Tagged: portland
10 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.
Nicks Ericsson
Nicks Ericsson is the Chief Marketing Officer of KEEN Footwear, the Portland-based outdoor shoe company, a role he took on in 2024. A Swedish-trained brand marketer with more than 20 years across fashion, sport, and footwear, he spent over a decade at UGG, where he built the brand's first circular-economy program and pushed its regenerative-agriculture pledge across a million acres of farmland. Earlier he helped scale premium labels including J.Lindeberg and Justin Timberlake's William Rast, and he co-founded The AND Agency to advise companies on responsible brand and sustainability strategy. His stated aim at KEEN is to make it 'the most trusted brand in the world' through consistency and transparency rather than moonshot promises.
Don Spear
Don Spear is the co-founder and CEO of OpenSesame, the Portland-based marketplace that lets companies find, buy, and manage elearning courses the way people buy songs on iTunes. A Rice University engineer and Harvard MBA, he spent decades scaling companies - from PetSmart through its IPO to Banfield Pet Hospital's expansion from 4 to 250 locations - before founding BlueVolt and then OpenSesame in 2010. Today he leads a catalog of tens of thousands of courses and an AI-driven push to make workplace learning easier to find and use.
Gregg Semler
Gregg Semler is the founder and CEO of InPipe Energy, a Portland-based company that generates clean, around-the-clock electricity from the water already flowing through municipal pipelines. A serial clean-energy entrepreneur since 2000, he previously led PolyFuel, ClearEdge Power, and Lucid Energy, and spent years as a venture investor in the sustainable economy. His pitch is contrarian: instead of covering the planet with solar panels and batteries, harvest the predictable, weather-proof energy hiding in the millions of miles of pressurized pipe that move our drinking water.
Visiting Media
Visiting Media is a hospitality technology and immersive-content company that helps hotels and resorts sell their physical spaces remotely. Its flagship platform, TrueTour, turns properties into interactive 360 virtual tours, 3D models, and shareable media that sales teams use to run virtual site inspections. The newer SalesHub platform layers digital asset management, distribution, and analytics on top. Used by brands including Hilton, Hyatt, and IHG, the company exists to close the gap between what a property actually looks like and what a buyer can see before they ever arrive.
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.
Nina Perez
Nina Perez is the founder of Project Fandom, an entertainment news and podcast platform she launched in 2009 that covers TV, movies, gaming, comics, anime, and books from a geek's perspective. Dubbed 'The Oprah of MySpace' for her uncanny ability to get readers hooked on almost anything, she is also a published author with three series under her belt, a Social Media Community Manager by day, and a lifelong Brooklynite who now calls Portland, Oregon home.
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.
Ruben Gamez
Ruben Gamez is a self-taught, bootstrapped SaaS founder based in Portland, Oregon who built two profitable software companies - Bidsketch (proposal software) and SignWell (e-signatures) - without a line of venture capital or a high school diploma. SignWell hit $5M ARR in 2024 with just 7 people, competing directly with DocuSign at a fraction of the price, and is widely respected in the bootstrapped/indie hacker community as a thoughtful, anti-hype voice on SaaS growth, pricing, and long-term brand building.