EO Portland Member Stories
Members Share How they Started their businesses
Good news for entrepreneurs and those with entrepreneurial ambitions: this is not a series of “success stories.” In the EO community, we wholeheartedly celebrate our members’ wins, and at the same time, we understand that the glow of awards and critical praise can mislead from the reality of the entrepreneurial journey. In this series, we sit down with entrepreneurs in Portland, Oregon, and ask them about their beginnings: the itch that started it all, the spark that lit the fire, the challenge they just had to square off against. With these stories, our community hopes to share with you how entrepreneurship is a lifelong journey of learning.
Michelle Cairo, CEO of Olympia Provisions
“He looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t we do this?’ I told him I’d lend him the money, that I was perfectly happy in my corporate job. Like every good Greek brother, he guilted me. So I said, fine, I'll be your partner, but I'm never going to quit my day job. It was exciting.”
Ray Tsang, founder of only today
“I was ready for a new challenge and wanted to prove that I could do something creative, meaningful, and still make a living out of it. Naively unphased by the recession, my wife and I quit our corporate jobs and jumped right into launching a video business with no prior experience or knowledge in filmmaking.”
Augusto Carneiro, founder of Nossa Familia Coffee
“I started out as a mechanical engineer but after three years, I realized it just wasn’t me. I had to do something different. My mom’s side of the family had a coffee farm in Brazil and had been in business for five generations. It’s a beautiful place, like the Napa Valley of coffee...”
Cameron Madill, founder of pixelspoke
“I realized that I never liked following the directions of others. And I decided that I'd rather make a ton of mistakes and bear the consequences myself. This opened the door to starting my own company. And I think for people graduating in 2003, like me, if you had a laptop and some basic technical skills, you could build websites. So that’s what I did…”
Dre slaman, founder of farm to fit
On New Year’s Eve, 2010, Dre Slaman and her husband, G. Scott Brown, were at the Meridian on Hawthorne. The day-job/acting-hustle combo they’d moved to Portland to pursue wasn’t working out. They needed jobs with schedules that would allow them time for auditions and rehearsals. “I’ll never forget it,” says Slaman. “We wrote on this little piece of scratch paper: we want to do something that’ll get us out of working for other people. I still have that piece of paper.”
Bonnie Richardson, founder of allegiant Law
“I was 9 years old when my dad graduated from Veterinary School and then went on to open his own small animal Veterinary Clinic in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, when I was 11 years old. I could tell that he loved the independence of running his own clinic…But I could also see how he struggled to be a business owner, balancing money with doing what he loved most.”