mtrichardson

Urban Airship, in Portland, San Francisco, and remote. We're building the platforms required for communicating with and understanding a mobile audience, and we work with some of the biggest and best companies in the world.

We're looking for technical product managers, designers, platform engineers, senior web engineers, sales engineers, program managers, data engineers... Feel free to send me an email (in profile) to talk about any of these.

Same restrictions on normal unemployment apply in Oregon. The SEAP is unemployment, and requires that you be on regular unemployment first. The differences are that you're specifically allowed to work full time on your company. The company has to be vetted to make sure it's not completely ridiculous, but all profits you make are yours. It's a fantastic lifeline and without it Urban Airship would definitely not exist. It's also a federal program (as well as federally funded), though the states run it - in other words, California could implement it. They just haven't.

You can be doing what you love and still have a crappy job with low pay and no hours.

I think the difference here is that I'm already on my phone or iPad looking at the item in the first place. It's a pleasant experience for me to look up things that I might like, or to grab something I know we need. Oh, we're out of light bulbs? Pull out the phone, Prime them, done, don't need to think about it. It's not that it's easier on the phone/tablet over the laptop, it's that more and more those devices are becoming the first thing I go to.

I'm honestly curious, why is that a problem?

I'm using it right now, as is a friend I recommended it to a few minutes ago, thanks to this post.

I'm one of the founders mentioned, and others are here as well - please don't hesitate to ask any questions about the program.

Portland venture capital is picking up (and we've been lucky to be a part of that). An important note is that most of the money isn't coming from Portland and it's not coming in small amounts. Serious investments are coming in from out of state VC firms.

Dedicated entrepreneurs exist and are making a go at it here - and doing quite well.

I'm wary of most of these organizations, but I do have high hopes for the software startup scene here.