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FridayMay 1 2026First Friday at Upstart CollectiveWebsite
Kick off the month with First Friday at UpStart Collective, a relaxed happy-hour style gathering for good conversation, new connections, and a little end-of-week celebration. Join the UpStart Collective community on the 5th floor in downtown Portland for an easygoing hour of meeting people, catching up, and easing into the weekend with a festive vibe.
Whether you’re stopping by after work or making this your first Friday tradition, it’s a great chance to unwind, share what you’re working on, and enjoy a welcoming space with a lively crowd. Come as you are, bring a friend if you’d like, and settle in for a fun start to the month.
Tomorrow
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SaturdayMay 2 2026Mentorship Saturdays @ Roseline Cafe & OnlineWebsite
Thanks to Roseline Coffee for providing a physical location! Find inside the hotel and to the right, likely on the couches
Coffee, bagels and people working on their careers and code! We have 2-5 mentors every month ready to help people get started in the industry, get help with a particular problem, or get career advice. We offer resume reviews, portfolio reviews, and sometimes mock interviews (time permitting).
Or call in (audio only)
+1 872-240-8681,,882162595# United States, Chicago
Phone Conference ID: 882 162 595#
Thanks to Capital One Café for providing a physical location!
Discord https://discord.gg/nSCxgbcG7U
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InventOR Bootcamp Mentor & Judge Opportunities | Support Oregon Student InnovatorsWebsite
InventOR Bootcamp Mentor & Judge Opportunities | Support Oregon Student Innovators
Join the PSU Center for Entrepreneurship (https://www.pdx.edu/entrepreneurship/) in supporting the 10th Annual InventOR, Oregon’s only statewide collegiate invention competition.
InventOR (https://www.inventoregon.org/) is an 8-week experiential program that helps collegiate inventors and innovators refine their ideas through mentorship, prototyping, storytelling, and exposure to Oregon’s startup ecosystem.
We are expanding our mentor and judge network and invite professionals from across industries to participate in one (or both) of the following InventOR Bootcamp opportunities:
Mentor Match Mixer
Saturday, May 2 | 6:00–8:00 PM
SEC Event Space, Portland State University
2130 SW 5th Ave, Portland, OR 97201A speed-networking style event where student finalist teams and prospective mentors meet to explore mentorship fit.
How it Works
- ~20 student finalist teams participate
- Teams give a 60-second overview of their project
- Mentors give a 60-second intro/background
- Brief Q&A / discussion
- Participants rotate through multiple pairings
Important
Mentor matches are made after the event based on mutual interest and fit.
Attendance does not guarantee a mentor assignment.Matched mentors receive a $500 honorarium for:
- Meeting with their team at least twice during the 8-week program
- Providing strategic guidance and feedback
- Virtual/Zoom meetings are welcome
Pitch for Feedback Judge Session
Sunday, May 3 | 9:00 AM–12:00 PM
Embassy Suites, Downtown PortlandHelp teams prepare for InventOR Finals by serving as a practice pitch judge.
Judges Will
- Listen to 3-minute student pitches
- Ask follow-up questions
- Provide written feedback
- Offer recommendations on design, strategy, and next steps
Interested?
Please fill out our Mentor/Judge Interest Form:
Get Involved: Support the Next Generation of Innovators!Then email Stacey Hoshimiya at [email protected] to confirm your participation at one or both Bootcamp events.
Help us support the next generation of Oregon innovators!
Next two weeks
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TuesdayMay 5 2026ATProto 101 + Hangout with your favorite ATmosphere nerds!Website
Come join your fellow idealists, builders, and shitposters for another meetup about the atmosphere! Together, we’re doing our part to create a more social web so the internet belongs to The People and not the oligarchs.
Co-organizer Brittany Ellich will give us a preview of the AT Proto 101 talk she’s presenting at CascadiaJS June 2nd - including a raffle for a ✨ free ticket to the conference ✨. And, since we got lots of love re: the open, collaborative style of our last meetup, we’re doing it again!
How it will work:
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@BrittanyEllich.com , will kick the meeting off with her AT Proto talk, including:
- The problem with social media
- What is the atmosphere?
- Overview of DIDs/lexicons/etc
- How we can get involved
- We’ll ask for 3 -4 volunteers to lead a discussion group
- Then, we’ll break out into huddles, and everyone can join their chosen discussion group
Example discussion ideas:
- How to Make ATProto Normie-Friendly
- Here’s how I built XYZ
- My Experience Working on ATProto as an Absolute Beginner
- Let’s Discuss: Getting Funding for Our Projects
Agenda:
- 6:00 - 6:10 (ish) | Snacks, hangout, shooting the shit, whatevs
- 6:10 - 6:40 (ish) | AT Protocol 101 by Brittany Ellich
- 6:40 - 6:45 (ish) | Discussion huddle ideas
- 6:45 - 7:15 (ish) | Huddle breakout
- 7:15 - 7:30 | Regroup and discuss
- 7:30 | Close, announce raffle winner, and after-hangout at a nearby bar
Special thanks to @jason.energy for offering his CodeTV studio for our meetup space! Hope to see you all there!
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@BrittanyEllich.com , will kick the meeting off with her AT Proto talk, including:
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ThursdayMay 7 2026Think and Drink Trivia NightWebsite
Think & Drink Trivia Night returns to OBI
Join us at the Oregon Bioscience Incubator for an evening of dinner, drinks, and friendly competition. Whether you come solo or with friends, we'll form teams of four or fewer to keep things fair and fun, so bring your A-game!
Your ticket includes a delicious catered dinner and two drink tickets to keep your mind sharp and your energy up.
Get ready for classic pub-style trivia with a mix of general knowledge questions. Not too tricky, not too simple, and just challenging enough to keep the competition lively.
Doors open at 5:30 PM for networking and mingling. Trivia starts promptly at 6:00 PM and yes, there will be prizes worth bragging about.
Come for the trivia. Stay for the community. Leave with bragging rights.
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TuesdayMay 12 2026Product-Market Fit + Go To Market Strategy: A Free Lightning Workshop for Founders–
KilnWebsiteA toolkit for founders from Ali Maaxa, Ph.D., incubation product & marketing strategist (founder: ProductTheory.io, former: AWS AI, New Relic AI, Meta AI, Recreation.gov), guest VC expert Marianne Motus (UC Berkeley Business School), PDX startup dev team Semi-Decent, and leaders from CHIFOO and the ORPIB Incubator.
This is a FREE lightning workshop to help scrappy startup founders nail product-market fit (PMF) and go-to-market strategy (GTM). Be your own incubator, be nimble, and be ready to answer deep strategic questions for potential investors, flagship customers, or strategic partners — in a flash.
Sure, PMF and GTM are buzzwords thrown around constantly. But they stand in for due diligence that actually makes a difference. Skipping the fundamentals is the primary reason 91% of startups fail:
The classic frameworks that undergird successful incubations — from enterprise AI to EdTech startups Rigorous market research powered by smart AI context engineering Real-deal, progressive hypothesis-testing toward a heavy-hitting MVP In fact, 82% of "failed" founders say that challenging their assumptions about their market would have saved their business.
Most startups don't find product-market fit for one of two reasons: consultancies charge high overhead to run studies and then throw their findings over the wall — or founders rely on raw AI outputs without the frameworks and context engineering that hold up under VC scrutiny and real product + user discovery.
Founders need a toolkit they can use throughout their entire product and business development journey. Before you hire a fractional, take generic expert advice from someone who doesn't understand your context, or worse — guess your way into brand damage — let us help you develop your ProductTheory with startup-friendly canvases that will anchor your pitch deck and your upcoming rounds of critical business decisions.
Learn more about Ali Maaxa's work: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alimaaxa/
Get on board with ProductTheory.io: https://www.producttheory.io/
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Founder Demos & NetworkingWebsite
Take a break from panels, and meet the people building things in Portland.
This is a casual, walk-around event where early-stage founders will be demoing what they’re working on from small tables.
You’ll be able to:
See what local startups are building
Talk directly with founders and teams
Meet others in the tech community
Move freely between demos and conversations at your own pace
To help make those moments easier, we’re featuring Wyrl, a networking app built for in-person events. Wyrl shows you who’s around you in real time, lets you view their profiles, and message other attendees so you can connect while you’re attending this and other Startup Week events.
Free drink tickets are available with Wyrl sign up. Download it at wyrl.io/app
Hosted by Wyrl
Sponsored by TiE Oregon Foundation
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Community Broadband PDX MeetupWebsite
Come join Community Broadband PDX to talk about building a publicly owned broadband network here in Portland.
See you there!
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WednesdayMay 13 2026dMob @ Company Wine BarWebsite
Pull your shorts out of the back of the drawer and don’t forget the sunscreen! 🍷
Join us on Wednesday, May 13 at 6:00 PM for a golden hour evening with friends, wine, and refreshing drinks at Company Wine Bar in SE Portland.
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ThursdayMay 14 2026Building D3.js Visualizations For Non-Technical Audiences–
VirtualWebsiteThis presentation introduces D3.js as a powerful tool for transforming complex data into clear, meaningful visual stories which non-technical audiences can understand and use. It explains what D3.js is, how it works with web technologies and why visualization is essential for revealing patterns and insights raw data alone cannot show.
This talk emphasizes designing visualizations with the audience in mind while also covering core D3 concepts such as data binding, scales, layouts and interactive graphics. Through examples, case studies, design principles and practical tips, this presentation demonstrates how builders can use D3.js to communicate ideas effectively and empower people to discover insights from data.
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Cloud Native May Meetup: Change-driven Architecture and Serving Inference at ScaleWebsite
Cloud Native PDX May: Change-driven Architecture and Serving Inference at Scale
This May is all about scaling; scaling your infrastructure management, or scaling your LLM inference serving. Join us to find out about some open source tools to make managing large modern stacks easier.
Date: Thursday, May 14 Time: 5:30–7:30 PM Location: Reperio Health, 4784 SE 17th Ave Suite 120, Portland, OR
Recording: Talks are typically recorded (opt-in by speakers)
A big thank you to Microsoft for sponsoring food & beverage, and to Reperio Health, our venue host.
Drasi, a new take on Change Driven Architectures: Aman Singh, Microsoft
Modern cloud-native systems constantly generate data changes, and applications often need to react to them. Building change-driven solutions that respond to specific changes in distributed data is challenging. This talk introduces Drasi, a CNCF Sandbox project that simplifies the design and implementation of change-driven architectures using Graph Queries and pluggable components. For example, with Drasi you can declaratively write automation to detect and respond to running containers with newly identified vulnerabilities across pods and deployments in a Kubernetes cluster. Join us for a walkthrough of real-world use cases that show how Drasi’s approach brings structure and responsiveness to complex distributed environments - without writing custom code.
Dynamo: Large Scale Distributed Inference David Zeir, Director, DL System Software, Nvidia Neelay Shah, Distinguished Engineer, Nvidia
This talk introduces Dynamo, NVIDIA's open-source Kubernetes-native distributed inference platform. We'll cover the problem space, walk through Dynamo's architecture — disaggregated prefill/decode, KV-cache-aware routing, and a transport layer that moves KV blocks directly between GPUs — and dig into the Kubernetes integration for scheduling, autoscaling, and graceful failure handling. We'll close with a demo of Dynamo serving a real workload.