The Portland Plan: A Plan for the Future

http://www.portlandonline.com/mayor/index.cfm?c=49522&a=390210

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eckjmv_mpVc&feature=player_embedded

This is a nice video that expresses realistic and attainable ideals for the community we know as Portland.  I embrace this type of forward-looking, collaborative and inclusive planning; it reflects the values of the people in our community who place opportunity, education and fairness for all at the top of the list to make sure that we continue to grow and prosper in a way that is sustainable and embracing of the diversity that provides the richness in the spirit of life here.

Excellent job by everyone involved, each of you obviously cares about our future.  Great things in a community will only happen when the citizens spend the energies to define what is important; and then you have a framework to allocate the resources to make it happen and see it through to reality.

Good job Portland!  Watch this video

Looking Ahead

Image via Wikipedia

Did 2011 produce  tech-fruit and tech-nuts  in return for the community collective that herald the uprising of tech start-ups in Portlandia?  It must depend on how you measure; I see that it had a bountiful harvest for many tech start-ups in the local community: leadership contributions set a great example, there were lots of new funding rounds taking form. Markets were seized   By years end, lots of tech savvy folks ended the year much stronger in the pursuit of their dreams, in solidity of their ideas/ideals and how that manifest their careers, their zen and their personal balance sheets.  Yahoo! Let’s keep it rolling folks…

So what is in store for 2012?  I for one surely hope it includes a more meaningful Twitter experience.  It already seems so 2010  (yes 2010) for that 140 character string.  If I am not the only dweeb feeling that sentiment, then what does that mean for Twitter’s hysteria-driven valuations.   Remember, we have really short attention spans; that is what keeps us in technology . +1 for Facebook too please. Can I vote twice?

Anyway, the election cycle will likely spell bull for the markets, nationally and locally; and its about time. In Portland Oregon, the Pacific Northwest (I just love that phrase) and America, 2012 will be a continued focus on building the momentum in executing the vision to make the new economy model deliver prosperity for those fixated on bringing their dreams to reality.

This post is simply about giving my comments of hope, caution and encouragement to all of my friends and colleagues; and even a few I haven’t met yet.  Let’s make great thing happen this year, let’s engage the community for social good and make some change.  And let’s do it a way that champions the cause of free enterprise; ethical capitalism that executes in a way that provides pathways of opportunity for everyone of those folks who has a dream and needs a lil bit of support to get there.

And let’s work to elect some great leaders, those who believe in prosperity at home in America, those who want to create good free and open jobs for those that want to work, that produce real product and make good local commerce; those who believe in using our armed forces for real defense, who protect our Bill of Rights and Constitution, and who believe in keeping and investing our tax-payer money at home in America.  And those who will please do this with smaller government

That’s it. May all your dreams come true.

Leonard Cohen’s New Song

Leonard Cohen, Show Me The Place: New Song Takes Us Back To Hallelujah AUDIO.

Simply Wonderful.

The Funk Brothers, a tremendous influence

Cover of Standing in the Shadows of Motown

Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002) – IMDb.

I watched this film today.  Wow, what an emotional experience for someone who grew up through the influences of Motown and their artists.  Memories ran through my mind with a warmth of feeling reminisce of Grandma’s soft cheek.

The tracks, the expressions, the stories of the people behind the scenes make this movie a great journey and an absolute must see for anyone who has ever felt heat in their soul through the sounds of the Motor City.  One of my favorite all-time blues artists gets mentioned in the film, John Lee Hooker, and some of these guys played with him.

The  rhythm & blues influence of these men has been pivotal to American pop culture, their contributions having given rise to many US & European artists that defined rock n roll in the 60s, 70s, 80s and well beyond; I am thinking about the Rolling Stones at this moment.  These are the guys that gave Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Night, Four Tops and many others the funk, the groove, and the back beat that made us jump, made us boogie and made us go out and buy records.

Members of the Funk Brothers were real creatives of their generation, and Berry Gordy the quintessential entrepreneur; together they were innovative, they disrupted their markets with a new musical genre that enabled Motown to redefine and capture a new market opportunity.  Another success story of a great enterprise founded by a few guys working in their garage, like Apple and Hewlett-Packard but just a different sense of purpose.

Parallels run through Silicon Valley and the Motor City:   start-ups are exciting,  emotional and energizing.  Was Detroit’s Hitsville USA “Studio A” America’s first start-up incubator?

If there is a business take-away from the movie – don’t forget your Term Sheet!

Watch this movie.

Celebrate Global Entreprenuership Week: Nov. 14, 2011

http://www.gewusa.org/                             

Fall is always a time for reflection, a time to refresh your ideas and a time to update your goals for the next year.  Most enterprises go through a formal planning cycle this time of year to rebalance and refresh.  What about your new ideas?  How are you going to better enable your organization to become more innovative and entrepreneurial to advance the ball?

November brings Fall to a close and what better time to celebrate entrepreneurship.  Global Entrepreneurship Week brings a celebratory atmosphere to being creative and striving to harness that next breakthrough innovation that can transform something.  Through the spirit of being entrepreneurial, we can each advocate for constructive, positive change in our community.  We can promote beneficial things, perhaps philanthropical, socially, commercially, and equality.

You may even launch a new company, or make plans to; so that your boldest ideas have a way to seek reality.  It is better to dream, and to seek to make it happen in some way than to look back next Fall upon a weathered hope.  And if you fail, celebrate the fact that you reached out there with enthusiasm.

Entrepreneurship, the mindset and activity of being entrepreneurial, is all about advocating and promoting something you feel passionate about.  Yes, its primary links are to creating new business ventures, and its great to harvest a commercial success with something you create; but it is not limited to business, money and the pursuit of wealth.  It is also about enabling good things to happen in your community.  It is the way to promote social well-being in a manner that can generate opportunities for better lives for all. Things like sustainable job creation, the opportunity to scale new businesses that contribute taxes for infrastructure and services, rebuilding and revitalizing local economies and the promotion of indigenous technological strengths of the community around which other economically beneficial support systems emerge.

What are you doing during GEW?  I hope it is something inspiring.  Something that gives air and light to your ideas, and in ways that advance well-being in the community.  Give it shot, it is funtastic!

The State of Venture Capital and the Internet | TechCrunch

The State of Venture Capital and the Internet | TechCrunch.

Image via Wikipedia

The slide set contained in this article cleanly captures the current affairs of the VC market and Start-up community.  Though rather lite on how the disruptive technology eco-system can better foster development of emergent opportunities, it does contain very interesting projections of disruptive transformation within content-based TV programming and what is beginning to happen in this space.

It will be interesting to see if Mark Suster is right with this call, I believe he is.  I will be looking to further enable this trend to gain traction in my local market.

The Fed says: no more QE, that ship has sailed ?

Image via Wikipedia

Ben Bernanke, Existentialist | Daniel Gross – Yahoo! Finance.

for the Cliff Notes and here for a little more substance:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke Hints At Potential Need For Additional Stimulus

Maybe there will no QEx, lets hope not.  We do not need any further taxpayer subsidized underwriting of major bank profits.  They won’t fail, so says Warren Buffet.

It appears that Bernanke’s speech was a clear indicator that the Fed is finally poised to enable a ‘free-market capitalist’ economy to function in line with its mantra:  a free market where financial resources always seems to find the most efficient path along its way to the other exploits of capitalism, that being the most efficient use of labor and land.

We will rebound, and reinvent along the way – that is our nature.  Innovation through entrepreneurialism, unbounded by unfair advantage to the corporate oligarchs that has been the Fed purpose these last few years.

Let it go. I am very happy the Fed is taking a long-term view of our macro economic scenarios; this is exactly what we need to recover.

Now if we can just convince Washington to keep out tax dollars at home, you know for little stuff like stimulating investment by entrepreneurs to rebuild our true GDP production capacity by having businesses invest in capabilities that make and sell things that employee people, we might get a macro-economic fiscal program that works.

All the World’s a Stage : The IMF Loves Iran

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The IMF’s Bizarre Love of Iran – Global – The Atlantic Wire.

The IMF seems to be repositioning itself of late, moving from the decades long and sleepy policy driven influencers of policy on the World’s backstage, to one that feels the need to  have a little upfront drama to remain relevant.  A good friend told me a few years back, “Randy, we all need a little drama in  our lives’ …  I still don’t get it

First the sex scandal topples the Ex-leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn for raping the hotel maid, then the former French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde comes in with her own baggage of possibly showing favorable bias to a French mega-businessman to the tune of 300 million euros.  Now, we see the IMF cuddling up to Iran in a big economic analysis and reporting flip-flop that would make Mitt Romney blush.

What is going on within the IMF other than a pronounced shift in leadership and along with that a shift in strategy?  It will be interesting to watch this unfold as the IMF’s policy position on a country can have a significant impact on its overall strength economically, its standing in the international community politically, and in the case of the Middle East a direct impact on how culpable they are viewed in sustaining the balance of power.  Apparently, a strong Iran is vital.

Does the IMF, under French leadership, have a new agenda relative to the upcoming 2012 US Presidential election cycle? Or could it simply be France’ desire to return to its lucrative cat-bird seat of duplicitous purveyance of armaments to the Arab-Isreal paradigm, perhaps both.  Charles de Gaulle would be happy.

Twitter’s $8B Valuation, I hear Bubbles

What is the true value proposition of this tweeting capability and how long will the joy of getting someones tweet updates about nothing sustain?  Atleast they are less obnoxious than  the phone conversation going on in the public restroom…  I mean how can someone’s update of where they are drinking represent true economic value.

Check this out:  http://twitter.com/#!/bxchen

Brian tweets: “Just got jacked by the @wired vending machine. Is this what I get after three years of hard work?! http://instagr.am/p/JLvBu/”

Poor Brian X. Chen of Wired gets my wrath, using his tweet as an awful example of how not to use cloud data storage.  I  do not know Brian; I apologize to you upfront Brian, am sure you are a great guy.  But letting the world know that your money got stolen by the vending machine at work, along with the Instagram picture link of the actual vending machine and jammed-up junk food is well, seems a bit reaching to make sure peeps you think of as in “your circle” will not forget about you.  I would prefer a phone call from a friend (just not from the public restroom k).   I have no idea why this tweet even arrived in my Twitter queue, oh clueless me.

It seems to me the investors who poured $800M into Twitter this week are bullish that this platform has further transformation capability or that the level of social integration via the broader populace will support the valuation, maybe both.  $8B is a lot of monetized transactions.  Perhaps Twitter can however become a much more significant core and feeder system than it is today for huge scale mobile application deployment and integration; I don’t see that in my view but hey I didn’t drop the $800M either, nor is my money in the fund that did… whew.

Which Portland? America’s Best Cities for Young Professionals

Image via Wikipedia

See This Story:  http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/power-your-future/america-best-cities-young-professionals-185412024.html

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

Portland, Oregon should be on this list. We are a  mecca for young people, including young professionals.  There are significant industry players in the technology community that are based here,  and we have a great presence in medical sciences, financial services, global trade, sustainable energies, did I mention sports among others; and we have a great urban university and a couple more just South.

Why is there no jobs growth? Actually, here in Oregon we have continuing job reduction.   We need to get more companies applying the cash in their idle bank accounts by making investments in innovation via incubating new ideas and creating market breakthroughs which in turn creates jobs, profits and wealth.  Building a company though should be as much about investing in the community for the longer term to create a sustaining economic contribution through employment and the local tax contributions, not just a quick exit play.   And too many legacy, mature companies today are sitting on huge piles of cash, doing nothing, and instead of investing for innovation they continue to carve out jobs en-masse; this decimates  communities, bringing them to stagflation. This is rapidly becoming our National problem.

I read a story yesterday about one of our hot local exciting start-ups in apparel.  Here was (is) a great opportunity for the local entrepreneur to create local jobs and build community; sounds great but the founder should rethink the idea of manufacturing offshore and invest locally in the community to produce the goods.  I believe the economics of local production will even out and it will have greater impact to the local jobs market which we desperately need.  Take a truly global view of what it means to build a company in a community.