32: Ep. 32 | Navigating the Startup Landscape with Rick Turoczy

Bethany (00:00) Welcome to the Overcommitted Podcast, where we discuss our code commits, our personal commitments, and some stuff in between. I’m your host this week, Bethany, joined by…

Erika (00:08) Hey, I’m Erica.

Brittany Ellich (00:09) And hey, I’m Brittany Ellick.

Bethany (00:11) The three of us met while working on a team at GitHub and quickly realized we were all obsessed with getting better at what we do. So we decided to start this podcast to share what we’ve learned. We’ll be talking about everything from leveling up your technical skills to navigating your professional development, all with the goal of creating a community where engineers can learn and connect. Today on Overcommitted, we’re thrilled to welcome Rick Turosi, a Portland ecosystem veteran who spent three decades in the trenches with startups.

Rick doesn’t just support startups, builds the founders behind them. Rick, we’re so glad you’re here.

Rick Turoczy (00:43) thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m really honored that you chose me, especially that I’m like a hobbyist developer at best. hopefully I can hold my own. Let’s not get too technical here.

Bethany (00:54) ⁓ no, that’s amazing. I am so excited, especially just with all the work you’ve done within your community and stuff. Super excited to discuss some more of how you think about things like that and how you support founders. So let’s dive in. Wanted to start with just generally, how did you get started in the Portland tech startup scene? Were you always interested in technology or did it come later? I would love to know some of your background.

Rick Turoczy (01:13) Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, happy to do, yeah. Portland, pretty accidental, quite frankly. It’s like a series of happy accidents kind of thing. I used to be a very, very good developer in BASIC on a TRS-80 when I was like in fifth grade back when you still had to press like play and record to save your files. But I continued to just kind of remain a hobbyist and involved in technology. But went to school.

got a degree in English, wound up moving to Portland and it was just really a random opportunity with a company that was hiring for an editor and copywriter that happened to be this thing called Startup. And I didn’t know what a startup was or like that. I mean, I realized people started companies, but I didn’t know that like you joined companies that were still at their formative phases. And my initial role kind of quickly transitioned from

being a copywriter to being the guy who built pitch decks all day, every day for the founding team. And then continued to grow and learn about the organizations and kind of wound up following a few executives around to new startup gigs. So for about 12 years, I was just bouncing around from startup to startup, all venture funded, all tech companies here in Portland.

And then, you know, thought I’d learned enough to do a company on my own. So tried that a couple of times and was just like, no, I’m not a founder. I’m like really good tactical support for visionary founders, but I’m not that visionary person. So kind of was spending a lot of time in the open source community. And because that’s where a lot of the startup activity was coming out of. This is about 2005.

or so. So it’s at the point where open source is now being adopted by corporations and proprietary software pursuits. And at the same time, cloud infrastructure is becoming a real thing. So it’s like this perfect storm of just like things that used to take us a room full of engineers and a room full of servers were suddenly being built in a matter of weeks or months by a handful of developers. And I just found that super interesting.

And so again, didn’t have enough technical acumen to contribute to any of those projects, but I was like, I’ll just open source my marketing communications. And so I just started writing about what I saw happening in the community. And I’d blogged since the previous century when you used to have to write code to put words on the internet, you know? And so I didn’t expect it to be anything. I was just like, this will be my personal journal.

keep track of what’s going on and for whatever reason it struck a chord. So people started sending me stuff and they’re like, write about our startup, tell people about our event and all those kinds of things. So that’s really how it started and now it’s been 18 years of what is basically now a bad habit of writing about what’s going on in the Portland startup community.

Erika (04:14) I can see maybe some of the magic that you have in my cookbook. I think I laughed about like three times reading the first paragraph. yeah, the joy comes through and is in a sort of contagious. Yeah, it’s contagious.

Rick Turoczy (04:18) Hahaha

That’s very kind of you. Yeah, and that’s my

one and only GitHub repo that’s had any traffic whatsoever is we just used it to write documentation for one of our programs. And that was a really interesting experiment as well.

Bethany (04:46) Yeah, I was definitely a big fan of your philosophy on open sourcing your thoughts around startups and what makes a good founder. And I think honestly, more of that is so needed, especially it was a wealth of information. It was really cool, potentially related. But would you say your background in English has set you up for a…

given you lot of skills for your future with startups or how has that interconnected? mean, even maybe more than just writing.

Rick Turoczy (05:14) Yeah, that’s a great question. It was a small liberal arts college that I went to. And I think if I learned one thing there, it was actually how to learn, how to not be afraid of a new topic and how to embrace the learning around that topic. And that has probably been the thing that’s most valuable. I think in that system, you wind up juggling a lot of topics and you’re like,

you know, inch deep, mile wide on any number of subjects, but have to pretend you’re expert in them. And I feel that that works really well for especially early stage startup founders who are kind of pretending they know what they’re doing or trying to kind of fake their way through stuff. And I still talk to my alma mater and other small liberal arts.

Colleges and they’re kind of having a crisis of confidence right now. They’re like, we don’t have a CS program or like we’re not teaching business acumen or those kinds of things. And I’m always trying to remind them that like if you teach people how to learn effectively, then that’s really, you know, an asset that people are going to be able to put to use regardless of what they pursue. So I think it, I think it was really that. And it was one where you were almost

Forced out of your shell to explore new topics like that was part of the requirement was making yourself a well-rounded Individual in terms of the educational perspective. So I think all of those things were really Really helped contribute and then specifically from just an English perspective like To it kind of like we’ve talked about a little bit like just putting stuff in ⁓

common English and not using acronyms or lingo or like just being basic and explanatory can sometimes be hugely valuable in our industry. you know, people get really used to talking in code or lexicon that does not resonate with a regular individual. So I’ve found it’s really helpful for me to be able to like convey that stuff in standard.

English or it forces me to ask questions where I’m like, what do mean by that? Like, I don’t understand. How would I explain that to somebody else? Like that’s been that’s been helpful as well.

Bethany (07:32) It definitely makes sense, especially if you’re founder trying to ask for money or interest in your product, you need to be able to convey very concisely and crisply what it is you’re selling. that definitely makes sense. with regard to, said you moved to Portland after college, was there anything that drew you to Portland as a community and ⁓ what sets it apart from other areas that are more typical for

tech startups like Silicon Valley.

Rick Turoczy (08:01) ⁓ great. Great question. Yeah, I was just I was a huge fan of Portland. Like before I moved here, I I was a dumb jock. Like I played sports all through school. And so even in high school, wound up over here playing sports quite often. And then in college, I was here a lot. And I really enjoyed my college experience. But.

You know, when I graduated, most of my graduating class was moving to Seattle and I was like, kind of done with college. I kind of need to move on to that next phase of my life. And so Seattle was close to Portland. That was one of the compelling things was it was close enough to kind of stay in touch with friends. And the other part was, you know, I’d grown up all over, but my high school years were in a small rural town. And so,

Portland had this compelling like small town-ish mentality even though it had a larger metropolitan culture available to it and I found that really compelling about the community. I think in the in the time that I’ve been here, so I moved here in the mid 90s, so 30 years, and in the time that I’ve been here like it’s come into sharp relief that

Portland has this really interesting, I refer to it as like aggressive humility. Like the people here are really smart and really creative, but they don’t self promote. They don’t brag about it. They’re just kind of, oh, this is just the thing I do. I do this little thing. And then you find out later they’re like the CEO of a billion dollar company or something. And it’s like, I love that part about it. It’s super charming. And I think it also lends to…

Because people aren’t living to work, like they might be in the Bay Area where it’s like work or your startup is the be all and end all. I think, you know, people have more pursuits and creative outlets and like they’re interesting, well-rounded people that always makes for compelling just communities and engagements and people you get the chance to chat with. I think…

Portland is a unique place on the West Coast, especially when it comes to technology. Like for somebody who’s worked in tech in Portland for 30 years, I’m not sure it’s really a tech town. Like I think we’ve kind of made a run at it a few times, but that might not be the most compelling ecosystem for us. And I think…

You know, as the West Coast culture has kind of become more homogenous, like 80 % of the culture on the West Coast is the same, regardless of where you’re located physically. If you’re in San Diego or LA or Seattle or Portland, like you get good food, you have access to the outdoors, like all that kind of stuff. And it tends to be those more specific aspects of the community that tend to attract people. And so I think there’s almost a…

selection bias for Portland. Like if you’re really hard charging startup type, you’re probably going to gravitate to the Bay Area. If you’re more business corporate type, there may be some things that are compelling about Seattle. And so I think we find we find that that people we wind up with a kind of similar group of people because of that selection bias. And that can be both good and bad for a number of reasons.

But it also feels like other regions on the West Coast specifically have, they’ve been defined already and Portland still feels like it’s trying to figure out exactly what it is or what it wants to be. And I find that compelling as well and interesting. Like we haven’t.

We haven’t really owned our own narrative. We don’t really have a brand unless it’s defined by somebody else. And so it’s kind of a constant creative work in progress. And I find that interesting as well.

Erika (11:59) Yeah, I was gonna say, I think you described that as kind of the blank space phenomenon. And like it is kind of interesting thinking of how to see that blank space because it is dependent on the person.

Brittany Ellich (11:59) Yeah, that kind of, sorry, go ahead.

Erika (12:16) You know, I always think of like this idea that like, you know, three different people are looking in three different windows. One person sees the couch, one person sees the chair, one person sees the rug. Like what’s actually inside the house? Well, it depends on what you’re looking at. You know, it’s like the blank space depends on like your sort of mindset and like who you are, like what problems you end up wanting to solve. But at the same time, like

you know, eventually like the tech that you build is used by someone else. So like having some connection to like real problems that other people might be experiencing, like takes that curiosity, takes that humility and be like, okay, but like, is this actually a problem we’re solving on like a bigger scale? You know, maybe, maybe I need to go and look at another window to see, you know, if they need a chair, they already have one.

Rick Turoczy (12:52) you

Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Erika (13:08) kind of thing.

Rick Turoczy (13:09) Yeah, I think there’s I think there’s Portland, in my experience, tends to excel in the space between maybe the people building the product and the people using the product. Like we’re we’re like engineers building tools for other engineers, like we’re infrastructure plays or

or analytics plays or that kind of thing seem to be the spot that we tend to do best. And I think to your point, it’s because we’re looking at both of those parties and being like, what you do is great, but it’s too hard in this specific area. And it’s not delivering the right experience to the end user. And so we find ways to kind of fit in between there, be it with

cybersecurity or kind of like APIs or piping or plumbing or that kind of stuff as well.

Brittany Ellich (14:00) Yeah, actually, I haven’t thought about that as characterizing a lot of the startups in the area that have been pretty successful. But I agree with that statement that a lot of them tend to be like developer tools type focused. ⁓ Yeah, I’ve been to a lot of tech events here too. And I can say that ⁓ I am, think I’m the only, I know I am the only of the hosts actually living in the Portland area as well. ⁓ And I definitely agree with the humility part as well.

Rick Turoczy (14:13) Yeah.

Hmm?

Brittany Ellich (14:29) I can probably count the number of times on one hand the times I’ve gone to a tech event and actually talked about anything tech related. Nobody actually talks about their job or what they do or if you ask somebody what they do for work, it’s like, that’s kind of weird. Rather talk to you about my obscure coffee roasting experience. Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.

Rick Turoczy (14:35) Yeah.

Right, exactly. Let me talk to you about my LP collection.

Brittany Ellich (14:53) I also love Portland for a lot of those reasons. So one of the things that we would like to know about is sort of your experience with supporting founders. I know you’ve done quite a bit with Pi. The Pi Cookbook talks a lot about making mistakes. And I’m curious if that’s something, is that like drawing from your own experience within your career about like, you know, making mistakes and how it’s important to do those, to learn from them, or how have you seen that play out with the founders that have gone through there?

Rick Turoczy (15:11) Mmm.

That’s super interesting. Yes, I have learned from my career. what like one of those, you you sometimes have those random like things that just kind of stick with you forever and just kind of become a touch point no matter how miniscule they may seem like I can still remember like I was cleaning out my garage or something and came across a brochure. ⁓ We used to do brochures. They were printed.

Erika (15:19) Thank you.

Rick Turoczy (15:44) pieces of collateral that people would hold in their hand before we did all the digital things. like, like it was a brochure I’d worked months and months and months on and really been like, you know, painstaking work, trying to make it the perfect document possible. And I remember opening it up and seeing a typo on the first page. And it was just like one of those things. It was like, if I was so obsessive about this,

And that still got by me. then most people aren’t noticing most mistakes we’re making most of the time. And that really inspired me to like, people come back sometimes and they’re like, you told me to do this and it worked really well. So I kind of stick with it. It’s like just half ass everything. Like don’t be so like, I have to be all in, I have to be perfect. I have to do whatever like.

It’s really been this like, if you want to do something, don’t worry about going all in, just try it. And you need to try things and experiment to figure out where your skills or expertise actually exists. And with founders, you kind of have to push them to do that because they’re expected to do everything. Like I think one of your recent

conversations the founder was talking about, like, I knew how to build product, but I didn’t realize I had to do all these other things to be a founder. And you’re never going to be perfect at all of those things. You’re never going to be expert at all of those things, but you do want to try them or at least risk failing at them to figure out where the gaps in your knowledge are, where you can excel for the company. You know, I…

I have conversations with founders all the time, especially technical founders, where I’m like, are you sure you want to be the CEO of this? Do you want to just lead product or be the CTO maybe? And they’re like, no, no, I totally want to be the CEO. I’m like, OK, but you don’t get to do any of fun stuff anymore. You have to do all that other stuff, and somebody else is going to be building product and doing the things that you enjoy. So, so much for

startups and founders apart from that experimentation is helping them have the courage to fail so they can figure out where they can be successful or to have them say like this isn’t what I thought it was like

For me as a founder, it took years and years for me to figure out that I didn’t want to be a founder. If I can help somebody else figure that out in three to six months, everybody wins because that person’s really focused on what they want to be doing and what they should be doing. But they would never know that if they didn’t have the opportunity to try it, to experiment with what they were doing and likely potentially fail because that’s mostly what startups do. Like they just don’t.

Like, it’s so, there’s so many moving parts and it’s also like timing, which you have absolutely no control over. It’s like the market has to be there, the idea has to be right for that market. Like technology has to be at a right level for it to deliver in the right way. So many, so many aspects of, you know, what makes a company successful has absolutely nothing to do with the founder. So it’s, you just have to get used to that.

potential for failure.

Brittany Ellich (19:03) Yeah, that makes sense. I have never personally been a founder, but I’ve watched that journey a lot with my brother who was at Pi. I think also Erica had a great point that we should probably define what Pi is for listeners. ⁓

Rick Turoczy (19:08) Yeah.

sure. Yeah,

yeah. So Pie, at its very most basic, is just this ongoing experiment to figure out how more established organizations like a corporation or an educational institution or maybe a government entity can effectively collaborate with startups and startup founders for mutual benefit. So we don’t want it to be a one way thing. We want

the established entity to be deriving value from it. We want the startups to be deriving value from it. We’ve been working on it for about 15 years. It started as a coworking space and then really we kind of got into the situation where coworking is a hard model to begin with. And what we started to realize was if you’re a coworking space, you have to take anybody who can.

pay for a desk, whether they’re contributing to community or not. And then we were also encountering people who are like really great stewards of community who just couldn’t afford coworking. And we’re like, what are we doing here? This isn’t, this isn’t the right model. And so we kind of pivoted into the startup accelerator model, which, which people throw that term around. It’s basically just mentorship for startup.

founders over a very short period of time, usually accompanied with some investment of capital of some sort. And so we just continued to kind of iterate on that. We copied a few other models and kind of mucked around and put something together and then continued to try different things. We originally started in SaaS mobile kind of stuff.

The only thing that remained consistent year over year then was we really felt the shared workspace was valuable. We felt it was valuable to have founders around other founders for both peer support as well as just like emotional support. And then we learned a lot during the pandemic where like this model does not work terribly well if it’s not in a physical space. Like the space itself does a lot of work.

that we didn’t even realize it was doing. And we’ve also experimented not only with different organizations, but different participants, different types of products. So our original partner was Widening Kennedy. If people don’t know who Widening Kennedy is, they’re a global advertising firm that came up with Just Do It. They’re like the Old Spice Guy and Coca-Cola Polar Bears and like that kind of stuff.

And they really wanted to just learn more about innovation and technology. That’s why they began the pursuit. We did a great program with Daimler. Daimler Trucks has a corporate presence here. We helped them build an external, an internal accelerator for employees to address problems that were occurring in the corporation and use kind of thinking to solve things like that.

And we experimented with digital storytelling. like what back then was AR, VR, XR kind of stuff, video game things. We have a partnership with Autodesk, which has a major Portland presence around manufacturing or founders who are building a physical object, ideally one with some electronics related to it, because they like figuring out like…

both the circuit boards and the housing. And so that was what motivated them to engage in that. And then for people who aren’t familiar with Portland, one of my co-founders always refers to Oregon as the Silicon Valley of consumer products. We have more like footwear and apparel and food and beverage and coffee and blah, blah going on here than probably anywhere else on earth. And so we…

took the opportunity to focus on some consumer products companies and test the accelerator model with them as well. So it’s really like, it’s just a learning platform. It’s a way of delivering education and mentorship. And we just always look for new ways to kind of leverage that to see what’s possible.

Brittany Ellich (23:19) I love that. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think that I’ve never really thought about Portland in that way as all of the consumer products, but there are quite a few here. mean, yeah, there are. Yeah, that’s cool. Nice.

Rick Turoczy (23:27) It’s crazy. Uh huh. Yeah, it’s like

you always say you obviously think of Nike just because it’s such a presence, but like you just look a little bit, you know, a little bit below that. And it’s like pretty much any major footwear company has some presence here. And then I’m again, I’m stealing lines from Mitch Doherty, my co-founder, but he’s he’s also like, name another.

They have another college stadium that’s named after a potato salad and salsa company. Like Oregon State is Reese’s. It’s like, you know, it’s just like, there are these random things where you’re like, oh yeah, all of our billion, regardless of how you feel about billionaires, all of our billionaires are consumer products people. They’re apparel, footwear, coffee. So yeah, it’s just, it’s a really unique place in that.

Brittany Ellich (24:04) Yeah.

Yeah. It sounds like it’s been a really great community for founders to find a space or anybody really in the startup community, which is awesome because that’s something that we desperately need now. You’ve talked a little bit about the ups and downs associated with being a founder and how lonely and isolating that can be. Is there any part of Pi that sort of focuses on that, like on the mental health aspect of like making sure they have a support system built in?

Rick Turoczy (24:47) Yeah,

it did become more and more obvious to us that that was an actual issue. And we also had the opportunity to do some very directed work focused on women founders and BIPOC founders, where we found that was even exponentially more apparent than a bunch of white tech bros pretending they’re founders. like we…

We really focused on making it as safe of a space as we could and ensuring that people felt comfortable sharing with one another in Brad’s cohort. We actually, it was our first one, and we actually encountered this issue where the company that Brad would eventually go to work for was like the superstar in that class, and they would show up.

to every group meeting and they’d be like, we just raised millions of dollars and we just launched this product, we just did this. And you’d see the rest of the class just go, like everybody be like, I didn’t get anything done this week. So we had to like that taught us that it’s like, you have to put some guardrails in to say, we love it if you’re doing great, but this is really about sharing your challenges and where you’re finding difficulties and.

We don’t want to dismiss that progress, but this should always be someplace where we’re looking to improve or work on things. And we continue to kind of refine that model. A lot of my work as kind of just like herding cats, it tends to be like looking towards that negative space of being like.

you’ve been checked out for two weeks, what’s going on? Like, do we need to do something to help you? Do we, you know, we had a little slush fund where it was like, anybody on staff could use it if they found a founder was struggling. Like we had a founder who was like feeling, he’d been working way too much, was burnt out. We were sensing that like,

It just wasn’t healthy. And so we were like, we’re going to pay for a babysitter and dinner. Just go do that. Stop thinking about the startup and go do the thing. And, you know, just being open and present to like, these are people trying to build things and how do we support those people? had also pursued it. Speaking of failures, I had also pursued something unsuccessfully that I still think has merit.

I think so many programs like ours look for ways to aggregate services in benefit of the startup. So they’ll be like, here’s a legal team, here’s an accounting team, here’s a design team. Like these are all the resources that you can use. We had pursued a grant to do the same thing with a professional therapist. Like we wanted to see like if you brought therapy

into this environment, would that make for more successful, resilient, kind of formidable founders and companies? We couldn’t never get anybody to quite buy off on the grant. Like we got positive feedback, we just couldn’t finance it. But I was always curious to see also like which type of

therapeutic environment would be best for a Like is it group therapy? Is it individual? Is it like what? So we wanted to test some of that stuff too. And I’m still of the mind that, you know, if a founder has, if a founder is taking care of themselves physically, mentally, emotionally, they have a much better chance of being successful at what they want to do, but they have to have the time.

to do that. That can’t be forcing them to do all the things. You have to like figure out how to structure that the right way. But it is, it’s the most corrosive. Like I don’t know why anybody does it. Being a founder is awful. Like it’s the worst thing you could do to yourself. adds so much stress. Probably takes years if not decades away from your life. It’s just like…

It seems it’s such a shiny object and there’s all this mythology around it about how great it is. And the reality is it’s really hard. And that’s what continues to motivate me day in and day out. It’s just like, it’s not easy and no one knows what they’re doing. And even the people who pretend they know what they’re doing don’t really know what they’re doing. And so it’s just a very unhealthy environment, but it is what it is.

Erika (29:24) I almost got the sense talking to Brad, who we talked with. It’s Brittany’s brother, who was a member of one of the cohorts and a couple of episodes back. I almost got the sense that it’s something that he felt like he had to do rather than something he even wanted to. Yeah, so.

Rick Turoczy (29:39) Mm-hmm.

And I

think that’s, think that like, as Brad mentioned, like he, I love his trajectory because his, the company he came into pie with failed. Like it failed even though it launched with Google drive. Like Google drive used to think they were going to have an application ecosystem. And so Brad’s companies was one of the first companies on Google drive. Like it had a successful launch. It just couldn’t make it.

And, and yeah, he comes up with an idea. He’s like, I got to build this. And, and he also has, I think, I think many people experience that. I think that’s one of the challenges is part of the mythology is build it and they will come. just, have to have the capability of building this product. And that draws a lot of people into starting something. And the reality is,

If you simply want a product to exist, just go build that product. Like, just do that. Like, if you start a company to do it, then you’re building a whole other thing in addition to building a product. So one of the things we always ask founders is like, do you want this product to exist or are you trying to build a company? And the qualifying question there is

Let’s say we have to kill that product in order for this company to survive. Are you willing to kill that product or is that just what you really want in the world? And that can be one of the things that helps people figure out if they’re truly on kind of a startup founder trajectory because startup founders want to build a business.

and they will figure out products that make that business successful, but the business is more important than the product. And then unfortunately, if they take that venture capital path, then making money becomes more the focus than even the business or the product. So yeah, there’s a lot of messiness there as well.

Erika (31:43) really interesting. Well, with your wealth of experience in seeing so many of these startup journeys, what challenges do you see for startups now compared with when you first started in the space? And do you have any predictions on the future of challenges that founders might encounter?

Rick Turoczy (32:02) I’ll start with predictions because I’m really bad with predictions. don’t. I don’t have any. I can still remember, like I used to be on the internet when you had dial-up and you had to remember IP addresses to get to anything because there wasn’t DNS really everywhere. And so I started seeing this www folder showing up on some of my servers. I’m like, what’s that? And people are like, we’re going to be able to put images and, you know.

colors and things on the internet. I’m like, that’s stupid. Text is enough. We’re good. So don’t take me for any predictions. And then I’ve forgotten the first part of your question, of course, because I went off the rails like an old man on my other thing.

Erika (32:40) ⁓

Comparing challenges for startups that you noticed when you first started with challenges now, how is that different?

Rick Turoczy (32:49) Mmm. Yup.

Yeah, mostly cultural, I guess is the best way to put it. Like when I started in startups, even into the early pie days, you were still crazy to be starting a company. Like people would be like, why don’t you just go get a job? Like, why are you starting a thing that’s dumb? so like today, it’s like, well today every

kid coming up through the system wants to be a creator, YouTuber, whatever, but startups are part of popular culture and we’ve had like, whatever, 15 years of Shark Tank, like, constantly feeding people that, you should start a company and do a thing. And I think that’s become a whole new challenge because of that mythology. So, you know, when we started, it was hard because nobody thought you should be doing that. And now we exist in a world where

he’s like, well, if you if you’re not doing a startup or a side project, are you even really doing anything like and so there have been a lot more a lot more people in in the industry and a lot more folks struggling with things than they did in the past. I think, you know, the other part of it is and I don’t want this is not meant to be negative or dismissive like

it’s a lot easier to build a product these days than it was before. And so that can also be something that kind of leads to issues and problems. I mean, when somebody even like with my lack of technical acumen can spend some time with Claude or chat GPT and code up enough of a thing that works well enough to do the thing I need it to do. Like that’s also

That’s also kind of almost a garbage in garbage out problem. It’s like, because the barrier is so low, people may think they have an idea that’s viable that’s not really an idea that’s viable. And so the bigger challenges now are educational dissuading people from taking

the track they think they need to take because of what they’ve heard, because of what goes on in the industry. It’s still just, it’s still, no matter what people say, it’s still hard to raise money. It’s still hard to build a company. It’s still hard to build a good product. And I heard something really good from a venture capitalist here in town named Diane Freeman who works at Voyager.

⁓ the other day, I thought it was a really important point. Like, no matter how easy it gets to build products, raise money, what have you, you still have to sell the thing and somebody still has to buy the thing. So like that, that remains like a huge friction point that will remain hard forever, even if it’s, you know,

giving your agent your credit card so it can go buy something. It still needs to be buying something and somebody still needs to be selling it. So it’s like, there’s just all kinds of facets where one part of it, as one part seems to get easier, the other part seems to get harder and it always kind of balances out. There’s always something hard. There’s always something that’s slightly easier. And, you know, it’s just kind of trying to stay up to date.

on where those areas of conflict or friction are is the work we try and do with our programs or that we try and bring other founders in and say, based on their experience, like, here’s what you might find difficult kind of thing.

Bethany (36:27) It definitely makes sense. it’s cool that you have a model that will continue to evolve with those challenges as you’re moving forward as well. So really, really awesome to hear about all the knowledge you’ve built up around startups and founders and dive into that. We are coming up at a time, but we typically do a fun segment. So the segment we have today is called

Local gems. So since you’re passionate about your community, would love to go around and suggest local gems you’d recommend for anyone visiting your city, like restaurant activity, anything in between. As per usual, we’ll let you go last so you have some time to think about it. But I guess I’ll go first. So I live in Charlotte, North Carolina.

And it struggles with the same thing of, I think, finding its identity and trying to figure out who it is, what it is in this, like, as it’s growing up. But I would say one of my favorite things in Charlotte is Camp North End, which is a, it’s a, used to be like an industrial mill, and they revitalized it to have a lot of like local small businesses and incubate those small businesses, which

I really love, there’s a lot of chains coming into Charlotte, which is fine, it happens, but I really love that there’s a space to really grow what’s special to our community. And it’s walkable, they plant natural, native wildflowers and things, and it’s just a really lovely space.

I’ll pass it off to Brittany so we split up the Portland wrecks.

Brittany Ellich (38:03) Great.

My best recommendation that I always give to folks is to this is probably really overrated actually for Portland. I feel like it’s really common, but to go to Powell’s City of Books, it’s an independent bookstore based in Portland and there’s a few locations in Portland. I’m not sure if it’s extended outside of there, but I know you can also order from them online and it is just one of the coolest, if you like reading one of the coolest places to go.

in the world, in my opinion. It’s, I think, like four stories tall and it’s just filled with books. They have a rare book room, which is so cool to walk through. And it’s a very satisfying place to walk around. And they also have some really great like touristy, off the wall sort of touristy things if you want to buy, you know, you know, magnets that aren’t just like the I Heart Oregon magnets or whatever, then it’s a good spot to go for that too. So that’s my recommendation.

Erika (38:51) I am not a San Diego native and so I moved here, what is it, six years ago now? But I feel like I’m still discovering a lot of my favorite gems. think currently we’ve been taking Isabel to the aquarium a lot, which is…

sort of a sleeper hit because it’s really small. Like San Diego is known for its zoo, which is gigantic and is amazing. But the aquarium is really small and sweet. And in the summer, they’re open late. So we’ll go and like walk around and she can like see all the fishes and pet the starfish and then like get an ice cream cone afterwards. And it’s like been a really lovely like experience for.

her as a toddler and us as like, you know, parents trying to corral an energetic and curious kid through the world.

Yeah, she especially loves the turtles and I think last time we went she spent about like 15 minutes outside the turtle tank like what they have like a little ledge you know and she was like walking back and forth and like singing a song outside the turtle tank. I was like well that’s my child guilty.

Good times.

Rick Turoczy (40:04) Seconding Powell’s is just like it’s a full city block of books, like all used. I think they sell some new, but it’s a used bookstore. So definitely that. If you come here with kids, go to OMSI. Like most it’s the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. And I think in most cities, the museum that’s central to the city is an art.

museum and for us it’s really OMSI which is experimental and fun. But to pick the like if you you can’t go wrong like every five blocks is a new neighborhood in Portland full of like great restaurants and coffee shops and those kind of things so it’s really hard for me to pick a favorite but I would say the quintessential coffee shop for Portland right now for me is Deadstock because it’s a sneaker themed

coffee shop that was started by a former Nike shoe engineer. And it’s just really one of those where it’s such an interesting cross section of a town that tends to be very siloed in its creative pursuits. Like tons of great food people, but they don’t necessarily cross over with the shoe people or they don’t cross over with the artists or whatever. And so it’s just always nice to see that

those two things collide in that place. And they’re always everybody from like, you run into elected officials to like, famous people who just happen to be in there. It’s just a really interesting place. So I always recommend Deadstock.

Bethany (41:34) that sounds so cool. Well, I see ⁓ we should have a Portland meetup in our future, it sounds like. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Rick. That was an awesome conversation, really interesting. Where can people find you online?

Rick Turoczy (41:40) Yes, definitely.

⁓ I’m on the internet like my usually under my last name, which is notoriously hard to spell but like Twitter used to be my big thing and now like it kind of lost the juice so like Unfortunately, it’s like LinkedIn or Brittany and I are trying to make blue sky work We’re putting our energy into the blue sky. So I’m on there too, but generally I’m on most of the most of the socials and

If you’re watching this on the YouTube, I’m also on the YouTube on a regular basis.

Bethany (42:22) Awesome. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to Overcommitted. If you like what you hear, please do follow, subscribe, or do whatever it is you like to do on the podcast app of your choice. Check us out on Blue Sky as well and share with your friends. Until next week, goodbye.