Startup Events in Portland

The objective of this meetup is for you to connect with your fellow founders, talk about what you are struggling with, and just get to know the community. Hope to see you all there! Josh & Mark As a business owner, you are faced with many challenges. You're forced to make decisions every day that could make or break your business. founder.coffee is a way to network with other entrepreneurs to allow free-flowing information with the intent to collaborate and help each other. So often we're challenged, and there's very little we can do to express our challenges with the people we work with or the people we care about. Think of founder.coffee as your own personal support group for business owners. We're all here to help!

General Admission Sales start on Aug 31, 2026 only on Eventbrite. Join us for the 4th Annual Silicon Forest Tech Connect, an evening bringing together business and technology professionals from across the Portland region. Whether you're leading a team, driving strategy, or solving hard problems at the intersection of business and tech, this is your chance to connect with the people shaping our region's technology community. Set on the patio at Migration Brewing's pop-up inside PacWest Center in downtown Portland, the evening features drinks, food, and plenty of room to network with peers across industries and disciplines. What to expect: A relaxed, business-casual networking environment Complimentary drinks and food Conversations with professionals across tech, operations, strategy, and beyond A chance to grow your local network and reconnect with familiar faces Event Details Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 Time: 5:30 PM – 8:30 PM Location: Migration Brewing Pop-Up, PacWest Center, 1211 SW 5th Ave Portland, OR 97204 Getting There Check-in is required at street level with building security. Recommended parking: PacWest Center Parking Garage (attached to the building) or SmartPark 1st & Jefferson (2 blocks away, open 24/7). REGISTRATION ON EVENTBRITE ONLY: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/silicon-forest-tech-connect-by-profocus-technology-tickets-1996829584039

Cloud Native PDX September: Observability Night! For September, we're taking advantage of a speaker in town for DevOpsDaysPDX, and making it an all-observability night, with FluentBit and OpenTelemetry. Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM Location: SteepleJack Brewing, Fireside Room, 2400 NE Broadway, Portland A big thank you to SUSE for sponsoring catering at SteepleJack, as well as Eric's travel. First Presentation: No C, No Opaque AI: Watch Your First Fluent Bit Contribution Happen Live Speaker: Eric D. Schabell, SUSE Contributing to a CNCF graduated project feels out of reach until someone shows you exactly how it happens. In this session, that someone is on stage doing it in real time — spotting a gap between what the Fluent Bit codebase actually does and what the docs say, opening a branch on a live fork, running the project's prose linter, writing a properly signed commit, and pushing a pull request that closes a real tracked issue. Every step, no shortcuts, no slides pretending to be a terminal. You will leave knowing the two-repo mental model that makes Fluent Bit doc contributions work, the git habits that signal credibility to maintainers, and the AI guardrails that keep your name attached to work you actually stand behind. Your first PR does not require deep C knowledge. It requires knowing where to look, how to show your work, and when to keep your hands on the wheel. Second Presentation: Devs, Transform (Your Data) and Roll Out!: Learning and Leveraging OTTL Speaker: Reese Lee, New Relic The OpenTelemetry Collector is OTel’s power tool for ingesting and processing your app and infrastructure data, but there’s even more you can do with your data before it reaches your backend! Learn how to start leveraging OTTL, or OpenTelemetry Transformation Language, to manage your data volume and quality. We’ll explore the syntax basics and its underlying architecture within the Collector, where its strength really comes into play, w

🚨 Register on Luma 🚨 Six evenings that use the defining technology of our moment to re-examine our relationship to one another. Not AI as a tool to master or a threat to repel, but a sustained question: who are we in dialogue with when we use AI, and what is it teaching us about ourselves? Each evening stands on its own, and the six together make an argument. There is nothing to catch up on and no background required, beyond having noticed that something has changed. This is not a technical course. It is an invitation to look at AI plainly, together, and to notice what it is teaching us about ourselves. Bring whatever you already think. It holds up better in a room full of people than it does alone. Read more: https://www.indialoguewithai.org/ Demystifying AI Seeing plainly what AI is, and learning to look at it without projection. About Roberto Santiago Roberto A. Santiago is an applied AI researcher who has spent thirty-five years inside this field, in a lineage that runs directly back to Paul Werbos, the inventor of backpropagation through time. He builds these systems, and he has watched the culture around them form. Agenda 6:00 - 6:45: Lecture 6:45 - 7:00: Discussion 7:00 - 7:30: Post-event networking 🚨 Register on Luma 🚨

Join Firsthand's applied AI lead, Chen Chen, for a practical session on finding the agent projects actually worth building in your business. Everyone is being told to put AI agents to work. Almost nobody can tell you where to point one, and that's not a technology problem. You'll learn four tests you can run on your own operation to find where an agent would genuinely earn its keep, and where it wouldn't. Chen will walk through all four using one real business taken apart end to end, showing where its information quietly dies between teams and systems. You'll see which problems agents can finally solve that earlier automation never could, and which are still better left to ordinary software. Bring an operation that annoys you. Whether you're new to AI or already running agents in production, you'll leave knowing which part of it is worth handing to an agent, which parts aren't, and where to start. Our Speaker: Chen Chen leads the applied AI team at Firsthand, a B2B AI company, where she builds and evaluates the agentic systems behind live marketing campaigns, plus the internal "world model" that lets agents act on how the business actually runs.

🚨 Register on Luma 🚨 Join Firsthand's applied AI lead, Chen Chen, for a practical session on finding the agent projects actually worth building in your business. Everyone is being told to put AI agents to work. Almost nobody can tell you where to point one, and that's not a technology problem. You'll learn four tests you can run on your own operation to find where an agent would genuinely earn its keep, and where it wouldn't. ​Chen will walk through all four using one real business taken apart end to end, showing where its information quietly dies between teams and systems. You'll see which problems agents can finally solve that earlier automation never could, and which are still better left to ordinary software. ​Bring an operation that annoys you. Whether you're new to AI or already running agents in production, you'll leave knowing which part of it is worth handing to an agent, which parts aren't, and where to start. 🚨 Register on Luma 🚨

Join us for our in-person project work nights! This is an opportunity for our project teams to meet and collaborate in-person. All skill levels are welcome, this is an inclusive learning experience for everyone. For more information, check out our website: https://www.codepdx.org/ If you're new to CODE PDX, a project work session is a perfect time to connect with project leaders and check out what we're working on, see what project sparks your interest, and join a team. Here's the scoop: 👉 We build civic tech projects that solve local problems. Every project has a team lead who coordinates the work of all the contributing volunteers, as well as the requirements from the community partner, a local non-profit or government agency, who will use the finished project. 👉 Our stack is generally Flask, Rails, and ReactJS, with some HTML and CSS. And we don't just need developers - we also need UX Designers, Project Managers, and Product Owners! 👉 All skill levels are welcome, this is an inclusive learning experience for everyone. 👉 For more information, check out our website (which is also a project, so if you have ideas for it, come and contribute!): https://www.codepdx.org/ Connect with us on Discord:

Climb aboard the AI Portland school bus! We're heading down to Oregon State for a day inside their AI and robotics labs. Yes, an actual yellow school bus… lean into it, it's part of the fun! The day is built around lab tours, live robotics demos, and time with the people doing this work at OSU. Lunch is provided on campus. Get your ticket, this event is capped at 43 spots. They will go fast! Ticket includes round-trip bus transportation, AI Portland t-shirt, and lunch. Itinerary: Depart Portland - 9am Lunch - 12pm Return to Portland by 4pm

🚨 Register on Luma 🚨 Six evenings that use the defining technology of our moment to re examine our relationship to one another. Not AI as a tool to master or a threat to repel, but a sustained question: who are we in dialogue with when we use AI, and what is it teaching us about ourselves? Each evening stands on its own, and the six together make an argument. There is nothing to catch up on and no background required, beyond having noticed that something has changed. This is not a technical course. It is an invitation to look at AI plainly, together, and to notice what it is teaching us about ourselves. Bring whatever you already think. It holds up better in a room full of people than it does alone. Read more: https://www.indialoguewithai.org/ Night 2: The AI Culture How AI quietly became the medium between us, and what that costs. About Roberto Santiago Roberto A. Santiago is an applied AI researcher who has spent thirty-five years inside this field, in a lineage that runs directly back to Paul Werbos, the inventor of backpropagation through time. He builds these systems, and he has watched the culture around them form. Agenda 6:00 - 6:45: Lecture 6:45 - 7:00: Discussion 7:00 - 7:30: Post-event networking 🚨 Register on Luma 🚨

🚨🚨 RSVP on Luma ​🚨🚨 Students are already using AI. This panel conversation will tackle what's actually happening: the different ways students are using it, what it might be doing to how they think and learn, and what it means when a chatbot becomes a student's go-to when they're stressed or stuck, not just a source of homework help. ​Three things we'll get into: ​The range of ways students are actually using AI, and why one story doesn't fit them all ​Whether AI is changing how students think, not just what they turn in ​What it means when students reach for AI instead of a teacher, tutor, or someone else, when they're overwhelmed or need support ​This is for anyone who teaches, parents, or works with students, or just cares about where education is headed. ​Panelists: ​Seth Fleischauer, Founder & President of Banyan Global Learning, host of Make It Mindful: Insights for Global Learning ​Mohan Nair, author of Unreachable: How Not to Lose Your Mind in an AI-Obsessed Era ​More panelists to come... 🚨🚨 RSVP on Luma ​🚨🚨

🚨 Register for this event on Luma ​🚨 Join AI Portland for a relaxed evening of conversation and connection at our Happy Hour! This is the perfect opportunity to unwind and mingle with fellow AI enthusiasts and professionals. Share your experiences, discuss the latest AI trends, or simply enjoy the company of like-minded individuals. 🚨 Register for this event on Luma ​🚨