pacific-northwest
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David Moore Devine Is Making a Bank Feel Like a Neighbor
After nearly two decades inside one banking organization, David Moore Devine has learned that a brand is not a slogan. It is the accumulation of rooms, screens, winter coats and small decisions that tell customers who belongs.
FUSE Is Betting Seattle’s Best Network Can Beat Silicon Valley’s Biggest Checkbook
The six-year-old venture firm has more than $420 million to deploy and a deliberately local edge: turn the Pacific Northwest’s operators, buyers and repeat founders into an unfairly useful network for the next generation.
The Fund Built to Turn UW Lab Coats Into Cap Tables
Ken Horenstein spent years watching University of Washington research spin out billion-dollar companies for investors somewhere else. Pack Ventures is his answer: a fund that shows up on day zero, before the pitch deck is polished.
The Quiet Business of Making Sure You Actually Own Your House
The Talon Group built a title and escrow operation on a strange promise - that the most important day of your financial life should be completely uneventful.
The Internet Company Digging Its Way Out of Cable's Past
Ziply Fiber inherited an old Northwest telephone network and made a blunt bet: keep digging until fiber reaches the places larger providers skipped. Now the same company selling home broadband is carrying 400-gigabit traffic between Seattle and Chicago.
Umpqua Bank
A timber town built a bank so workers would not have to cash paychecks at the tavern. Seventy-two years later, the name disappeared - but Umpqua's experiment in making banking feel human still echoes through the West.
Walt Weyler
Walt Weyler is a Portland, Oregon entrepreneur and chemical engineer who turned a career running factories into a second act buying, fixing, and building industrial companies. He is President and CEO of SequenceUSA, a private holding and lending company that backs Pacific Northwest manufacturing and technology firms, and President and Managing Director of Clarus LLC (Clarus Water Solutions), a water-filtration and stormwater venture spun from his work at Crystal Clear Technologies. Before founding his own companies he co-owned Kinetics, a metal-injection-molding shop he grew from a struggling $3M operation to roughly 100 employees and sold to mining giant Phelps Dodge. He sits on the Supply Chain & Logistics Management Advisory Council at Oregon State University's College of Business.
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.
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.
Minda Brusse
Minda Brusse is a Venture Partner at 2048 Ventures and Co-founding Partner at First Row Partners, a pre-seed firm backing technology companies that empower brand builders, content creators, and storytellers. With 25+ years in the startup ecosystem spanning Andersen Consulting, multiple co-founder roles, angel investing, and fund management, she also teaches Angel Investing and entrepreneurship at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. A champion of expanding participation in Pacific Northwest venture capital, she co-founded The 1K Project during the pandemic, raising $3.3M for 1,100 families in need.