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EPISODE 029 : 09/23/2021

Rick Turoczy, Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE)

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Rick Turoczy is the co-founder and general manager of the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE), a well-known startup accelerator, as well as the editor and creator of Silicon Florist, Portland’s original tech blog. Rick has contributed heavily to the tech scene in the Pacific Northwest and beyond, and joins Spark Plug to talk about startup formation, diversity in startups, startup heartaches, startup triumphs and startup successes. 

Host: Ned Hayes and Ashley Coates
Guest: Rick Turoczy

Topics discussed in this episode

  • Experiment and discover people with different perspectives than you, it helps to see the problem differently

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Audio Transcript

Ned Hayes [00:00:01] Welcome to SparkPlug, where we talk to smart people working at the intersection of business and technology. Brought to you by SnowShoe making mobile location smarter, SparkPlug is excited today to welcome a hometown hero, our own Rick Turoczy, co-founder and general manager of the Portland Incubator Experiment, known as PIE here in Portland. He’s also the creator of Silicon Florist, the local tech blog that covers the whole startup scene here in the Pacific Northwest. Rick is a great connector of people, and we’re glad to be connected with him here at SnowShoe. Welcome to the podcast, Rick. Great to have you here.

Rick Turoczy [00:00:42] Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. 

Ned Hayes [00:00:44] Could you first tell me a little bit about your history in the Portland startup saying you got into this way back, you’re you’re kind of a grey beard in this scene. 

Rick Turoczy [00:00:53] Yeah. Both literally and figuratively. So I moved to Portland in the mid-nineties and had no idea what I was going to do. Kind of wound up falling into what was then software start ups in Portland. I mean, back then everybody was out in Hillsboro, so it was a kind of different vibe back then we were, you know, installing software, using floppy disks and CDs. The web wasn’t really a thing yet. 

Ned Hayes [00:01:23] And I remember well, I remember. 

Rick Turoczy [00:01:25] And so kind of got the kind of got the bug and getting the opportunity to see how companies were built and what they struggled with and that kind of thing. And so started to get really involved in the open source community in Portland, which was really robust at the time, and they were still that that was also an interesting transition point in the open source community. I was seeing a lot of the same things I had seen in the proprietary software community, which was, you know, a bunch of really intelligent, driven, creative people who focused their creativity on building product and either couldn’t or wouldn’t really communicate about what they were building. And I was like, Well, I’m not a talented enough developer to contribute to really open source, right? You don’t want my messy spaghetti code in any of your open source projects, but maybe I could open source my marketing communications and kind of help promote or describe what was happening in Portland at that time and what was starting to happen with tech startups at that time. And so I just started writing about what I was seeing in the industry for whatever reason that just kind of struck a chord with folks like I’d been blogging since the late 90s, but nothing had ever really happened with that. And then writing about the tech community and the startup community was something that was clearly needed because it really resonated with people that Silicon Florist. So just like happy accident there and then that led to PIE and PIE at its very most basic is just this ongoing experiment to figure out how established organizations like corporations or government entities or educational institutions can more effectively collaborate with the Portland startup community, hopefully for mutual benefit. So we kind of wanted to be a two way street. And I’ve been working on that project for the past 12 years. It’s gone through any number of iterations, but continues to be kind of interesting and inspiring project and a way to help activate the community around here. 

Ned Hayes [00:03:41] One of the first things that was attracted to me about PIE was that you called it an experiment. So just a riff on that. Why is why is it important for startups to experiment and to kind of be in a place where they don’t know the answers? 

Rick Turoczy [00:03:56] I think the interesting stuff is always out along the edges, you know, continuing to kind of push that envelope. I’m not a huge fan of like, move fast and break things behavior, but I think I think experimentation is good. I think it gives you the opportunity to get different viewpoints or different vantage points that help you see the problem differently or explore ways of solving the problem differently. And I think by experimenting, you encounter other folks who have different perspectives on what you’re doing. And most of all, I think, especially from a PIE perspective, it always keeps it fresh. It’s not repetitive. It’s like we’re always trying something new. We’re always, you know, looking for other opportunities where we could engage effectively. And so just from purely an emotional standpoint, it keeps it inspiring and and something to enjoy working on. 

Ned Hayes [00:04:57] Well, speaking of being inspired. What inspires you about working on PEI? What turns you on there? 

Rick Turoczy [00:05:04] It was a moment in time where again I refer to my career as as just a series of happy accidents like it was. We were having the conversation in the community about wouldn’t it be nice if we had a shared workspace where start ups could collaborate because there weren’t a lot of co-working options back then? And literally within a few weeks of that conversation, Renny Gleason from widening Kennedy reached out and said, Hey, we have some empty space in our building. We’re interested in getting involved in the startup community. Could you do something with that space? And we’re like, Yeah, let’s let’s do that. Let’s put let’s put that together. But I think I had tried to be a founder. That was something. After 12 years, you know, working for founders, I was like, Oh, I get it. I think I can do this, and I really discovered that I would. I’m not a founder. I’m not. I just am not inspired by the same things that founders are inspired by. I don’t typically have a kind of strategic vision for where I’m going. I’m very tactical. And so I think the opportunity that appealed to me most about PIE was it was my opportunity to be tactical and support a variety of founders simultaneously. But rather than just going to work for one company, I could kind of spread my expertize and mentorship across a variety of companies. And I’ve always been like, I was a lacrosse coach, I was an editor, I was I’ve always been the person who helps somebody else get better at what they do or or tell a better story than there than they’re capable of telling. And so PIE was just yet another iteration of that. 

Ned Hayes [00:06:55] Well, could you tell us a little bit about some of the success stories that have come out of PIE? 

Rick Turoczy [00:07:00] Success to us is ensuring someone is on the right path or ensuring that they are achieving a level of contribution that they find inspiring. And so one of our greatest success stories is actually a failed company from the first class, and we had a founder. He was playing the role of both CTO and CEO of this company was called Jive. Yeah, there were pursuing kind of like revision control for creatives like, how do you deal with all these Photoshop files that are named, you know, Rev 92 and Rev 93, you know, really driven, really passionate founders. They wound up actually launching along with Google Drive. It’s one of the first applications on Google Drive, but there wasn’t really a path forward there, so they decided to shut that down. The CTO/CEO  his name was Brad Heller, and Brad had been at Jive and about us and a couple of other companies. This was kind of his foray into being a founder, and after he shut it down, he went to join another company in the class called Cloudability and kind of help them build some of the initial versions of the product that they had. Cloudability, if folks don’t know, went on to great success, had a successful exit and it’s kind of a marquee company here in town. And Brad had a lot to do with that and then wound up meeting his next co-founder at Cloudability. They both started another company. That company was venture funded and then exited the puppet. And then Brad worked at Puppet for a while, and now he’s off in Berlin, Germany, doing more work. But I just love his trajectory through the community because he found that role that really enabled him to contribute in a really meaningful way and has the ability to touch a variety of companies and help them be successful. So that’s one of my favorite ones. Some of the other companies that have have kind of come through the space like Linux is probably the one locally that people know best. Still very much a going concern there. And you know, and have done a fantastic job of really informing the customer data platform space and kind of leading the pack there in terms of Gartner quadrants and all that kind of thing. And then on the consumer products side, I would say MilkRun, which if folks don’t know, is very much like an Instacart that connects farmers directly to consumers. They’re an alum of PIE that has done really well. And then more recently, Pans Mushroom Jerky, which came through our consumer product side through our collaboration with Built. Yeah, they wound up on. Shark Tank and Cuban put some money in, and there they’re going like gangbusters now, so we don’t have, you know, in this process, it’s not like you select 10 companies and you have 10 homeruns out of that situation. You have it, you have a few here and there, but everybody gets something out of participating in the program and that’s what I appreciate most and they develop the relationships again. I think Brad is a great example. They develop the relationships that are going to be their future co-founders or employers or their employees, and helping to kind of stitch that fabric together is, I think, what PIE is best at doing right. 

Ned Hayes [00:10:44] And I think it’s really infused with your approach to coaching and really building relationships. I know some accelerators are all about the bottom line or all about getting a certain outcome, certain metrics. And you’ve really been focused on building people and helping people to kind of realize their best selves. At least that’s my perception. 

Rick Turoczy [00:11:03] That’s what I mean. That’s definitely my goal. And my hope, I think, are in the early days we were borrowing from existing models. And so we were very much like, how much money have you raised? How how are you going to exit? Like, how many people are you employing? But we eventually found the way to that path of like, how do we make you better at what you want to do, whether that means being a founder or doing something else in the community, 

Ned Hayes [00:11:31] This particular community is is distinct from some other places like the Bay Area and Seattle. So if you could put it in a nutshell. How is Portland different? 

Rick Turoczy [00:11:40] The analogy, I think that works best to describe Portland and to some extent, Oregon. For folks who might not have a lot of experience with it is the is the, you know, the Oregon Trail goldrush analogy, right? Like there’s a fork in the Oregon Trail and people who wanted to get rich quick and make a lot of money took the fork to the south and went to the Bay Area and tried to find gold. And people who wanted to settle down and kind of build something slow and steady continued along to to Portland, Oregon. And I think that culture is very much the underpinning of most things we see built here. People are accidental entrepreneurs, they’re very driven by their passions and a sense of craft and building the best product possible. What are the economics of building that product necessarily work or not? And I think if you look to the Bay Area, you know, time and time again, they are very financially motivated. Like what is going to make the most money? How can we build the biggest thing and how can we do that as quickly as possible? And then to the North, I think in Seattle, you see a lot more kind of business acumen. You know, somebody somebody starts a company because there is a clear market opportunity for that solution or that company. And Portland is pretty much the polar opposite of that. You know, it’s like I built this thing. Somebody told me they pay me for it. What do I do now? Like, that’s that’s most of the entrepreneurship around here. 

Ned Hayes [00:13:27] Do you see people who move to Portland or move their companies to Portland in order to do something different than what is happening in their geographical location? 

Rick Turoczy [00:13:36] Yeah, we did see that. I think that’s a unique dynamic of the West Coast in particular, and maybe we’ll see some of the similar dynamic on the East Coast given the growing prevalence of like the Miami’s and Atlanta’s of the world. But I think to date on the West Coast, the most interesting thing is people can kind of self-select based on their passions or frustrations. And if Portland moves too slowly for somebody, they may relocate to the Bay Area or Seattle to grow the business they want to grow. But to your point, the opposite is also true, like if the frenetic pace of the Bay Area is too much or that focus on venture capital is too explicit, then you know, somewhere like Oregon can be a great place to grow a company with the focus of building a good, sustainable business not necessarily the most, you know, fundable business and maybe not throwing out the most revenue, but building a business that has the potential to be sustainable and survive and pay living wage jobs for a variety of people. I see a lot of folks who could move here first and foremost for the culture or lifestyle, and then realize that they can also build a business here very effectively. 

Ned Hayes [00:14:57] Well, my business SnowShoe is here because of that sustainable character. We, you know, aren’t a unicorn, we are throwing off billions of dollars a year. But we’ve been around for, what, eight years now and gradually building a sustainable business, which we’ve been very fortunate to have investors who back that strategy. Rather than wanting to flip the company in three months flat, they’re willing to fund it, you know, for three to 10 years in order for it to really, really build a base of real customers. And it takes time that takes applied energy. But I’d like to think that that builds a company that has a really good foundation under it, rather than one that is kind of puffed up artificially by fake dollars in a way, you know, when VCs throw a lot of money at something you’re distorting the marketplace. 

Rick Turoczy [00:15:45] Yup. You know, that was part of my initial career with startups was and I think one of the things I found frustrating was I was in a position of telling stories to get that fake money right. They were fake stories to get fake money, to build a fake business. And I was just like, I don’t know, I don’t know is really where I want to spend my time all the time. 

Ned Hayes [00:16:07] Yeah, and not that those businesses are entirely fake, but it is a business that may not exist without an infusion of cash and a business that may not have a good reason to exist. I mean, if we were to pick the category and distorted it dramatically and the category is self-correcting, but there’s a lot of a lot of busted hearts and a lot of busted business there. 

Rick Turoczy [00:16:29] Yeah, absolutely. I’m currently reading one of the, you know, I think it’s called the cult of we work, but it’s, you know, basically the journalists who covered. We work from its very earliest days through the whole, you know, implosion and and just those those things that looking back, seemed so obvious. But in the in the thick of the irrational exuberance, they oh yeah, that totally makes sense. Of course, we’re going to do that. 

Ned Hayes [00:16:55] Well, let’s talk about start ups a little bit. What’s the point at which a startup turns into a business, just another business? Because there’s all this mythos around startups. So let’s try to find some terms. What’s a startup versus what’s a viable business? 

Rick Turoczy [00:17:10] Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t think anybody has ever, like, hit upon a definition where they’re like, Yes, this is a startup. It’s about, I’ll give you my perspective. My perspective is you stop being a startup when you become self-sustaining. So if you’re taking outside capital or bootstrapping or, you know, doing things to keep a business alive independent of the revenue and profits driving that business, that’s likely a startup that has nothing to do with age. The first startup I worked for was 10 years old when I joined, and it was still very much a startup. It really has nothing to do with the amount of money you’ve raised or the amount of revenue you generate. It’s just kind of that self-sustaining function. And then the other part of it is, I think you stop being a startup once there’s some liquidity of that, be that private equity or going through an initial public offering or getting acquired. That’s definitely the end of your company being a startup. It’s it’s a wholly different beast at that point. 

Ned Hayes [00:18:25] Right, right. When you’re reporting to the street, the kinds of concern you have in a day to day basis are very different when you’re managing a team of eight people and one of them is your best friend and it’s complicated. Yeah, it’s good, but it can get complicated quickly. 

Rick Turoczy [00:18:40] Exactly. 

Ned Hayes [00:18:41] Complication, then having a public company or having a company that even as acquired as part of a division in another company. 

Rick Turoczy [00:18:49] Yeah, even if even if it’s only like some acquisitions people go through and it’s, you know, it’s autonomous, it’s a wholly owned subsidiary, it’s still being managed by the folks who who got acquired. Even then, that doesn’t feel like a startup to me. That’s that’s a different thing entirely. And I think that may be another indicating factor is, you know, like it or not, startups are kind of expected to grow up and to the right forever. Once you start to plateau or once that kind of exponential growth trails off, once you’ve kind of discovered your market and really satisfied the needs of that market, that’s probably another good indicator that you’re no longer running a startup at that point. 

Ned Hayes [00:19:37] So let’s talk a little bit about startup founders. I mean, startup founders are kind of a weird, rare breed. But tell me about some of the founders that you’ve met, and I know some people go through multiple startups before they really find their rhythm. And some people keep keep working on new company ideas. But I’ve always been intrigued by the vibe of the startup founders. They’re intense people. 

Rick Turoczy [00:19:58] They are intense people and in my experience, the best startup founders have a very special talent of being able to hold this vision of how the world will be a better place once they achieve what they’re trying to achieve and they keep that in their head on a consistent basis. It’s the reason they get out of bed every morning, but at the same time, they’re also able to distinctly focus on very tactical elements of the business. Like, what do we need to get done in the next hour? What do we need to get done this week? And they kind of oscillate back and forth between those two extremes? I think another really specific factor for us at PIE is coachability, willingness to learn. That’s where we tend to have the most success with founders. I always say if Steve Jobs or Bill Gates had applied to PIE, we probably would have rejected them, not because the business wasn’t sound or the concept wasn’t sound, but simply because founders who are stubborn and headstrong don’t necessarily do as well in our program. And they end up getting frustrated with us. Mentors wind up getting frustrated. We’re like, Why? Why am I talking to this person? They’re not listening to anything, I say. So that tends to be a qualifier for me personally. And then I think just being comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s really difficult to be a founder and it’s really difficult to kind of have everything on fire simultaneously and yet kind of keep up that veneer of, no, it’s all great. Well, we’ll get through this. That’s no problem. 

Ned Hayes [00:21:41] The roof was on fire. Don’t worry about it. Yeah, it’s all good. 

Rick Turoczy [00:21:44] It’s on fire by design. We actually set it on fire because it’s the right thing to do right now. 

Ned Hayes [00:21:49] Well, as you know, SnowShoe focuses in the retail domain and during COVID, retail really had to adapt quickly, let’s say, and some companies went out of business. So where do you see things going in terms of post-COVID economy? And I know this is a big question, but it’s the question on everyone’s mind. 

Rick Turoczy [00:22:10] No, totally. I appreciate that I only have my kind of vantage point, which is really particular, but optimistically, I will say for as negative and catastrophic as this whole experience has been for any number of people. It’s also kind of forced folks to think differently about their businesses. And I think one of the most positive aspects is overnight. A lot of typical retailers who may not have been terribly technically savvy or may not have understood direct to consumer had to learn all that stuff overnight. 

Ned Hayes [00:22:48] And they were counseling a lot of our customers on how to become omnichannel when they used to just be brick and mortar. 

Rick Turoczy [00:22:56] Right? And so that’s knowledge that they’re going to carry forward in either their current pursuit or future pursuits. That’s important learning that would never have happened without that forcing function. And so I’m optimistic about that, about how that level of innovation and the insight kind of changes the future of retail writ large. And then I think from a Portland perspective, you know, it’s probably only been the last five years or so, maybe 10 that Portland has really been this like shiny object that people like, Oh, what’s going on in Portland? And you know, when I first moved here, it was a very kind of gritty, third tier metropolitan area. You know, there wasn’t a lot of the culture that attracts people to the town now. And I always encourage folks that if they’re feeling concerned about Portland right now, go watch Drugstore Cowboy or my own private Idaho and see what Portland used to look like in the 90s. And maybe I’ll go OK, from that perspective, I’m like, We know how to do this as beat up as the town has been, as beat up as our retailers have been. We know how to build this stuff back up, and that’s a muscle that we will need to exercise and get back in shape to make it happen. But I’m confident that Portland, you know, kind of like Senator Widen recently said he’s like, Don’t bet against Portland, will figure out how to how to come back. And I think we’ll come back much more quickly than the 10 to 15 years it took to build that version of Portland originally. 

Ned Hayes [00:24:32] Let’s talk about Portland and why Portland was in the news with the Black Lives Matter protests and with an increasing focus nationwide on how America has been a white supremacist organization. 

Rick Turoczy [00:24:47] Yep, yep. 

Ned Hayes [00:24:48] Is waking up to that fact for some people and is finally listening for other people. So how does the startup world in the tech world respond to that understanding? 

Rick Turoczy [00:24:58] Yeah, I. And if people don’t have the context, I mean, Portland. I mean, I think we’re neck and neck with Minneapolis for being like the whitest metropolitan area in the nation. And, you know, the Oregon Constitution had racism baked into it. White supremacy was kind of baked into that initial constitution. So we have very deep, ugly roots of that behavior in our community and then look to more modern aspects of it where we bulldoze the primary Black community in Portland to put the, you know, Moda Center. And and there is that kind of like running I-5 and the Moda center through those areas, which was clearly a racist behavior. And I think what is on the positive side, it’s in our face now and folks are forced to deal with this stuff and forced to to start to work on this kind of thing. And that’s, I think, a positive aspect for the community. My friend and the chairman of our board, Steven Green, always highlights that Portland, while lacking in diversity, is less segregated than other communities. There are communities in metropolitan areas in the United States where if you’re in a Black neighborhood, you are just see Black folks and don’t see anybody else. And that’s not necessarily the case in Portland. There’s more diversity, you know, throughout the city than it being segregated to particular neighborhoods. So I always see that as a positive. I think Portland’s willingness to acknowledge these problems A) start to talk about them, but more importantly, B) start to work on them is is perhaps the most positive outcome of this situation to be sure. 

Ned Hayes [00:26:55] Right? And when we think about forming companies, mentoring teams, growing organizations, what’s changed in terms of how startup leaders think about diversity and inclusion? 

Rick Turoczy [00:27:09] We’re definitely seeing the conversation change. I don’t know that we’re seeing that conversation being put into action across the board, but the conversation is changing. So that’s that’s a small step forward. I honestly wonder if and you know, I’m sure somebody more educated than me could could put this into a thesis or at least, you know, explain the metrics behind it. But I often wonder if that lack of diversity is the reason that Portland doesn’t build companies any bigger than like 400 or 500 people like that. If you have a bunch of white dudes trying to figure out problems to solve. You can only see so many problems or you only understand so many problems. And if you don’t have, you know, different lived experiences in forming that problem, you’re only going to be addressing a small segment of the market. And then that leads to the fact that if there’s only so much market there, or if you’re only addressing the problem in a way that a small segment of the market understands it, then you’re never going to be able to grow a big, diverse business like that that’s just not going to happen. So I think the onus is on the founders and the founding teams to diversify sooner rather than later, because I think one thing I’ve encountered is, you know, once you get over like five to 10 employees, that culture starts getting baked in. And if you’re not bringing new viewpoints into that culture, then every new hire that you add because it becomes expand exponentially more difficult to reverse that trajectory. And so I would really like to see at the very earliest stage, like how do we build, how do we bake that diversity? And from day one, as opposed to thinking it’s something that we instituted retroactively after we’ve raised Series B or whatever.

Ned Hayes [00:29:10] Right and regrowing SnowShoe this year, I took a very conscious approach to how do we get a balanced team and a team that can do top notch work? I mean, we’re not lowering the bar for anyone, but instead hiring a team that really can contribute with multiple viewpoints, as you said. Yeah, I’m happy to note that SnowShoe is currently gender balanced and and we have a lot more diversity than we used to have. But I think there’s there’s more work to do. And that’s the other thing to keep in mind, too, as you’ve pointed out about Portland, is that if you hire a single person who is in a minority community, you’ve actually isolated them. You create a community within your organization that can support that voice and to make that voice a prominent one that can be listened to well. 

Rick Turoczy [00:29:57] And you have. To think through the. It is not if you happen to be lucky enough to bring in someone who doesn’t look like you or shared your lived experience or shared the lived experience of the team. If you happen to be lucky enough to attract that talent and hire that talent, then you also need to be willing to change the culture of the organization so that that person feels like they have a place in the organization. Because I think that’s the other difficulty that we see so much as like where we tried, you know, we tried hiring folks, but they just don’t stay. And it’s like, Well, that’s because you didn’t change the culture. So they felt welcome, like you got 

Ned Hayes [00:30:39] Maybe, maybe that’s a you problem not a they problem. 

Rick Turoczy [00:30:41] Yeah, exactly. Yes, very much so. And so, yeah, to your point, like group steps in the right direction, baby steps in the right direction, but still a lot of work to do. And I think from a call and cultural perspective, we writ large have a certain amount of difficulty with that. Portland, for being a second tier metropolitan area, still thinks it’s a small town and we really get into this dynamic of what we fix that problem. We don’t need to keep working on that. We solved that. And so it’s like we were the most bike friendly city in 1980. So why would we keep working on that? And and you know, we we established public transportation. That’s good enough. So why would we keep working on it like that? I can see that tendency kind of creeping in as well, where it’s like, Well, we worked on some DEI stuff, so check that one off. We don’t need to keep working on it when in actuality there’s no end to that process, and it’s just kind of a constant thing to be working on, right? 

Ned Hayes [00:31:45] Entirely agree with you, Rick. Let’s go back to that idea of startups having a vision, and I assume that you know you, you live with a vision of where you would like Portland to go. So let’s let’s think about five 10 years in your best case. What would Portland be like for startups and for a diverse teams and four for the city as a whole? 

Rick Turoczy [00:32:08] In my best vision for the city, and we’re all my inspiration point for this time and time again is Rukaiyah Adams. And if people don’t know Rukaiyah, she’s the Chief Investment Officer, Meyer Memorial Trust. She was, you know, one of the leading voices and advocates for the Albina Vision, which is kind of rethinking that area. We were talking about where the Black Neighborhood had been destroyed. She, to me, is, I always say, is getting back to ridiculous decisions like they’re they don’t seem to make sense. But the longer term vision of what those decisions bring about are are incredible and really make this city what it is. And and when I provide context for like a ridiculous decision, it’s Tom McCall Waterfront Park, which if people don’t know the history of that, there was going to be an interstate running down the basically the facade of the Portland downtown and the community made the decision like, no, that should be that should be a park. So everybody has access to that waterfront. I don’t want to drive by the waterfront. I want to hang out in the waterfront. And another one is is Pioneer Square, where right across from a bunch of retail locations could have easily been a parking garage. But instead, Portland decided that no, we’re going to make that into our living room, and we’re going to have that somewhere where any any citizen can enjoy the Portland as if this were their living room or if you look at the, you know, the urban growth boundary at a time when many cities were were expanding and sprawling as best they could, Portland made the decision, or Oregon made the decision that Portland would have a growth boundary and it would protect the farmland and forest land and not allow the city to expand into those things. At the time those decisions were made, that seemed ridiculous, like why would we do that? But it’s created the Portland that we have today, and I feel like we’ve lost a lot of that ethos, and that’s something we need to get back to. So that five to 10 years from now, the ridiculous decisions we’re making today really inform a new generation of this city and its citizens. 

Ned Hayes [00:34:38] Wow, that’s that’s a really compelling vision there. Thank you for that. Sure. So the last question that we always close our podcast is what do you see as your legacy and what would you like to be remembered for?

Rick Turoczy [00:34:52] Not screwing stuff up? I don’t know. I would love for my legacy simply to be inspiring. One person who might not think they have anything to contribute to the community, to step up and participate. And, you know, if that is inspirational to even one other person, then I feel like that’s a legacy that I would love to have. 

Ned Hayes [00:35:20] Thanks for listening today to the SparkPlug podcast and brought to you by SnowShoe Snow.sh For smarter mobile location. Smart Plug is a wholly owned property of SnowShoe all content. Copyright 2021 SparkPlug Media.