Portland, OR: startup douchebag free

Okay, maybe not 100%. But pretty damned close.

Yes, I know that this will all come off as hyperbole and local bigotry. It partially is. But hear me out.

My inspiration

If you haven’t already, reach Chris Tacy’s series of blog posts on the douchebagification of the Mission District in San Francisco. Chris’ take is at turns hilarious, poignant, and horrifying. At some points you’re not sure which of those adjectives you should use to describe the phenomena that he’s pointing to: douchebags who cart around their fixed-gear bikes in fancy SUVs; Sean Parker’s wedding; douchebags swapping Aderall-in-Las-Vegas stories; and so on so forth. I can’t do it justice here.

My reaction to these reactions was only secondarily one of disgust. My deepest and most visceral reaction was actually one of relief. You see, I don’t live in the Mission District. I live nowhere in the Bay Area. Not even California. I live, rather, in Portland, OR—and hail from very close by—which is a city that has managed to (a) have a flourishing tech scene that punches way above its weight given the size of Portland, and yet (b) has attracted precious little of the Aderall-, fixie-, and testosterone-fueled asshattery on display in the Mission District.

BTW, I’ve written on the subject of the Portland tech scene in more depth if you want to see a more complete set of thoughts.

How we did it

Now, don’t get me wrong : Portland has plenty of douchebags. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. On the West side, there are lots of run-of-the-mill bro-dog douchebags, typically found high-fiving and getting into fights on NW 21st Ave. These people are a dime a dozen and they’re inescapable no matter where you go in this country.

On the East side, you have loads of johnny-come-lately douchebags who dress like hipsters—complete with tanktops and gas station sunglasses and the occasional meshtrucker hat—but have never heard of Yo La Tengo or My Bloody Valentine or Jean-Luc Godard or even Friedrich f***ing Nietzsche. These douchebags are more rare, but to me they’re even more galling than bro douchebags.

So PDX isn’t exactly a pristine douchebag-free zone. But you will see absolutely zero of the behavior described by Mr. Tacy. I’d like to venture a few reasons why this might be:

• Money. Sure, there’s money here. There are successful startups, some established players, and some outposts for major companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart Labs (which, to be fair, consists of a bunch of NodeJS geeks and has little to do with the Wal-Mart empire itself). But Portland remains a consumer of venture capital rather than a distributor of it. No one flocks to Portland to be close to VCs. There are plenty of people trying their damndest to impress VCs, but it’s still pretty rare for people to come here to get VCs’ attention. The fact that Chris Tacy has to beg VCs to stop giving money to douchebags as a last resort says quite a lot.
• Culture. Yes, I’m a diehard pro-PDX chauvinist. But anyone who spends time in the scene here knows that our culture here really is different from the Bay Area. Why? Because it’s a culture that privileges building and learning—and only those things. Now, tons of that goes on in San Francisco, too; no doubt about it. But the culture of making and learning is increasingly complemented by a culture of smoke and mirrors and snake oil salesmanship and “confidence” and “disruption.” In PDX, on the other hand, you only make money if you make good things that have real value. We see entrepreneurs as builders. No one cares about your “disruptive” ideas that you swaggeringly inflict upon anyone who will listen. We do care, however, about what you’re building.
• Isolation. We don’t really care about what anyone else in the country is doing. We built a brand spanking new light rail system in the 1980s when it seemed impossible. Brooklyn, NY copies us left and right—they even have their own Pok-Pok now! How adorable!—but we couldn’t give two shits about what Brooklyn is up to. We started the micro-distillery movement. Powell’s Books flourishes even amidst the death of the book store. I could go on and on. The important thing is that the only reason that we care about the Bay at all is because we don’t have VC of our own here. And it tears us up inside. But our previous isolation has meant that we’ve been able to build a tech culture here that often goes against the grain of the Next Hot Thing in the Bay. We were doing functional programming here before it was cool (just ask Galois and Janrain and a bunch of professors at Portland State University). Ward Cunningham invented the Wiki here and wasn’t paid a cent for it.
• Artisanal culture. PDX is a city of artisans. Artisanal bread, artisanal pizza crust, artisanal cheese, artisanal ketchup, artisanal soap, artisanal donuts, artisanal fucking everything. This is closely aligned with what I said above about building. This is a city of makers, not Powerpoint presentations and sound bytes. Douchebags don’t make things because making things is hard and takes time, even *gasp* years and years of time. When douchebags try to make it within a culture of makers, they fail. They’re seen for what they really are immediately.

None of this makes us douchebag-proof. But it certainly helps.

Going forward

As far as I can tell, Portland is in a good spot. On the one hand, a variety of smaller companies are showing immense promise, and some are becoming full-on legit players: Jive Software already has an IPO, and Urban Airship, Elemental Technologies, and my own company, Janrain, are pushing up against the 200 employees milestone.

I do have to admit, though, that I’m worried. Money is flowing in, companies are getting bigger, the job market is air tight in a way that suggests that we’re going to be getting a big influx of “creative class” people very soon, and housing prices are starting to rise in oh-so-noticeable ways. To me, that suggests trouble. The douchebags could be on the way.

So what do we do? I’m not entirely sure. But here are some suggestions:

• Keep pushing inclusivity.On this front, Portland is far from perfect. The PDX tech scene is very much a white male-dominated thing. But I really do think that PDX tries harder to be inclusive than the Bay Area does. There are tons of meetups and workshops that are designed to get women involved in programming, tons of beginner-focused seminars and hack nights, and so on. One way to keep the douchebags out will be to make the Portland tech scene the most diverse and open in the country. The more white male-dominated a tech scene is, the more vulnerable it will be to startup douchebags. This is going to take a shit-ton of hard work.
• Keep building; stay cynical. Puppet Labs built important shit. Urban Airship is building important shit. Jive Software is building useful shit. I could go on. All of them have a crystal-clear value proposition. They made it in this town the hard way and the right way. Yes, they got VC, and plenty of it. My company did too. But they didn’t get there through Aderall and swagger. We need to keep valuing building above all else in this town. Whenever people throw us nice-sounding pseudo-ideas replete with buzzwords, we need to knock them down a peg and ask them hard questions that will make them squeal. Rinse and repeat forever.

Please, Dear Reader, tell me your thoughts. Tips on how to keep PDX douchebag (mostly) free are especially valued.