
BankSimple moves to Portland - ahhrrr
http://banksimple.com/blog/BankSimple/were-moving-to-portland/
======
bfe
Portland is one of my favorite American cities. But if you're freely choosing
somewhere to relocate to, I would think Seattle would be a tough competitor.
It's nearby, has a bigger tech community, and has Washington's zero state
income tax versus Oregon with the highest state income tax in the country at
11% for the top bracket.

~~~
m0nastic
When I was out in California, my company closed up our Santa Cruz office very
suddenly.

A large contingent of people working there decided to move to just outside of
Portland (Vancouver Washington) mainly because of the fact that by living in
Washington you wouldn't pay any income tax, and by adjoining Portland, you
could do all your shopping and avoid paying sales tax.

I opted not to relocate there with everyone else (it seemed silly to move
somewhere just for tax reasons), but I imagine there are at least a fair
number of people who use that scenario.

~~~
MrVitaliy
With average traffic/distance and ~25mpg, it takes about $6 for a round trip
from Vancouver, WA to Portland, OR. Which would save you ~$4 on a $100 item.

However, for some reason, lots of people in general were fleeing CA at the
peak of housing bubble.

~~~
bfe
That was a "~" too far for HN. It's a 19.8 mile round trip, and gas was $3.71
yesterday in Vancouver, Washington, so making the trip in your 25 mpg vehicle
would cost $2.94 in gas.

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Zimahl
The Pearl District in Portland is nice and all but I'll never understand why
you would want an office there, especially if you aren't a business that
requires a trendy, hip image. A web-based business with no front door is going
to pay a TON per square foot just to be downtown.

Is it the address they are after? The need to impress investors? It's already
expensive enough to run a business, why burden yourself and your employees
with a completely irrelevant location?

I do live and work here and love the city, I just don't get the appeal of
working downtown. The company I currently work for left downtown before I
joined and I'm glad they did. Not many people live downtown and getting to and
from work every day would take longer for me (and many others) than it does
now. Not to mention an added cost of parking or taking mass transit.

~~~
MrVitaliy
Many people live in Goose Hollow (87% of them are renters) and the Fareless
zone covers most of the transit distance.

I find that many people who live in downtown simply do not own a car, which
seems almost impossible to function in this day and age.

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dminor
Portland seems to be attracting a lot of hackers lately, so it will be
interesting to see if the startup scene and investment money follow.

~~~
jvoorhis
It's already here. Our company (AppFog) was founded in Portland and we just
secured our Series B. We have offices in the same building as JanRain and yet
another co-working space. In Old Town or the Pearl District, there are
startups on every other block.

Interestingly, our biggest challenge right now is recruiting. If you're
considering moving to Portland, we could use you.

<http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/06/10/we-are-hiring/>

~~~
shrikant
OT, and completely uninformed question: how's the scene in recruiting straight
from Portland State University?

(I ask out of idle curiosity, because I once had the opportunity to do an MS
in CS there a while (6 years) back, and I passed up because I couldn't take on
the financial burden - please drop me an email if you feel this might
threadjack the discussion here.)

~~~
jvoorhis
We haven't tried recruiting from PSU ourselves, but we probably should. Galois
(<http://corp.galois.com/>) recruits students from PSU's CS program. My
colleagues from PSU's mathematics dept have also been a pleasure to work with.

~~~
thos3000
Yup, Galois is the most obvious direct recruiter from PSU, but there are
others, to be sure, but not enough. I've got a few friends in the MS and PHd
programs at PSU and they certainly don't have people beating down their doors,
I'm sorry to say. It would certainly be good to see more direct recruiting and
internship opportunities opening up.

~~~
nigelk
We (Puppet Labs) take interns from PSU and have hired pro services engineers
from there.

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ry0ohki
I really love Portland, and I'm sure it's a great new home for BankSimple, but
I am a little shocked that a company would move to a city where literally
everyone in the company would have to be relocated. I've seen companies move
to SF or NY before because of VC raised, but this is almost the opposite!

~~~
pchristensen
There are clues there:

1) they wanted everyone to be in once place 2) they're hiring a lot of people,
especially customer service.

Customer service in NYC or SF would be prohibitively expensive, so if they
want to be all in one place, they would have to move anyway. This is no
different than Zappos being in Las Vegas or Groupon being in Chicago (I think
Zappos relocated). Personnel costs when you have 50 employees per hacker
become a big deal.

Portland has a ton of skilled, educated people and high unemployment, so
they're going to get a lot of bank for their buck.

~~~
al3x
You got it.

~~~
mattmanser
Probably worth putting who you are in your profile, at least one of your other
answers has been killed, possibly because it wasn't obvious you were answering
for the company and it's a one worder:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2921563>

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mathattack
From anecdotal experience, it does seem like Portland is drawing a lot of
talented folks. It is definitely a "bike to work, complain at city hall and
drink obscure beer" crowd, but is that such a bad thing?

~~~
pnathan
"bike to work, complain at city hall and drink obscure beer"

Sounds great to _me_.

~~~
mathattack
Indeed. It appeals to the hacker ethic. And the Green ethic. But not to the
SUV and Strip Mall ethic. Or the Zenga (sp?) tie ethic.

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MatthewPhillips
Still waiting on that invite I signed up for what seems like a year ago.

Can't leave Fifth Third soon enough.

~~~
thinkcomp
BankSimple isn't a bank!

What I don't understand is the fact that all of BankSimple's customers (banks)
are in...New York...

~~~
al3x
We're not a bank, but we view our customers as being the people who would use
traditional banks. We partner with banks, and those banks are located around
the country.

That said, our processing technology partner, TxVia, is located in NYC, as are
several of our investors.

~~~
thinkcomp
I don't know your plans, but if banks (or Fiserv or FIS) are the ones paying
you for a license to your front-end, then they are your customers. End users
are the banks' customers, and in whatever contractual agreements you end up
signing, based on my experience, the banks and their regulators will make
absolutely sure you know that.

Also, you should change your name now before the regulators make you.
Consumers think that financial companies with "bank" in their names are banks.

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LiveTheDream
Does this have anything at all to do with the new California money
transmission laws?

~~~
al3x
Nope.

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heyrhett
The dream of the 90's is alive in portland:
[http://www.hulu.com/watch/205428/portlandia-i-dream-of-
the-9...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/205428/portlandia-i-dream-of-the-90s)

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mosburger
As someone from Portland, Maine, I always get a little miffed when people
don't specify that this is Portland, Oregon.

Yeah, Portland, Oregon's metro area is about 4x the size of that of Maine's
largest city, but it's not like it's an order of magnitude or anything.

Maybe I'm just jealous that there's more going on there than here. :(

~~~
fuzionmonkey
It's like somebody in Moscow, Idaho getting upset that people don't refer to
it as Moscow, Russia.

Face it, Portland, Oregon is the real Portland.

~~~
pnathan
Woah, someone actually knows Moscow, Idaho exists. +1, sir.

~~~
fuzionmonkey
I've been there, haha.

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nivertech
Can this be related to the fact that Oregon has no Sales Tax?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_State...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_States#Oregon)

~~~
scottkrager
Probably not.

It's actually a very exit-unfriendly state from a tax standpoint. Very high
state income-tax rate and capital gains are taxed at your state income level
as well.

However, it's pretty sweet to pay the price listed at stores and restaurants.

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dailo10
Portland is basically where San Francisco was at 20 years ago.

In terms of a tech hub, the only thing missing is a stronger university
presence.

~~~
harryh
This is not true. There is a history of technology entrepreneurship in Silicon
Valley going back (at least) 60 years. There are a great many pieces of human
infrastructure that exist in SF that do not exist in Portland from the largest
collection of technology VCs & Angels in the world, to lawyers that understand
corporate structure and stock options, to bankers that understand IPOs, and of
course thousands and thousands of engineers.

A 20 year difference if a vast understatement.

~~~
al3x
Even though I guess I'm supposed to be the one sticking up for Portland in
these comments, I have to agree with this. I don't think Portland or any other
city is likely to be the next Silicon Valley. I also don't think that's a bad
thing for some types of businesses.

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bh42222
Portland is a great town.... but seriously gastro-pubs are silly, get some
real restaurants people.

~~~
al3x
I'm kind of a foodie, and our project manager is _definitely_ a foodie. He
runs this site that lists some great places to eat and drink if you're only in
a city for a couple days. Here are his picks for Portland:
<http://noms.in/portland>

I've seen very few places here that categorize themselves as gastropubs. There
are a lot of breweries in Portland, and some of them have their own
restaurants/pubs. But's that's a relatively small percentage of the diverse
dining options here.

~~~
clistctrl
As a fellow foodie, but in Boston, tell your project manager his site is right
on for the area. All really great suggestions.

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Pakourama
Portland? WTF? Why? It's a hipster dump. Rains 9 months a year, has 12%
perpetual unemployment, plus the USA's largest resident homeless population,
which isn't terribly shocking given the awful job market. But, if you can
actually get a job the salary will be circa 1994 and yet the property and rent
prices are in fantasy land stuck in the 2006 housing bubble. Oh, plus the city
has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. Great place to live if you
like being wet, underemployed, and depressed.

Glad I got out of that dump, if you want to have a future you need to be in
Boston, NYC, or The Valley.

~~~
dreamdu5t
LoL, like Boston, NYC, or the Valley are any less of a joke.

All of America is same sprawling hollow suburbia.

~~~
binarycleric
Visit Pittsburgh someday. We have some hollow suburbia but we don't have the
typical endless suburban sprawl. We do have a fair amount of hipsters though,
just a warning.

~~~
dmix
Hipsters are in every city, its not 2007 anymore.

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reustle
BankSimple == Duke Nukem Forever

~~~
heyrhett
Duke Nukem Forever, you mean that established product with nearly half a
million customers?

~~~
KirinDave
Just downrate the unfair comparison and move on.

There is no way to positively spin a comparison to Duke Nukem Forever. Don't
even try.

