Making Oregon

In this edition of Making Oregon, our guest is Joe Mueller, founder and proprietor of the downtown Portland clothing maker Wildwood & Company. They make high-quality and stylish suits and shirts by hand in their on-site workshop, keeping the traditional craft of hand tailoring alive.

A native of Banks, Oregon, Joe started Wildwood in 2014 after an impressive run as a lawyer – he graduated first in his New York law class and worked in top-notch law firms in New York City and in Portland.

While in Portland he noticed that the long-time New York tradition of the “bespoke” suit, a suit handmade to the customer’s detailed specifications, was nowhere to be found in the Rose City, which sparked his entrepreneurial idea – Wildwood & Company.

Our conversation takes place in Joe's wonderful lounge fitting room, a walnut-paneled lounge with posh leather furniture, and adorned with cool art, bolts of beautiful fabrics, and great scotch - a perfect complement to the stylish, traditional, high-class and hand-made suits Wildwood is making here in Oregon.

On this edition of Making Oregon our guest is Sonja Skvarla, founder of the Portland non-profit A Social Ignition. ( https://asocialignition.com/ ) Sonja started A Social Ignition in the Spring of 2012, and since 2014 has offered and taught a curriculum of entrepreneurship and professional development at the Columbia River Correctional Institution in Portland, OR, called the “Ignition Option”. It’s focused on a successful transition for men returning to the community.

Recently, A Social Ignition added a “Long Haul” program, which provides graduates of the core entrepreneurship program individual and small group coaching towards their particular business goals.

Sonja had gotten great traction with the program with very little outside resources – there have already been 49 graduates of the Ignition Option, there are 22 members of the Long Haul, and 12 graduate businesses are either launched or in development.

They will be celebrating the men of A Social Ignition at a gala on November 10th in Portland (get more info here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/first-annual-celebration-tickets-27956631036?aff=es2)

On this edition of Making Oregon, our guest is Molly Lindquist, founder and CEO of the Portland non-profit Consano. Molly has created a unique crowdfunding platform that that enables donors to give their support directly to a medical research project that matters to them. By harnessing the power of a crowd, they aggregate donations so the public can directly choose and support high quality medical research, pooling their money with others who care about the same health issues.

Molly started Consano in 2013 after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011. Frustrated by her inability to make donations to specific medical research projects that could impact her two daughters , the idea for Consano was born, and since its launch, Consano has raised nearly $700,000 in project donations to directly support 40 research projects in 28 unique health categories.

Molly tells us her inspiring story and candidly talks about her battle with breast cancer, the impact of the medical research Consano is enabling, and the many life and business lessons she's learned along the way.

In this edition of Making Oregon, we got out of the studio for a “Founder Coffee Talk” – lively conversation with Oregon founders at a local coffee house. For this chat, Built Oregon co-founder Terry St. Marie ventured to Groundwork Coffee Shop in SE Portland, for a fine almond milk latte and an iced mocha with our guest Britt Howard, co-founder of Portland Garment Factory, serving companies in the fashion design and product creation industries. The business started in 2008, and now has 11 employees at a 5,000 square foot facility on SE 79th and Stark

Portland Garment Factory helps creators from the beginning development of a product’s concept to seeing it through to completion. Serving clients both large - such as Nike and Levis – and small, they offer everything from pattern drafting and sample construction, to the branding of the final product.

Britt and her partner started the business because they saw a pressing need in Portland for these kind of services – until they came along, fashion makers had to seek help elsewhere, slowing down the creative flow. They’ve forged a niche in the Oregon creative ecosystem and economy, and our conversation reveals the unique and creative path that Britt took to get there, as well as her perspectives on sustainability and “zero waste”, the Portland fashion scene, and “pursuing beauty from odd angles” when designing clothes.

And, she reveals her (very simple) secret to success that may surprise you.

On this edition of Making Oregon, our guest is Juan Barazza, a Portland champion for entrepreneurial development, as the Program Manager at Portland State University Center for Entrepreneurship, the President of the local chapter of ALPFA (the Association of Latino Professionals for America), and as the founder and CEO of startup VDO interpreters, a A SaaS platform that provides Language Access Compliance for the Healthcare Industry.

He’s also going to be a speaker at the upcoming “GoGreen” conference in Portland on October 5th (Built Oregon is a sponsor).

We’ll talk about Juan’s personal journey, his transition to startup founder after a corporate career in multiple industries, and his budding local involvement in mentorship, startup development, and sustainability through Startup Weekend Latino, the PSU Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Cleantech challenge

Lastly, we’ll have a great discussion about his leadership in helping Oregon and Portland keep the conversation going regarding diversity, equity and inclusion in the entrepreneurial and investment arenas.

In this edition of Making Oregon, we chat with Justin Yuen, President and founder of FMYI in Portland. FMYI, which stands for “for my innovation”, is a collaboration software company Justin started in 2004, after he finished an 8 year run with Nike in Beaverton, where he was a Senior manager of corporate sustainable development.

We chat about Justin’s early years in New Jersey and how his parents influenced his worth ethic and commitment to family, and his college years where he caught the entrepreneurial bug and indulged his great intellectual curiosity.

We talk about his years at Nike, including his time in the Netherlands and his progression to being one of the leaders of the company’s sustainability efforts.

We find out what sustainability really means to him, and ask him to simplify its definition through the lens of the triple bottom line.

Justin will also chat about FMYI and its genesis, growth, and how it empowers teams to make a difference through its collaborative platform.

And, we hear about Justin’s passion for community, and how he balances it all to live a productive entrepreneurial life.

In this edition of Making Oregon, we feature Jude Gerace, founder of Sugar Wheel Works in Portland. She talks with us about her entrepreneurial story, how she came to love cycling, develop her craft, and the elements behind her drive to make high-quality bike wheels.

Jude remembers her first bicycle, a pink, second-hand Schwinn Fair Lady and how it represented the gift of independence. By the age of 14 she had 3 jobs—one of them a business she started herself—complete with a jingle she wrote to attract customers.

Jude explains some of the difficult turning points in her life, and how she got from Chicago to Eugene to Portland. She’ll talk about what she learned in her travels, how cycling became not only a passion but a career path, and how she “collects brains” to continually build her expertise.

Jude explains what it took to boot strap her business and what happened when her original business name was contested by a larger company. She has a lot to teach us about building a team, especially what she has learned from one of her employees, Dan, a young man who is living with autism.

Jude also reveals some of her own ongoing struggles, like the difficulty in achieving the elusive work-life balance, dealing with fear, and how she see thinks about the future growth of her business.

On the latest edition of Making Oregon, we discuss the craft beer industry in Oregon with a great panel representing the breadth of an industry that is constantly growing and evolving. And one that has close to a $4 Billion economic impact in the state.

The panel is moderated by Mellie Pullman, a Supply Chain Management professor and the director of the Business of Craft Brewing Certificate at Portland State University, an Online education program, which teaches all the business skills for starting and running a craft beverage business. The members of the panel include Kevin Shaw, head brewer of Astoria based Buoy Beer, Brad Windecker, Founder/CEO of Orchestra Software, and Blake Crosby of Crosby Hop Farms.

We asked the group about the innovations that are driving the beer industry, and what makes Oregon such a hotbed of craft beer. We discussed how raw material production can keep up with growing demand, the ways software is helping to reduce operational inefficiencies within breweries, and how you break into a crowded market. We also dived into some of the challenges and opportunities that face the industry as craft beer continues to evolve. And of course, we asked each member on the panel to name their favorite beer.

At the core, this panel gives us a snapshot of all the moving parts that are associated with craft beer, and how through collaboration and community, Oregon remains one of the key cogs in the future of the industry.

For this edition of the Making Oregon podcast we bring you one interview divided into two parts. We chat with Portland startup founder Stephen Ridley, the founder of Senrio. Senrio is an entirely new approach to data security, a Software as a Service product that unveils solutions and tools to provide unprecedented visibility and intelligence into the IoT devices all around us, a long-considered "blindspot" in cybersecurity.

In this Part 2, we back track to Part 1 for a couple minutes and talk once again about how Senrio works. Then we dive into a discussion about best practices for protecting data, especially if you are a small business.

Stephen will also talk about the vulnerabilities he and his developers find in consumer electronics and how Senrio can play a role in providing solutions.

Plus, we’ll get his take on data privacy, metadata and what social media giants like Facebook are doing with the information users supply, whether they know it or not.

Finally, we’ll ask whether data privacy really exists in today’s world, and how Stephen balances his awareness of security issues with his own personal practices in daily life.

For this edition of the Making Oregon podcast we bring you one interview divided into two parts. We chat with Portland startup founder Stephen Ridley, the founder of Senrio. Senrio is an entirely new approach to data security, a Software as a Service product that unveils solutions and tools to provide unprecedented visibility and intelligence into the IoT devices all around us, a long-considered "blindspot" in cybersecurity.

In the this part 1, we ask Stephen to tell us about his path from teenage hacker to working for the Department of Defense, Wall Street banks and social media companies. He’ll tell us how his love of research eventually lead him to become an entrepreneur—two pursuits that require very different skill sets.

He’ll describe Senrio, how it works, and what makes it different from other security applications. We’ll learn how it addresses the vulnerabilities found in embedded systems. And we’ll explain how ubiquitous embedded systems are—and here’s a hint—they exist in your cell phone.

And, if you’ve never heard of a USB Condom (also called Syncstop) and what it can do to keep your data safe, Stephen will explain what the device he designed and produces in Oregon can do for you.