Tagged: oregon
9 results
Portland Leather Goods
Portland Leather Goods is a bootstrapped, direct-to-consumer leather brand founded in 2015 by Curtis Matsko in a single-car garage in Portland, Oregon. What began as a handmade journal for his girlfriend grew into one of Etsy's top all-time sellers and a $100M+ business selling handcrafted full-grain leather totes, crossbodies, wallets and accessories. Known for its signature tumbled 'pebble' leather, aggressive social-media community building, and a fiercely loyal customer base, PLG blends artisan craftsmanship with modern DTC marketing to offer high-end leather at accessible prices.
Sriram Vasantharajan
Sriram Vasantharajan is the President and CEO of Mazama Energy, a Khosla Ventures and Gates Frontier-backed startup drilling into Oregon's Newberry Volcano to prove that superhot rock geothermal can deliver round-the-clock, carbon-free power at fossil-fuel prices. A former ExxonMobil engineer and CEO of oilfield services firm Blade Energy Partners, he is now applying decades of drilling and well-stimulation know-how from the oil patch to the geothermal industry, chasing rock hot enough to make a volcano's flank into a power plant.
Jim Williams
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
Jonathan Johnsongriffin
Jonathan Johnsongriffin is VP of Global Brand & Creative at Google, where he leads the Global Brand Studio's creative strategy. A veteran of Nike's most iconic campaigns - including 'You Can't Stop Us' and 'Just Do It Crazy Dreams' - he spent nearly five years shaping Nike's global brand narrative before joining Google in January 2023. Co-founder of the Serena Williams Design Crew program, jury member at Cannes Lions 2023 and 2024, and board trustee at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, Johnsongriffin blends industrial design roots with cultural storytelling at the intersection of sport, technology, and purpose.
Michael Keister
Michael Keister is a technology sales executive and AVP of Media & Entertainment at Adobe, based in Portland, Oregon. With over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and B2B SaaS sales, he has built and led high-performing revenue teams at companies including Zapproved (as CRO), Provana, Airship, Lytics, and Jive Software. Keister brings a track record of designing and executing revenue strategies in media, entertainment, retail, financial services, and technology sectors, and holds a BS in Finance from Oregon State University.
David Pearlstein
David Pearlstein is the Chief Executive Officer of New Horizons In-Home Care, Oregon's largest in-home care agency with over 570 employees and 12 locations statewide. A serial entrepreneur with 30+ years spanning healthcare, insurance, and real estate, Pearlstein built and sold multiple companies before taking the helm at New Horizons — transforming it into an award-winning, people-first organization recognized for both care quality and employer culture. Based in Lafayette, California, he leads a company providing around-the-clock care to seniors, adults with disabilities, and medically fragile children across Oregon.
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff
Jascha Kaykas-Wolff is the CEO of Visiting Media, a Portland-based hospitality sales enablement company, and a veteran tech executive whose career has spanned Yahoo, Microsoft, BitTorrent, and Mozilla. Raised in a socialist collective outside Eugene, Oregon - by a pioneering rock concert promoter - he grew up thinking deeply about systems, autonomy, and how teams work. He is the author of 'Growing Up Fast' (2014), a pioneer of Agile Marketing methodology, the first CMO to pull all Facebook advertising after the 2018 data breach, and co-host of the podcast 'This is Your Life in Silicon Valley.'
Stephanie Zinn
Stephanie Zinn is Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads editorial strategy and audience growth across Substack, X, YouTube, and search. With over a decade in tech editorial, she previously built editorial teams from scratch at Coinbase and GitHub - generating 15M newsletter subscribers at Coinbase and launching GitHub's influential ReadME Project. She is one of the rare operators who treats clear writing not as a nice-to-have but as a core business asset.
Anarghya Vardhana
Anarghya Vardhana is a venture partner at Maveron, the consumer-only VC firm co-founded by Howard Schultz, where she has spent nearly a decade backing iconic consumer brands in health, wellness, and social tech. A Stanford grad who published a math theorem at 17, she moved from Sandia National Labs nuclear research to Google international ops to the boardrooms of startups like Co-Star, Bend Health, and Alife. Forbes named her a 30 Under 30 in VC and their First Diversity Champion across the entire class. Simultaneously serving as Investor in Residence at Vanta, she is one of the few investors who credibly bridges deep technical rigor with consumer intuition - and who also runs trail marathons and dances Bharatanatyam.