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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

Hypothetically a glut of unemployed but highly skilled semiconductor people hanging around might kick off a wave of startup innovation.

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As a PDX native that went to Oregon State and saw a lot of people go towards Intel, I don't feel the Oregon Intel crowd has strong aptitude for starting something up. They're at Intel in the first place because it was a secure job in their hometown they could coast at. I'm sure there are many of them that can do it, but I don't feel Portland has strong startup energy.

You only need a sprinkling of people with the entrepreneurial spark to kick it off, right?

It helps there to be a strong community of founders, employees willing to take a risk to work at startup for less money, investors, capital, and general energy in the air. PNW tech scene is relatively low-key and apathetic to startups. Anyone with that type of ambition should have already migrated

There was a strong contingent of forward looking tech people and entrepreneurs a few years ago (pre COVID). They have left due to the large restrictions during COVID and the flight of capital and the general decline of Portland due to the riots and the lockdown measures.

Were there more restrictions in Oregon than California during COVID? Or are you talking about something else?

Here's one thing OP might be talking about – the "skyscraper district" of PDX practically emptied out during COVID, precisely because Portland has highly segregated big-B-business and residential districts. The rise of WFH meant that the whole district nearly emptied out overnight – especially anchor tenants like law firms and tech that were most amenable to WFH. Without any residential population in the area, boom: no place for a downtown flagship office.

Since I don't want to stealth-edit my post, another one was the rise of "nuisance homelessness" – the same shelter-in-place order prevented the City from sweeping people into warehouse shelters (but lower-capacity motel shelters were set up); and a combo drug-decriminalization-and-treatment-funding bill gave us the decriminalization but never actually funded the treatment in time, and so there was a lot of open-air drug use. That didn't help the return to "downtown" either.

Yes my company (small startup) closed its Portland office during COVID. It was opened for people who didn't want to be in the bay area. Pre COVID it was en vogue for bay area startups to have a PDX office. Then COVID happened and downtown became a ghost town.

I knew the end was in sight when it became company policy that no employee stay past 6PM without HR approval due to the danger.

Do you think east of the Willamette will be where any tech scene rebuilding might end up? I wonder which neighborhood might have the right mix of housing, office space, and recreation (ie food.)

Danger of what?

All of the west coast went insane, really. It was like the entire region had a competition for how crazy and nonsensical they could make the rules.

As a result, basically every west coast city absolutely destroyed itself and will take at least a decade or more to recover… it they every really do.

This is extreme hyperbole if you have been to most West Coast cities recently. Rents have shot up to new heights for a reason.

Portland specifically is lagging a bit, but they are on the upwards trajectory (with a few big things to fix still).

I go to Portland regularly just so I can enjoy a city that's much nicer than San Francisco. And Seattle recently hit another record population, it is significantly larger than it was before COVID and will soon pass SF.

I suspect the person denigrating the West Coast cities is doing so from their basement in East Prolapse, Kentucky, as a way to rationalize their life choices.

Portland has some major advantages over SF, but as someone who also goes there regularly (~5 weeks/year), I still prefer living in SF at the moment. Not considering the amount of tech jobs there (which is a major factor for me), the city in general just isnt quite there yet. There are also some very major fiscal problems that have to be sorted before I'd consider moving.

Great place though, definitely might end up there one day

I'm not denigrating Portland... I live here. I live two miles from downtown. People need to stop being sensitive

I am a critical person and Portland is currently deserving of much criticism in order to fulfill its potential. No one got anywhere by patting themselves on the back reassuring themselves they had already made it.

+1 to this. As someone who still believes that everything that made Oregon attractive is still there, and won’t be taken from Oregon soon - nature, laid-back culture, quality of life - we can’t deny that Oregon is deindustrializing more broadly. Reasonable people can disagree on the essence and details of the issues - I say this as someone who came here because of the youth culture, and still doesn’t have a family! Even we might agree on many things (as Portlanders usually do.)

But we all agree the state is seriously going to have to think hard about how to attract new business to both I-5 corridor and rural areas - whether it’s through investing in OSU upstream, or attracting more downstream manufacturing jobs.

Paging noduerme, surely they have some thoughts on the matter

De-industrialization is the right word. We are buoyed almost entirely by intel. Without Intel, the state is essentially cottage / mom-n-pop industries.

The financial numbers paint a grimmer picture of Portland than they do of the other west coast cities.

The city, the county, and the state all spend increasing proportions on debt service, and the rewards for earning a lot of money are much less than the neighboring state.

The total fertility rate is also one of the lowest in the country. And Portland lacks a flagship university to bring in young talent.

It might be a nice place to visit during the summer months, but I don’t foresee many high paying jobs or highly profitable businesses being made there.

I don't know how good the school is, but Portland State University is right next to downtown.

It's a decent school, but beset by the same 'Portland problems' that ruin it for the people who would be starting businesses. For example, during the last riot in Portland, the PSU library was taken over and rendered unusable for several quarters. If you were using this public space to do research or to work with friends to start a business... good luck... It's just gone in a day, and the university does nothing, and even encouraged the rioters.

I agree that Portland does need public space to co-work and to be close to research. Unfortunately that would take investment… and that’s not forthcoming, not even public $.

That being said, as someone who took a few graduate stats courses at PSU, I don’t think the library would have been the right place anyway - it always couched itself as a commuter access school that relied heavily on transfers from community college, and the library reflected that. It’s definitely not a well-resourced research institution, and with the retrenchment of federal funding for research and financial aid I’m not sure what it’ll focus on.

Not known for its tech-related offerings. OSU has the edge in engineering but it’s out in the boonies (for historical reasons).

If OSHU could expand to a serious biotech research uni that could maybe fill the gap and kickstart something. That’s where I would start. But I don’t know if it could eve happen. Portland definitely hurt by not having OSU or OU - compared with Seattle/UW, Austin/UT, Madison/UW etc.

Oregon and California were roughly on par. However, the once bustling downtown where you'd normally find people socializing after work, or hanging out, or doing tech-oriented meetups (I.e., the sorts of things that lead to business creation), was beset by 'fiery but peaceful' riots for almost an entire year. Now, the entire industry of after-work social hours, meetups, etc is dead. It is beginning to be revived but on the east side and suburbs, which is more residential and 'suburban' (although east side portland, is definitely more urban than most places). Suburban is okay, but you really need downtowns to create the sort of bustle that leads to that bay area zeitgeist.

One of the underappreciated things about the bay area is that, while it is very suburban, there are several respectably sized downtown cores -- Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, and of course the Big Kahuna - San Francisco -- all connected by relatively speedy (and from what I understand, much speedier now) rail.

You also need funding. That tends to be harder to come by in Oregon vs Silicon Valley.

This is basically correct. The culture in PDX is totally different.

How does it compare to Silicon Valley?

It's a very laid-back place - more of a "you're missing out on life if you're not enjoying nature every weekend" type of place. Lots of new parents in the mid-to-late 30s (I think the highest proportion of any major city, actually.)

I think what hampers Oregon is that there isn't much non-Intel investment in R&D in the Portland region as well, compared to the Bay Area – there used to be a graduate institute funded by Tek et al., but that never got sustained. [1] The local academic medical research center is well-regarded and otherwise wouldn't have trouble attracting talent if it wasn't for the salaries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Graduate_Institute

I was a student at OGI back when it was still a thing. Then a lot of the DARPA grant money dried up because of the Iraq war (they wanted research that could be applied to weapons in the short term, not basic research into operating systems and programming languages).

They merged with OHSU, but it turned out OHSU was about as broke as they were, so most of the CS faculty migrated en-masse to PSU and took all their grad students (myself included) along with them. (It turns out grants generally go to the principle investigator, not the school. So if your advisor moves schools, their funding goes with them.)

> salaries

Yeah, this is going to be the ultimate deciding factor. When local companies don't pay enough to live and Bay Area companies are paying upto 10X+ the compensation (for AI roles) people are going to make the move.

Silicon Valley is filled with people who moved there to start businesses. Portland is filled with people who moved there for a better quality of life.

Some are starting:

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/top-resear...

it's happening?

"Ex-Intel executives raise $21.5 million for RISC-V chip startup":

https://www.aheadcomputing.com/

I believe the founding team is all in Oregon - and mostly all ex-Intel.

Yes, these folks came out of Intel Labs. But that's also a fabless startup. When you start talking about fabs you're talking about needing real money (in the multi billions of dollars). That kind of funding could only come from the likes of Apple and Nvidia.

They did not come (directly) out of Intel Labs. They left because they were working on a moonshot project that lost corporate support. Just like Ampere computing, just a few years later.

Disagree. Hillsboro has plenty of businesses from ex-intel employees.

Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen or so.

They're just not in tech for the most part. I can think of 2 breweries, a standardization company, two machine shops. And those are just within a mile or so of my house.

I think a lot of folks work at Intel in order to get out of tech. That's basically what I'm doing, lol. Work enough to save and get out of tech.

Tech is also expensive to start up in. So it makes sense that a lot of the intel-driven businesses would be non-tech.

Ah, I meant tech startups. Starting a brewery and machine shop is exactly what I expect from the PDX crowd. I think you echo what I said, people working in PDX tech are there for the salary and coast so they can focus on their own lives outside of work, which is perfectly fine. But not conducive to a tech startup environment

It doesn't, unless there is cheap capital floating around

Fabs aren't cheap, so you can't just start-up mentality you're way into this. This isn't a bunch of dudes living in the same house banging code on laptops. Serious investment would be needed. Even with bags of cash available, these are not available for 2-day delivery. There's a bit of lead time involved

Only if there are paradigm shifts on the horizon. Chip making is high barrier to entry, capital intensive. No small collective is going to be able to start something up.

Yeah. The big problem with chip making is the effort to start up is absolutely monumental. China is putting all their money into it and still playing catch up. Japan is trying to get into the game and they're mostly aiming to make slightly older chips and bringing in companies that already have expertise.

Those are two of the biggest economies in the world pumping loads of money and people into that engine to try to get it started and still just starting to make some progress. That's not to say there aren't great ideas out there that we're missing which could make it all easier and cheaper, but a small team is definitely going to have one hell of a time making stuff on a nanometer scale without billions and billions of dollars behind them. Software startups are easy, but hardware is hard. Massive hardware and microscopic hardware are harder.

I wonder how many are on H1Bs? Intel has tons of engineers from India.

That or they’ll have to move to Shenzhen to find work

This is the reality. The US is cooked.

It sounds like a lot of the jobs are in manufacturing (fabs) or closely related. Once upon a time, innovative startups could be in that space (that's how "Silicon Valley" got the silicon part of its name). But, for several decades now, it requires billions of dollars to start up a semiconductor fab, and VC's don't seem to be all that into funding manufacturing.

I'm not saying it _should_ or _must_ be that way, just that it is.

Surely Intel made them sign non-competes and will vigorously enforce Intel's troves of patents and trade-secrets.

Lucky for those people, California exists! Noncompetes can’t be enforced here, and amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California:

https://www.littler.com/news-analysis/asap/california-reache...

> amazingly, this applies even if the employee entered into the agreement before they came to California

Has this been tested? Why would an Oregon court care about what a California law says it can and cannot do?

What makes Oregon think it can enforce its law across state lines ?

> What makes Oregon think it can enforce its law across state lines ?

It’s absolutely possible to be a fugitive in one state from another. It’s also typically quite expensive and stressful.

If I were on the other side of this fight, I’d use the opponent’s absence from Oregon courts to get civil judgements in my favour and then use the federal credit system to collect.

But this is not a criminal matter

Absent any superseding federal law, a contract with unenforceable clauses in California is not going to be enforceable in California.

Since the breach of contract occurred in California, the claimant would have have legal standing

Mean to say "claimant would not have legal standing"

In general you should ignore non competes but you should not divulge previous employers proprietary knowledge. No state will enforce a non compete if it means the person would be unemployed. The judge will laugh you out of the courtroom.

I am rooting for this to be the case, and frankly it should be, but typically the massive startup boom comes from companies IPOing (PayPal mafia, Google mafia, etc.). So much talent has been locked up at Intel, I'm hoping this is a liberation of sorts.

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