A pair of Portland events will return next year and are taking applications for founders to pitch their ideas or projects. One is an annual return, and the other aims to fill a gap that has emerged as people are hungry for events.
PitchBlack has become an important annual celebration of the Black community and its businesses and entrepreneurs. Demolicious was a semi-regular event that started in 2008 but had faded prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Demolicious is slated for Jan. 17 at 5 p.m. at Upstart Collective, 107 S.E. Washington St.
The event is a pitch competition but also a community gathering. Participants pitch ideas, projects or even an early startup pitch to an audience. The audience votes on pitches and selects a winner, who gets the Demolicious Championship Belt to keep until the next event.
Organizer Josh Carter had tried to bring the event back in 2022 but found people weren’t quite ready. This time, Carter is planning to make Demolicious a monthly event so that even if it starts slow it can build momentum. He’s also hosting it at Upstart Collective, a coworking space he helped organize and which has started hosting a variety of events.
“The feedback I keep getting from founders is that there aren’t many places for them to pitch,” he said. This is a venue designed for general pitching and not tied to any prizes or themes, and the monthly cadence could fill a gap as other previous events and meetups have not returned since the pandemic.
“(I’m) hoping that we can get a small handful (of pitchers) at least for the first one. I know it’s going to take time to build this event back up to what it was in the past,” Carter said. “With Covid we have a lot of new people in the ecosystem that have no clue what Demolicious was or what it meant.”
He also pointed to the success of this year's PitchBlack event and the recent Pitch Latino, both of which filled their spaces.
Applications to pitch are available online. And Carter notes that “applying” is mostly a formality for logistics and organization. There isn’t a competition to get in.
PitchBlack is returning Feb. 7 at the Reser Center for the Performing Arts in Beaverton. The application deadline is Dec. 12.
This is the first year since the first Pitch Black, in 2015, that has an application, said organizer Stephen Green. Also this year, he and co-organizer Mitch Daugherty have an advisory committee for the event.
Green has been organizing and growing this event over the years. He thought it would be a temporary event that would be taken over by other organizations or groups, but that hasn’t happened.
“Ultimately, as much as I want to see the systems and groups change to see Black and Latine founders as key drivers of our city and state’s future growth, I don’t do this for that,” he said. “I do it because I know what it means for my kids to see people who look like them betting on themselves and building companies.”
Leading up to the event, Green noted there will be a focus on showing what alumni from past years are up to, a podcast is slated to launch and “an ongoing push for the community to support Black businesses in the region.”
Last year’s winner was Creative Homies, founded by Cyrus Coleman and Adewale (Wale) Agboola. The two have purchased the Horizon Enterprise Building in Old Town to house a multi-story "creative center for the BIPOC community."
