Rick Turoczy — Portland, Oregon USA
More than mildly obsessed with connecting dots in the startup community
I write about startups, build community for a living, and get paid to stand on stages and say things that are — on a good day — useful. If you need a keynote or a brain deeply steeped in experimentation, you're in the right place.
Portland has never been particularly good at bragging about itself.
That's part of the charm. It's also a problem. And somewhere around 2007, I started a blog called Silicon Florist to do the bragging on everyone else's behalf — mostly because no one else was going to.
More than six thousand posts later, I’m still at it. Even though numerous people have begged me to stop. But like three of you encouraged me to keep going. So here we are.
Along the way I cofounded PIE, an experiment in getting startups and giant companies like Nike, Google, Intel, Target, and Wieden+Kennedy into the same room without anyone getting hurt. I cofounded TechfestNW. And Built Oregon. I helped organize Open Source Bridge, 30 Hour Day, Built Festival, and more PIE Demo Days than I can count — which mostly meant showing up early and staying late.
I don't really do anything. But I do my damnedest to celebrate the folks who are actually doing things.
Sometimes people pay me to help. That still surprises me.
I'm an introvert who has spent three decades in rooms full of people. So I've had to get very deliberate about how any of this works — and it turns out the deliberate part is the useful part.
I've done this at TEDxPortland, in front of 3,000 folks at Keller Auditorium. At HubSpot's INBOUND. At the Skoll World Forum. In Kobe, Japan, and Muscat, Oman, where I told very patient audiences to stop trying to be Silicon Valley.
Nobody has asked for their money back yet.
The version of networking you've been sold is built for people who like networking. This is the one for everybody else — where showing up, listening, and following through beat working the room every single time.
Delivered at TEDxPortland, Keller Auditorium
Every city wants a Sand Hill Road. Almost none of them need one. What you actually have — the industries, the weirdos, the institutions already sitting there — is the thing worth building on, and I'll make the case with receipts from a town that spent thirty years learning it the hard way.
Versions delivered in Kobe, Japan and Muscat, Oman
Portland founders won't promote themselves. It's charming. It's also killing them. A talk about why quiet ecosystems get overlooked, and what to do about it that doesn't require anyone to become insufferable.
Related: “The Power of Humility,” HubSpot INBOUND Bold Talks
Everybody wants to be the connector. Nobody wants to do the boring part first. This is about the years of listening, remembering, and writing it down that make the connecting look like magic later — and why there's no shortcut.
We spent years at PIE accelerating startups, and the most valuable thing we did was accelerate the failures. Finding out you're wrong in three months instead of three years is a gift — here's how to build a program that hands out that gift on purpose.
Related: “Ecosystem Builders as Second Responders to Crisis,” Skoll World Forum
A fair number of these were recorded. Here they are, if you want to check whether I can hold a room before you book me for one.
Want something else? Ask. I'll tell you honestly if I'm the wrong person, and usually suggest someone better.
Keynotes, panels, fireside chats, and the occasional unconference. Yes, I travel. Yes, I'll do the early flight. Even the redeye.
I've turned up on PBS NewsHour, OPB's Think Out Loud, GeekWire, The Oregonian, Portland Monthly, Oregon Business, and the cover of Willamette Week.
Other folks have described me more generously than I'd ever describe myself. So I'll let them.
Rick is kind of a fairy godfather of the Portland startup scene.Mara Zepeda, from the TEDxPortland stage — watch
The unofficial mayor of startup Portland.Renny Gleeson
The Don Quixote of Portland tech. There is only one Rick.Dylan Boyd
The Kauffman Foundation calls me one of the “OGs” of ecosystem building. The Portland Business Journal gave me Small Business Advocate of the Year. Mara also once called me Yoda, which I've decided to interpret as a comment on the wisdom and not the height.
This isn't magic. It's simply focus.
Return has been my consulting outfit since 2004. Return helps your company focus on a personality, an identity. Usually that personality is polite. Sometimes it’s quirky. Sometimes it’s downright rude.
To get there, Return helps you find the voice and the attitude your market actually wants — and then helps you interact with that market in the least obtrusive, most compelling way possible.
People tend to describe this as branding. Or rebranding. Or positioning. Or marketing. Or consulting. Or some other word they think conveys the concept. What’s the right word? Focus.
Because when it comes right down to it, Return earns its keep by helping you distill ideas into words and images your customers and employees understand, want, and cannot forget.
Who should call: founders who can't explain their own company at a dinner party. Teams whose messaging drifted three pivots ago. Accelerators, economic development folks, and universities trying to build a startup program that isn't just a rerun of somebody else's.
What it looks like: a few honest conversations, an outsider reading everything you've published, and a short document you'll actually use. Then I get out of your way.
Usually this means someone from outside asking the annoying questions your team is too polite to ask.
I've been writing Silicon Florist since 2007. More than six thousand posts about Oregon startups. Most of them written before anyone else thought there were Oregon startups worth writing about.
There are shows now, too: Portland, Oregon, Startup News, Startup Stories with Silicon Florist, and The Long Con, which is exactly as advisable as it sounds. All of them live on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts.
I also wrote the PIE Cookbook — everything we figured out running an accelerator, including the mistakes and the happy accidents, written down and given away so any community could run its own. We Kickstarted it in 2016. It is still a beta. It will probably always be a beta.
Before all of that, I wrote a few hundred posts for ReadWriteWeb and More than a Living, back when tech blogging was a thing you could just decide to do.
I also wrote a blog called “hypocritical” starting in 1998. We don’t need to talk about that. (But if you’re curious, it’s still out there in the Wayback Machine.)
Thirty years of it. The first half was marketing jobs at software companies. The second half is harder to describe, which is why the blog exists.
Everything I can find a record of — 99 entries and counting. Some of it I remember fondly. Some of it I remember differently than the people who were there.
Missing something? I probably forgot it. Tell me and I’ll add it.
Coming soon: a bot that has read everything I've ever written — every post, every talk, every long-winded answer — so you can ask it the thing you'd ask me.
Which means you can get a Rick opinion at 2am without having to buy me a coffee. Or wait for me to reply to your email, which — and I say this with love — can take a while.
Ask it something hard.
The Soqratic bot drops in here.
If you've got a stage that needs filling, a company that can't explain itself, or a community you're trying to build from scratch — say hello. I'd genuinely love to hear what you're working on.
Go get 'em.