Ignite Portland

I attended the second Ignite Portland tonight. Adam and I went down to the beautiful Bagdad Theatre and just barely made it in to the standing-room only (750+ capacity) venue before the locked it down and turned a ton of people away.

I hadn't been to an Ignite event before but was turned onto it by my friend Rob when he gave a talk at Ignite Seattle. From previous event agendas, I expected more tech & entrepreneurial stuff. There was some of that, but there was a mix of everything from that to explanations of why Germans love David Hasselhoff.

It was very entertaining. I'll definitely try to attend again. I'm also going to try to present there as well. I find the restrictive format (20 slides, 15 seconds each, auto-timed) to be an interesting constraint to work in.

A good thing about the event was that while the presentations varied in quality, none of them was very poor. They ranged from fair to excellent - which is far better than I expected.

The only complaint I have is that the intros and housekeeping - done by those that put the event together - were just crap. (A) They should have been done in the same 15-slide Ignite format, (B) they spent too much time stating the obvious (e.g. the 15-slide/5 minute format was stated multiple times, "They sell beer here" - ya we get it), and (c) most important of all - it should have been HIGH ENERGY!

Anyhow, forgive the venting. I really think they did a good job of pulling the event together, but it was disappointing on the kickoff and quickly recovered.