Rick Turoczy

Rick Turoczy has been working in, on, and around venture funded startups in the Portland area for 30 years. As founder and editor of Silicon Florist, he has blogged about Portland startups for 17+ years — even though numerous people have begged him to stop. In 2009, that side project led Rick to cofound PIE (the Portland Incubator Experiment), an ongoing experiment exploring the potential for mutually beneficial collaborations between the Portland startup community and more well-established entities like corporations, government organizations, and educational institutions. Partners in that experiment have included Autodesk, Coca-Cola, Daimler, Google, Intel, Nike, Prosper Portland, Puppet, the State of Oregon, Stoel Rives, Target, and Wieden+Kennedy, among others. Using what he learned at PIE, Rick cofounded Built Oregon, a nonprofit designed to celebrate, connect, and accelerate all of the amazing consumer product companies throughout Oregon — the Silicon Valley of consumer products. Rick regularly mentors for startup accelerator programs around the world. He has been recognized as one of the “OG”s of startup ecosystem building by the Kauffman Foundation. And he has been humbled by any number of additional opportunities to speak on stages from SXSW to Kobe to Muscat, including an opportunity to share his views on community building on the TEDxPortland stage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj98mr_wUA0). All because of a blog. Weird.