EO Portland Founding 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.”
Darcy Cameron, founder of shibui knits
Prior to entrepreneurship, Cameron was an accountant, a job for which she was “spectacularly ill-suited.” Accounting appeased her practical side, but ultimately, the job fit like a square peg in a round hole. “I live in the world of ideas. I’m able to dream things up and get a team excited,” she says. Now Cameron does exactly this for a living — dreaming and knitting the way forward for herself and her company.
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.”
