BankSimple moves to Portland
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A large contingent of people working there decided to move to just outside of Portland (Vancouver Washington) mainly because of the fact that by living in Washington you wouldn't pay any income tax, and by adjoining Portland, you could do all your shopping and avoid paying sales tax.
I opted not to relocate there with everyone else (it seemed silly to move somewhere just for tax reasons), but I imagine there are at least a fair number of people who use that scenario.
However, for some reason, lots of people in general were fleeing CA at the peak of housing bubble.
Is it the address they are after? The need to impress investors? It's already expensive enough to run a business, why burden yourself and your employees with a completely irrelevant location?
I do live and work here and love the city, I just don't get the appeal of working downtown. The company I currently work for left downtown before I joined and I'm glad they did. Not many people live downtown and getting to and from work every day would take longer for me (and many others) than it does now. Not to mention an added cost of parking or taking mass transit.
I find that many people who live in downtown simply do not own a car, which seems almost impossible to function in this day and age.
I can't say it seems any more so than other large cities I've visited, like SF, Seattle, or LA. What are you comparing it to?
> Seeing people covered in tattoos and piercings gets old and tiresome for some reason.
Yeah, if this isn't your thing the Portland might be wrong for you ;) Still, there are suburbs and such where this isn't the norm.
What are you comparing it against?
I might as well compare it to my tiny hometown in orange county, of course I'm going to reach a ridiculous conclusion about it's employment level and cleanliness (and tattoo level?) I think you would hate SF btw.
"For some reason"? This sort of willful cognitive dissonance is always fascinating to see in the wild.
Here's a hint: it's either you, or it's them.
When I lived there and had visitors from out of the area, everyone commented on how depressing the place was. Not a good place to live or raise a family. If you like the Pacific Northwest, go with Seattle, yes the weather is still crap but the city is vibrant, has real jobs with real wages, and you can actually build a career there.
1) Impossible to find a job? My wife just applied to 3 companies and got offers from all 3 within one month of us getting here, all paying equal or higher to her previous jobs -- and we knew literally zero people when we arrived.
2) Filthy and disgusting? Sorry, I've seen some disgusting shit (literally) on the streets in some of the other cities mentioned in this thread. People have tattoos and piercings? I'm surprised that bothers anyone. Who cares.
3) Rain? Sure, it rains. Not many cities have perfect weather. Where I just moved from (Austin), it has been 105 degrees for 70 days straight. That can be pretty depressing.
Since we've been here, we've gone to O'Reilly's OSCon, went to multiple beer festivals, went to multiple block parties, went to the coast, visited Cannon Beach, Rockaway Beach, Cape Meares, went to the Columbia River Gorge, saw many waterfalls, saw the Shins perform live in a small bar, also Phife from A Tribe Called Quest. Frequently visit amazing coffee houses and breweries, went to a neighborhood picnic, ate at a jillion food carts for less than $5, worked at a free coworking space downtown, walked/jogged/hiked in many beautiful parks, and browsed badass bookstores.
I like the food better, the public transportation is better, the rent is affordable, it is bike friendly, there are beautiful flowers in the neighborhood, the people are chill.
Depressing? Not at all.
It's easy to love Portland in the summer (and, having grown up in Sacramento with weeks of temperatures over 110 degrees, I was very surprised to discover that I actually like summer now). The real test is whether you still love it in the middle of your second or third winter. ;>
I resonate with the "filthy and dilapidated" comment though. I blew off Portland as a dirty industrial town for a lot of years before moving here. It still has a lot of that heritage, and if you're from a place that constantly tears things down and rebuilds, you likely won't understand it here.
Portland does indeed have an extremely high homeless population, and there are real structural issue with how the city deals with that problem. Depending on where and how you live, it's possible to ignore that problem, or to not fully appreciate how bad it is, but believe me: it's real. It's also gotten a lot worse in recent years due to the economy as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our local VAs have brought on extra social workers to try and deal specifically with homeless vets, and the various homeless services agencies have been expanding, as well.
We also have inflated unemployment, mostly because the city's such a nice place to live that lots of people move here without a job, or, when they lose their job, don't leave. If you've got technical skills, it's a great time and place to find a job- but if you don't, there are way fewer options than it might seem, and it is can be an extremely competitive job scene. It's like that everywhere, I know, but for whatever reason it's especially bad in Portland. I am (honestly, no sarcasm) thrilled for your wife that she had such an easy time finding a job; not knowing anything about her, I can say that if she's not a techie than hers is the first such story I've heard from a new arrival in Portland over the last few years. Far, far, far more common is the "well, I picked up a few hours here, and a few hours there, but I can't find anything full-time, and I've been looking for six months, etc. etc."
Regarding the weather- winters in Portland affect everybody differently. SAD is indeed endemic; my GP blames it on wide-spread vitamin D deficiency, but who knows. At least in the 1990s, Portland did have an above-normal level of teen suicide. I don't think the rain here is any worse than Seattle, and from what I've heard the SAD issue is about the same up there as it is down here. But it's a real thing... you'll know what I'm talking about when we get a freak-occurrence sunny day in Feburary (typically, it will have been raining or at least completely overcast for three or four months by that point) and suddenly everybody around you seems ten times happier.
Anyway, welcome to Portland, and like I said, I'm glad you're enjoying it. I love it, myself, and feel like the positives vastly outweigh the negatives. But it's important to have a complete and balanced view of one's city, and Portland definitely has room for improvement.
And I'm glad you decided to check the place out in spite of negative posts!
However, I hate to let you down, but if you've only been there a couple months, you have not yet lived through a Portland winter. It's certainly not unbearable, but the weather does take a drastic turn for the depressing.
In any case, I'd like to move back there eventually. From the cities I've been in, Minneapolis and Portland are about tied for the nicest.
Interestingly, our biggest challenge right now is recruiting. If you're considering moving to Portland, we could use you.
(I ask out of idle curiosity, because I once had the opportunity to do an MS in CS there a while (6 years) back, and I passed up because I couldn't take on the financial burden - please drop me an email if you feel this might threadjack the discussion here.)
Or education programmes for customer service people, at all. Or a single "best profile", even?
Before we were at PIE, our company worked at cafes. I guess you could say we scaled from our home offices to a multi-tenant office to dedicated office space.
1) they wanted everyone to be in once place 2) they're hiring a lot of people, especially customer service.
Customer service in NYC or SF would be prohibitively expensive, so if they want to be all in one place, they would have to move anyway. This is no different than Zappos being in Las Vegas or Groupon being in Chicago (I think Zappos relocated). Personnel costs when you have 50 employees per hacker become a big deal.
Portland has a ton of skilled, educated people and high unemployment, so they're going to get a lot of bank for their buck.
Portland, from all accounts, is beginning to look like a city-sized SOMA startup scene, and the city's personality certainly jives with the common stereotype of the hipster startup developer.
Vegas is certainly ideally situated for a place that wants a big warehouse, but I wonder how well Zappos are attracting tech talent. I can imagine Vegas might be a fun place to be, or it might be hell. I'd try it out for a year. It's certainly very different.
Still, there are a number of people in the company who are uprooting their lives in NYC, SF, and elsewhere, and we really appreciate that they were willing to do so.
Sounds great to me.
Can't leave Fifth Third soon enough.
What I don't understand is the fact that all of BankSimple's customers (banks) are in...New York...
That said, our processing technology partner, TxVia, is located in NYC, as are several of our investors.
Also, you should change your name now before the regulators make you. Consumers think that financial companies with "bank" in their names are banks.
Yeah, Portland, Oregon's metro area is about 4x the size of that of Maine's largest city, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude or anything.
Maybe I'm just jealous that there's more going on there than here. :(
Face it, Portland, Oregon is the real Portland.
Moscow, Russia has 11 million people. Moscow, Idaho has 23,000. I know you're probably being flippant, but I hardly think that's a fair analogy.
Besides, we had the name first. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_State...
It's actually a very exit-unfriendly state from a tax standpoint. Very high state income-tax rate and capital gains are taxed at your state income level as well.
However, it's pretty sweet to pay the price listed at stores and restaurants.
In terms of a tech hub, the only thing missing is a stronger university presence.
A 20 year difference if a vast understatement.
You then state "All up scale restaurants are "real restaurants"". That's poor logic. Portland has real restaurants. Some of them are expensive.
You then state mid level restaurants in portland are almost entirely dedicated to gastro pubs. Do you want me to debunk that as well? Very well, I'd suggest you look at:
del inti (italian) gilda's (italian) doc (italian) a cena (italian) de carli (technically beaverton)
st. jack vindalho meriwether's oba etc.
Portland has a vibrant restaurant scene full of "real restaurants". It's not just high end. If you want more than gastropubs, seek out more than gastropubs.
To be fair, I wasn't that much a fan of the gastropubs in portland. A couple were ok (ned ludd and the victory were the only two i remember), but i've never been a big fan of gastropubs anyways....
I've seen very few places here that categorize themselves as gastropubs. There are a lot of breweries in Portland, and some of them have their own restaurants/pubs. But's that's a relatively small percentage of the diverse dining options here.
Glad I got out of that dump, if you want to have a future you need to be in Boston, NYC, or The Valley.
Real estate prices are definitely down from 2006; maybe not as much percentage-wise as California, but the equivalent house here still costs much less than one in Boston, NYC, or The Valley.
The rain can get you down sometimes but summers are fantastic (and dry). I feel I have a high quality of life here without having to sit in a car for 12% or more of my waking hours. Not that I don't get annoyed by something or another here from time to time. Every city has its own benefits & burdens.
All of America is same sprawling hollow suburbia.
There is no way to positively spin a comparison to Duke Nukem Forever. Don't even try.