Vacasa

If you're contemplating attending a code school, academy or bootcamp this will be a great opportunity to learn from previous and current students. A handful of panelists from Epicodus and Alchemy Code Lab will join us and they will share with us some of their experiences, challenges both in school and in hunting for jobs.

There will be plenty of Q&A time so get your questions ready so you can make better choices.

We are excited to host our first Meetup at Vacasa in the Pearl Distrcit (Downtown PDX).

More details to come!

Please RSVP at https://www.meetup.com/LatinxTechPDX/events/259793264/

Join us for a lively panel discussion and Q+A about FinTech Product Innovation and its intersection with Blockchain. We've gathered a panel of brilliant FinTech product experts to share their perspectives on what's driving innovation today, how blockchain impacts FinTech product development, and why Portland is uniquely positioned to be at the forefront of innovation.

Our panel guests will be: Shamir Karkal, founder and CEO of Sila and cofounder of Simple Bank; Christian Maynard-Philipp, COO of Third Party Technologies; and more to be announced shortly.

Our panel will be moderated by product expert, co-founder of The Development Factory and host of the famous podcast 100 Product Managers, Suzanne Abate.

AGENDA: 5:30 Networking, happy hour, drinks and appetizers 6:00 Brief introduction from our hosts, Sila 6:20 Panel Discussion 7:00 Q+A

Learn more about our moderator and panel: Moderator: Suzanne Abate is co-founder of The Development Factory and host of the famous 100 Product Managers Podcast. She is a product management expert, having taught numerous courses for General Assembly and coached enterprise organizations including AT&T, Target, Marriot, and Blue Shield. She has also helped dozens of startups launch and scale their ideas in market.

Panelists:

Shamir Karkal is co-founder and CEO of Sila, a simple, secure, and accessible suite of developer tools for building financial applications. At the heart of Sila is a new regulatory-compliant ERC-20 token which is pegged to the US dollar via a centralized 100% reserve held in US Treasuries. The Sila token will be used as the base for an API platform that will offer developers APIs such as ID Verification, Account Linking, ACH and Card in/out, and token transfers. Shamir has a unique take on FinTech product development, as he is a software engineer turned finance and banking expert who co-founded Simple and headed the Open Platform at BBVA.

Christian Maynard-Philipp Christian is the CCO and COO of Third Party Technologies, a FinTech that provides brokerage API services to digital Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), software, and trust companies. Prior to Third Party, Christian worked for Acorns, after Portland-based Vault Investments, a retirement-savings app, was acquired last year. Christian has also worked to innovate financial policy both locally and nationally and co-led the rollout of the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Empowerment Innovation Fund. Christian is an honors graduate of George Mason University’s Master of Public Policy program and holds several financial licenses.

Benjamin Diggles is VP of Business Development at Constellation Labs, an unbounded Blockchain with microservices that are scalable and fault resistant with fast transactions.