Beyond the headlines: "Bend, Oregon, is becoming a commuter town for Silicon Valley despite the 10-hour drive"

I wanted to take a moment to expand on an article that came out recently on CNBC that characterizes Bend, Oregon as an up-and-coming Silicon Valley tech commuting hub. While I think the article was accurate in sharing the stories of some tech executives in their decision to move to Bend, it is important to understand what is going on in the region beyond the headlines. If you're interested, please take the time to spend about 10 minutes reading through this.

I came to Bend in 2001, after the first dot com boom. Bend was not new to me. I was raised in a rural lumber mill town, Roseburg, in Southern Oregon in the 70s and 80s. Like most people's formative years, it was a time that shaped my worldview. Roseburg in the 80s was in the middle of the spotted owl debate that made national headlines, being called "Lumber Town USA". I saw mill workers being laid off and families struggling to make ends meet. The common perception at the time was that it was solely the environmentalists – the spotted owl – causing the loss of their jobs. The reality was more nuanced as it also had to do with the economy as a whole and automation advances occurring in the mills.

My dad was a doc in Roseburg. He would often forego payment from folks who couldn't afford medical care and instead sometimes operated as an old school country doc, taking a cow or some help on the "farm" where I grew up raising pigs and other animals. He would come home with stories of treating loggers who had been injured because someone had spiked the tree they were harvesting. It was a divisive time and I was at ground zero, as a kid, seeing issues that now have come to raise their head again in the broader picture of our economic landscape across our country. And, Bend – hell, Bend at that time was just beginning to become a ski town, but it was a poorer version of Roseburg in many ways. The lumber mill – now known as The Old Mill (a thriving promenade and recreation area) – was very much at the epicenter of Bend. Smoke stacks bellowed and logs clogged the river. And, as a kid from a poor lumber town that had seemingly no future for my classmates or me, I left Oregon after graduating from high school and swore I would never come back.  

So, I left Roseburg and Oregon and was fortunate –  and I very much mean fortunate – to travel the world and live in many different places that opened my eyes and gave me additional perspectives. I entered into the technology industry and was again lucky – the right timing was everything. I was at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois in the early 90s when Marc Andreessen (at the University of Illinois) was in his early days of creating this thing called a Web Browser, which was initially named Mosaic. Mosaic subsequently became Netscape and the rest is history. I was at the bleeding edge of this new era of computing and this thing called the World Wide Web and I decided to move to Washington, D.C. where I focused on data and analytics working with several different government agencies. This early exposure translated into my current work with companies that use artificial intelligence / machine learning to automate many of today’s predictive manual tasks. Ironically, the automation that I saw as a kid in Roseburg has evolved on a broader scale and is affecting nearly every industry today.  I never imagined that my career would take me back to something that I experienced firsthand in my youth – let alone that automation would become something I would I invest in. Now, however, while I focus on investing in advancements and innovations in business workflows with AI and other technologies, I am also working towards how we provide additional economic opportunities for all, augmenting individuals versus simply automating people away.

By the late 90s I found myself in Silicon Valley working for a data and analytics startup called Arbor Software. It was an amazing time and Silicon Valley then felt like one giant college campus. Unfortunately, this campus wasn’t improving in all areas. I saw and felt the quality of life deteriorating with rising commute times and housing prices. There was a frenetic buzz to life in the Valley that was exciting, but also unsustainable and unrealistic. While sitting in a movie theater one evening, an ad projected on the screen promising a new BMW to the next 20 employees to join the next “big thing” startup, I knew it was time for me to leave. And to my surprise, I was able to negotiate a remote working opportunity with my company and left for Bend, a familiar town I had visited frequently as a kid.

The Bend of 20 years ago was much different than the Bend of today. It was quieter, didn’t have as many microbreweries, and there were not nearly as many cars on the road. There was no Old Mill district as we know it today and our economy was generally reliant on development and tourism – by now, Bend and the surrounding region had become known for great outdoor recreation. The hospital and service industries were (and most likely still are) the predominant employers and, for the few of us telecommuters – we pretty much knew each other as we all were hopping on a United prop flight down to San Francisco and fighting over the only seats with leg room – seats 9B/9C.  At this time I, along with a fellow telecommuter Robert Kieffer, started a prior iteration of BendTech as a way for those of us telecommuting to come together and discuss technology and how we might grow the tech community in the region. I became involved in various organizations and groups like Landwatch in an effort to help ensure that Bend might evolve its economy, but still grow in a responsible way. I advocated to build a thriving economic environment that was not divergent, but complementary to our environmental and regional heartbeat, when traditional thought was that the two were mutually exclusive.

Fast forward to 2018 and Bend is obviously a place on the technology map. It isn’t Silicon Valley – which is still the thriving epicenter of technology for many reasons – and it never will be. I honestly don’t believe that most residents or the local leaders aspire to become that.  But, Central Oregon is connected to the Valley in more ways than a quick flight on United or Alaska. The recent CNBC article casts light on these changes, but I’d be remiss to say that it tells the full story.

I'm now a General Partner at Seven Peaks Ventures, where we invest in early stage tech companies across the Western U.S. region. For me (and for my partners) living and working in Bend is very personal. Bend is our home, where we are raising our families, and where we are a part of a tremendous community that we love. My work today is my passion as I want to help diversify our economy and provide opportunities in regional, rural areas that have been overlooked. Steve Case at Revolution Capital talks about the Rise of The Rest. He has evangelized investing in "the rest" – the regional areas outside the well known epicenters of industry, like Silicon Valley or New York. Bend, and Oregon more broadly, are but examples of regions that have not had access to the investment that other areas have seen. Yet, with an influx of people coming into the region and local artisans already established, there is a need for investment dollars to help stimulate these businesses. Technology is now at the center of this. Oregon, throughout its history, has been predominantly a blue collar industry state, going back to my time growing up and certainly well before that. Despite larger technology organizations such as Intel, HP, and Tektronix that established early presence in the state, there has been a void of a thriving entrepreneurial technology ecosystem and the necessary capital to help early-stage digital entrepreneurs. That is now changing, across the state. I believe it is our responsibility as a tech community to help support this evolution and to create additional economic opportunities for individuals that are already here – not simply serve those who may want to come.

Those of us in the technology industry can influence how our economy grows throughout Central Oregon and the broader regional ecosystem(s). I certainly take that responsibility to heart. There was an article last year in a local paper titled "loving Bend to death" and the headline itself forces questions on key issues that are complex. Yes, Bend and the region is a paradise – that’s why I moved here and why I'm raising my family here. But there are also significant challenges that we need to continuously address. We struggle with living-wage jobs (Bend's old tagline was "poverty with a view"). We have an affordable housing shortage across all economic income brackets. We struggle with our own drug addiction challenges (1 in 4 pregnancies in Central Oregon is to a drug affected mother). We face significant forest fires and water issues. Homelessness affects our own communities. A few years ago, a mill in Prineville (near Bend), where Facebook and Apple have located some of their data centers, was hit with an ice storm and collapsed the roof. That forced over 100 workers out of a job a week or so before Thanksgiving…with no place to go. That should be unacceptable to all of us. Like all communities, there is a lot of work to do and we need to continuously innovate. And as I work in the areas of artificial intelligence and automation technologies that are already affecting blue collar and white collar jobs throughout the world, it takes me back to my teenage years when automation was transforming the lumber mills. We need to be mindful that we are not just in a tech community, but one with deep rural roots that need to be nurtured and respected.

My partners and I regularly discuss how to be good stewards of the Oregon economy and environment and how we can make sure that Bend and the surrounding areas maintain all the attributes that drew us here in the first place. There are no simple, black and white answers, but there are roadmaps and visions we can offer. We must always keep top of mind that what we do and how we do it ALWAYS affects our community. Keeping Bend Bend is what drives me and and my partners every single day. We aren’t trying to build another Silicon Valley or simply become its bedroom community.  We are helping entrepreneurs who are focused on solving hard problems by providing the capital and professional guidance that translates into broader economic opportunities for individuals locally as well as those that may migrate here – that is what gets me up every morning and one of my core drivers.  After all, I have two boys now, and I don't want them swearing they will never come back to Oregon.