2025 What Makes Workplaces Work in 2025? The Future Is Here. $4.99 Q2 2025 | OregonBusiness.com HOW COMEDY COMPUTES A robot tries to learn what makes you LOL UP IN SMOKE An Oregon winery’s creative pivot
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2025 What Makes Workplaces Work in 2025? The Future Is Here. Q2 2025| OregonBusiness.com HOW COMEDY COMPUTES A robot tries to learn what makes you LOL UP IN SMOKE An Oregon winery’s creative pivot COVER PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: Jason E. Kaplan ⁄Contents⁄ Q2 2025 FEATURES 18 The Analytics of Comedy Jon the Robot, programmed by OSU roboticist Naomi Fitter, is learning what makes people laugh — and how to adjust to a tough room. 22 A Spirited Response The co-founder of Newberg’s Patricia Green Cellars describes his winery’s creative pivot after the 2020 wildfires nearly destroyed that year’s crop. 39 The Future Is Now Cover Story In 2021 we spoke to leaders across a variety of sectors — including health care, philanthropy and financial services — about the future of work. Now we’re revisiting the question. 42 100 Best Companies to Work For in Oregon in 2025 Cover Story Our annual ranking of the state’s top workforces REGULARS 04 Editor’s Letter 06 Newsfeed 10 Tactics Joyce Tsang, co-founder of Only Today, talks about the past, present and future of video production. 32 Powerlists Financial planners and advertising, marketing and public relations Subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter featuring the best of OregonBusiness.com, plus articles from our print publication. To sign up, go to OregonBusiness.com. BRAND STORIES 14 GNSA Manage your multistate workforce without succumbing to costly pitfalls. 30 Marsh McLennan Build your business’s resilience with agent Nolan Colvin’s partner-first approach to risk management. 36 Get There Oregon Rethinking the workplace and commuting to enhance overall employee experience JASON E. KAPLAN CHECK OUT THESE EXCLUSIVES ON OREGONBUSINESS.COM n Dispensaries Sue to Stop Oregon’s New Pot Labor Law — Critics say Measure 119 runs afoul of the National Labor Relations Act. n Packaging Giant Announces Oregon Expansion — The global aluminum products maker Ball closed a Seattle-area factory last year but wants to keep a toehold in the Northwest. n In Conversation: Jacen Greene, Homelessness Researcher, Portland State University — Greene discusses the just released 2024 homelessness study, which showed an uptick in the number of people in homeless shelters in Portland. n HP Nets $53M From CHIPS Act to Expand in Corvallis — The grant award from the Biden administration will fund 100 manufacturing positions at the tech company. Follow @OregonBusiness for breaking news, blogs and commentary. 18 62 Downtime Live, work and play with John Boyle, merchandising and marketing officer at Market of Choice 64 Policy Brief Andrew Fortgang, co-owner of restaurants Le Pigeon and Canard as well as Flor Wines, writes about how wine tariffs stand to reshape Portland’s dining scene. 2
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⁄From the Editor⁄ Weirded Out I SPRAINED MY ANKLE ON NEW YEAR’S DAY. I was out for a short walk after a cozy day spent mostly indoors, hit a patch of slightly uneven sidewalk and rolled my ankle. I’ve since learned that the precise way I rolled my ankle—with the foot twisting inward—is the most common kind of ankle sprain, and that ankle sprains are the most common injury seen in emergency rooms. I know what it’s like when a medical problem has doctors shaking their heads in bewilderment, and all things considered, I’d rather have a problem doctors can identify quickly and may even find a little boring. That was the good part. The bad part is that the thing still hurt. A lot. I spent the first couple weeks in January feeling a little sorry for myself, and I suspect I got a little weird. My first public outing after that ill-fated walk was, no joke, a repertory screening of Rear Window. Unlike the protagonist — a photojournalist whose broken leg has rendered him unable to do his job — I continued to work, though I moved my home work station to my office couch so I could keep my foot elevated. Also unlike that movie’s main character, I didn’t witness anything especially interesting when staring out the window —mostly just people smoking cigarettes, walking dogs or trying to parallel park. Even without an engrossing neighborhood drama to focus on, the intensified isolation during the darkest time of year put me in a pretty weird mood. My ankle is improving, slowly, and so is the weather. There’s still plenty to feel weird about; it seems like every few minutes I get a push notification about a national political development, roughly half of which are announcements that a drastic change announced just days ago has been blocked or rescinded. And there are things worth feeling good about, too. For “A Spirited Response” (p. 22), for example, Garrett Andrews spoke to the co-founder of Patricia Green Cellars, a Newberg-based winery whose 2020 crop was severely damaged by that year’s wildfires. But when life handed them smoke-damaged grapes, the owners decided to make…whiskey. It’s not an intuitive move—typically brandy, not whiskey, is made from grapes — but it seems to have worked for them. And for “The Analytics of Comedy” (p. 18), Melanie Sevcenko spoke to Naomi Fitter, a roboticist at Oregon State who also dabbles in comedy. She’s created a robot named Jon who does a little stand-up himself—and is learning how to gauge audience response and develop an appropriate reaction when a joke doesn’t land. And our cover story, the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Oregon (p. 42), is our annual list of companies that have dedicated themselves to workplace best practices. It’s always instructive—and heartening — to review the results of our annual survey, and find out what companies across the state do to attract and retain the best employees, keep them happy and help them improve. VOLUME 48 ⁄ NUMBER 2 OREGON BUSINESS (ISSN 02798190) is published quarterly by MEDIAmerica Inc. at 12570 S.W. 69th Ave., Suite 102, Portland OR 97223. Subscription inquiries should be directed to 503-445-8811. Subscription charge is $15.95 per year, $27.95 for two years in the USA. Single copies and back issues available at above address and at selected newsstands. The editor is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts. Copyright © 2025 by MEDIAmerica Inc. All rights reserved. All material is protected by copyright and must not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. Printed in Oregon. Periodicals Postage Paid at Portland, OR. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Oregon Business, 12570 S.W. 69th Ave., Suite 102, Portland OR 97223 EDITORIAL EDITOR Christen McCurdy christenm@oregonbusiness.com ART DIRECTOR Joan McGuire joanm@oregonbusiness.com STAFF WRITER Garrett Andrews garretta@oregonbusiness.com STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Jason E. Kaplan jasonk@oregonbusiness.com COPY EDITOR Morgan Stone CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Andrew Fortgang, Melanie Sevcenko PUBLISHING PUBLISHER Courtney Kutzman courtneyk@oregonbusiness.com EVENTS MANAGER Craig Peebles craigp@oregonbusiness.com ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Evan Morehouse evanm@mediamerica.net ADVERTISING AND PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Greta Hogenstad gretah@mediamerica.net DIGITAL PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Alison Kattleman alisonk@mediamerica.net PRESIDENT AND CEO Andrew A. Insinga CONTROLLER Bill Lee BOARD OF DIRECTORS CHAIRMAN André W. Iseli PRESIDENT Andrew A. Insinga SECRETARY William L. Mainwaring TREASURER Win McCormack 4
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ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT ●Private eyes. A man who delighted drivers with googly eyes placed surreptitiously on sculptures in the roundabouts of Bend came forward after widespread press attention. Nonprofit director Jeff Keith’s actions inspired copycat pranksters. ●Common practice. The Portland Thorns and the as-yet-unnamed future Portland WNBA team announced the development of a shared practice facility planned for a 12-acre space in Hillsboro formerly occupied by Nike. The $75 million, first-of-itskind project is expected to open for the Thorns in time for their season in fall 2026, and for the WNBA team, in time for its inaugural season in summer 2026. ●Rose Part Tu. The Oregon Zoo welcomed a new face in early February when Asian elephant Rose-Tu gave birth to a daughter, which staff have named Tula-Tu. EDUCATION ●Scholarship athlete. Former Portland Trail Blazer Damian Lillard established a scholarship program at Portland State University for students from his native East Bay, California. More than a dozen have so far been admitted to the program, which covers costs for housing, food, clothes, transportation and books in addition to tuition. ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT ●Guardin’ octopuses. Oregon could become the third state to ban octopus farming. Supporters of HB 2557, before the state Legislature this session, say the practice is cruel to the famously intelligent animals and bad for the environment. ●Driven to despair. Approximately 30 vehicles were involved in a pileup in whiteout conditions on Interstate 84 near Multnomah Falls during a mid-February snowstorm. FARMS AND FORESTS ●Out of the woods. Oregon Department of Forestry head Cal Mukumoto resigned in January, shortly before the Legislature convened and after months of bad headlines, including a $218 million budget shortfall, increased scrutiny of spending and two workplace investigations. ●Egg drop. Grocery stores are limiting egg purchases due to a nationwide shortage. An outbreak of avian flu has caused farmers around the country to kill millions of chickens, resulting in fewer available eggs and upward-spiking prices. MANUFACTURING ●Wine down. The three West Coast states saw declines in the number of wineries for the second year in a row, the latest sign of a wine-industry slowdown. Oregon led the way with a 5% drop, down to 846 wineries in 2024. to four years in prison for evading $45 million in taxes in what prosecutors called one of the largest tax-evasion conspiracies in Oregon history. Attorneys for the business manager for Check Cash Pacific Inc. say he was merely a dutiful son of parents who own the company. ●Futures market. Revived plans for the James Beard Public Market, Portland’s answer to Seattle’s Pike Place Market, include 38,000 square feet of space and a partial opening in fall. Lawmakers are considering putting $10 million in state lottery funds toward the project. NONPROFITS ●Doghouse plot. Guide Dogs for the Blind announced plans for a $28 million expansion near the group’s Clackamas County headquarters. The organization, which trains canine guides and pairs them with people who are blind or visually impaired, will build a 30,000-square-foot client services and community hub near Boring. TECH ●Critical mass timber. Oregon Institute of Technology plans to build a $35 million residence hall utilizing mass timber on its Klamath Falls campus. The four-story project will house approximately 500 students and demonstrate the latest in renewable construction methods. ●Family patterns. John Bishop, CEO of Pendleton Woolen Mills, announced plans to retire. He represents the fifth generation to run the Portland-based textile manufacturing company. RETAIL AND RESTAURANTS ●About face. An Oregon man sued Jacksons Food Stores for $50,000 for religious discrimination after he says he was rejected for a job due to a prominent face tattoo. The man’s mug is covered with blue “Celtic knot” patterns he says reflect his animist belief system. ●Cereal adapter. Bob’s Red Mill closed its flagship whole-grain store and cafe in Milwaukie, putting 44 people out of work. The organic-oats godfather, still one of the world’s largest whole-grain companies, will sell the iconic red building. ●Check you later. The general manager of a check-cashing business was sentenced ⁄Newsfeed⁄ Tula-Tu is ready to recive visitors at the Oregon Zoo. COURTESY OF OREGON ZOO 6
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Plus January 2024 | OregonBusiness.com A FAMILY AFFAIR The Suhs invest in Northeast Portland A BROKEN SYSTEM How do we fix glass recycling? Our Yearly Guide to Top Businesses & Nonprofits Leaders weigh in on what’s up next and where they’ve been July/August 2020 | OregonBusiness.com THE HEALTH CARE ISSUE ELDER CARE Nursing homes reexamine approach to services BUYING LOCAL Small farmers reap bene ts of supply-chain breakdown HOPE FOR HOSPITALITY McMenamin brothers plot future for pub chain Digital Doctor Telemedicine has transformed health care. But is it here to stay? Dr. Elizabeth Powers, Winding Waters page 33 July/August 2022 | OregonBusiness.com THE HEALTH CARE ISSUE IS BALA BACK ON ITS FEET? Footwear startup tries a heel-turn WHO CARES? Oregon’s caregiver shortage spirals ON CALL Nurses join the gig economy plus A Rebirthed Tradition More Oregonians seek midwife care $4.99 May 2019 | OregonBusiness.com TSUNAMI THREAT *][QVM[[M[ LQ ٺ MZ WV PW_ \W XZMXIZM A BAD REP +WUKI[\ PMIL [MMS[ JZIVL ZMLW PEOPLE BUSINESS ;\I\M TMVLMZ [MMS[ P]UIV \W]KP / / Broadband gives life to rural economies, but not all can get connected GOT DATA? Natasha Allen, welding instructor November / December 2021 | OregonBusiness.com The New Face of Manufacturing Can a new training center remake the industry? ALWAYS HUSTLING College athletes cash in PLAYING DEFENSE Can Oregon become a big defense-industry player? Plus THE MANUFACTURING ISSUE Prime The Manufacturing Issue BIG CHEESE The cream rises to the top in Oregon’s artisanal cheese industry GRÖN IN OREGON A cannabis company goes global THE CHIPS ARE IN Making room for the semiconductor industry A FOUNDATIONAL SHIFT OCF’s new director $4.99 November/December 2022 | OregonBusiness.com February 2020 | OregonBusiness.com THE PROFESSIONAL SERVICES ISSUE BEEFING UP BOOKKEEPING Accountants turn their hand to advising KEEPING IT LOCAL Why consultants are working less and ying fewer miles ROBO LAW How AI is changing the face of the legal profession The Great Disruption May 2020 | OregonBusiness.com HILLSBORO’S DATA CENTER BOOM Big Tax Breaks But Few Jobs PORTLAND’S NEW TECH WAVE Growth Pressures Sector’s Identity ADDICTION IN THE WORKPLACE The Cost of Not Helping Employees Coronavirus Pandemic Forces Adaptability and Innovation July/August 2019 | OregonBusiness.com The leaders retooling the next generation of coordinated care organizations State Health ERIC HUNTER CEO, CAREOREGON LAST ACTS /ZMMV J]ZQIT[ ÆW]ZQ[P BRAIN WAVES 6M_ TQNM NWZ WTL LZ]O[ OPEN SIGNAL <M[\QVO I]\WVWUW][ JZWILJIVL / / of Are you in? Of course you are. Subscribe Today. Get your All-Access Pass to OB Prime when you subscribe to Oregon Business. ■ Four quarters (one year) of Oregon Business print edition, plus the digital edition of Oregon Business, readable on any device. ■ Special monthly emails that may include bonus story content, event discounts, special research stories, and/or additional photos. OregonBusiness.com/subscribe $4.99 June 2019 | OregonBusiness.com The Brave New World of Green Businesses redefine the mantle of sustainability LOADED UP Electric grid gets a revamp CAP AND TRADE An investor’s perspective BEYOND RECYCLING Three portraits from the 100 Best / / PLUS EXCLUSIVE: Intel CTO on the future of tech February 2021 | OregonBusiness.com THE PROFESSIONAL SERVICES ISSUE Scotty Fenters, farmer FACING DROUGHT Searching for Solutions in the Klamath Basin BETTING ON THE FUTURE Port of Portland rethinks growth plans COLLABORATIVE SPACES New era of of ce design RUSH TO THE SCREEN Digital marketing dominates ad spend WHAT’S NEXT FOR COLUMBIA RIVER PORTS? Also RECLAIMING WILLAMETTE FALLS Tribes make new plans for site PIPE DREAMS Irrigation gets a makeover $4.99 January 2022 | OregonBusiness.com P OB2 W0O 2OE R2K Little Loans, Big Results What microfinance is doing for Oregon entrepreneurs April 2023 | OregonBusiness.com MONEY IN THE BANK How consumer banks are dealing with increased interest rates MAKE IT WORK Staffing trends in 2023 plus THE FINANCE ISSUE ELECTRIC MINDS How Oregon companies are using AI A FLUID SITUATION Will OSU’s new tech hub make the grade? A Special Rep t February 2024 | OregonBusiness.com THE TECHNOLOGY ISSUE
⁄Tactics⁄ You quit your corporate job in 2009. It seems like that was not a time to be doing that; not a lot of businesses were being launched at that time. We were young, and I don’t know if I would do it the same way now, but I don’t regret how we did it. I mean, 2008 was a bad year for the economy as a whole. To leave my very stable job that had a 401(k) and health insurance and a pension — you know, that word doesn’t even exist anymore, but it existed back then — to go quote-unquote be an artist was scary. It was scary and risky. But I think the way that I looked at it was, “You know what? What is riskier: staying in something that doesn’t make my soul feel alive, or trying something and seeing where that goes?” I felt like I would regret not trying. I would kick myself if, 30 years later, I was doing this thing, and I was like, “I wonder what would have happened if I just tried my hand at telling stories versus designing braces.” I decided to take a risk; invest in myself, in what I thought was possible; and I’m very thankful, very grateful that things worked out for us. I would have really, really regretted if I didn’t try. Joyce Tsang Zooms In In the thick of the Great Recession, Tsang left her job as an engineer to take wedding videos, beginning a journey that took her to the Super Bowl preshow and beyond. INTERVIEW BY CHRISTEN McCURDY In 2009 Joyce Tsang was working as an engineer at 3M, designing orthodontic products. It was the work she trained to do in college, and she was successful— she holds a couple of patents from that period. “The science part of it was great,” she says, but she never felt comfortable in the corporate work environment. She’d also always had a creative side, and working as an engineer wasn’t feeding it. So she pivoted to video, founding a production company, Only Today, with her husband, Ray. At first they shot on tape, but in the late 2000s, digital single-lens reflex cameras became able to shoot video, greatly improving the quality of digital video — and the cost and speed of producing it. Joyce says Ray, who worked in finance at the time, “kind of dared me” to quit her job to pursue a creative career. He followed suit, reasoning that if the company failed, they could go back to their old careers. The Tsangs started out shooting wedding videos for friends, then expanded to sports work, commercials and branded content, as well as some documentary work — including a short film that showed during the 2024 Super Bowl, and one of the pre-game teasers. Though it’s been more than 10 years since the Tsangs were asking friends if they could shoot their weddings for free, Joyce says they still get most of their work through word of mouth. Commercial work isn’t off the table, but “it’s the human stories that really excite us,” she says. In January Oregon Business spoke with Joyce about her start in the business and how video production has evolved in recent years, as well as what’s next for the company. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 10
When you launched the business, were you in Portland? No, we were in L.A. My husband and I both grew up in the suburbs of L.A. And despite L.A. being, obviously, a huge mecca for video and whatnot, we gravitated elsewhere. We’ve been in Portland now for a long time. I love it here. People are always like, “When are you moving back?” And I’m like, “I’m not moving. We’ll come back and visit.” But yeah, I think the Pacific Northwest is home. JASON E. KAPLAN Tell me about some of those first jobs that you were doing, wedding jobs. How did you market yourself? How did you find people? We were at that age when we had just gotten married, and we knew a lot of other people who were getting married. So it wasn’t terribly difficult to convince a friend or a friend of a friend, to be like, “Hey, you know, I really want to try this thing,” to do it for free or for $500 and just kind of get our foot in the door. I’d never had to do sales before; I was an engineer. It was subscribing to this whole 10,000-hours thing, like you’ve got to get enough reps to know what you’re doing and just keep shooting and keep refining that. I taught myself how to edit using Final Cut 7 off YouTube, back when YouTube didn’t have what it has now. We both took workshops and we talked to people who were doing things that we wanted to do. When we started off, it was a free wedding, and then it was a $500 wedding, and then a $2,000 wedding, and then in about a year — a year and three months, I think — we got up to a $10 or $12,000 wedding, doing photo and video very early on. I look back sometimes on convincing people to give us [an opportunity] so we would have 10 weddings under our belt. But we just love making images and telling stories with those images. And I just can’t see myself not doing that now. If you told me, “Why don’t you go back to being an engineer?” I’m just not even thinking about that. What are some of the things that you’ve worked on more recently? I know you had a couple of short films that were shown around the Super Bowl.? For the 2024 Super Bowl, we did a couple of big things: We did the opening tease, which plays right before kickoff, with players and families. It wasn’t just us; it was a large team from the network and other shooters. Then we also did a short film that was kind of like a biopic narrative, but based on the true story of the Oakland Raiders. So we still do some sports stuff here and there. We mostly do branded content now. We’ve done full-blown commercial work, but a lot of it is kind of what I call human-centric, documentary-style storytelling that has a brand wrapped around it. We’ll often do things about a person who uses a product, but in a way where there’s a personal story behind that, and we leverage our event and documentary background to work with them where we’re telling their story authentically and beautifully, in a way that’s true to them. It’s different from a commercial, where you have actors and a script; what we do is kind of interview-based storytelling and day-inthe-life coverage of what they do, how they do it and why they do it. That’s probably one of my favorite parts about what we do, just being able to meet people, learn from them, learn about them, learn about their cultures. It feels silly sometimes to call it a job. I’m grateful that that’s what we get to do so often, just to get a glimpse of people’s lives and be able to share that more widely with the world through storytelling, through video. What are your thoughts moving into 2025? I don’t know. It’s still early. Hopefully we refocus on our company and our clients, like, what are the stories that we want to tell? What are the stories that are interesting to people? There are things that we naturally gravitate toward, but it’s kind of an unknown right now. 2025 feels a little less defined than some other years. I don’t know if you’re getting that sense from other businesses too, but it feels like it’s a little nebulous. I’m hearing that there’s some anxiety in ad and marketing spaces, in particular; people don’t know how much they want to spend because they don’t know what the economy is going to look like. There’s also just conflicting and confusing feedback from clients. There’s one train where everybody wants TikTok-style, short-form stuff. Then some people will be like, “Now it’s the long-form YouTube stuff; everybody wants more in-depth storytelling.” In recent years it feels like long-form documentary storytelling has made its way into streaming and all that. It’s really about trying to understand, where does the market want to go now? Do you want the short-form stuff or the long-form stuff? We’ve done plenty of both; we’re trying to kind of understand what the market needs are. It’s an ever-changing thing. 11
14 BRAND STORY PRODUCED BY THE OREGON BUSINESS MARKETING DEPARTMENT BY NATALIA HURT I n today’s competition for talent, multi-state employment has emerged as a winning strategy, albeit a challenging one. For many companies, the promise of deeper talent pools simply outweighs the risks. Great Northern Staff Administrators (GNSA) helps Oregon’s employers successfully manage their multi-state workforces without succumbing to costly pitfalls. After years of experience, GNSA knows the common mistakes and missed opportunities it can expect to find within organizations of all sizes. Since these issues revolve around payroll taxes, multi-state compliance, employee benefits and remote employee engagement, consequences can prove significant: A loss of employee engagement affects service quality, reputation, talent acquisition and more. Issues with payroll, compliance and benefits lead to expensive penalties and unhappy employees. Rather than a siloed customer service model built around support tickets and individual representatives, GNSA uses a team-based approach when partnering with clients. It begins with an in-depth assessment of the business in order to pinpoint and maximize the value that its HCM solutions and services can provide, while also identifying challenges and gaps in compliance. According to GNSA President Katharina Fink, multi-state employee strategies are inherently difficult to execute: “When we take on a new multi-state client, we know that, in most cases, we are going to find some issues. They often don’t fully understand what they need to do, because it’s complicated and often new ground for them. Have they registered their busiGNSA helps businesses gain long-term scalability while mitigating risk. Multistate Employment Models: Unlocking the Benefits Without the Risks
15 BRAND STORY ness correctly? Have they set up appropriate policies? Are they withholding taxes properly? Every state is different. Oklahoma has two types of payroll taxes. New York has 15.” Whether setting companies up with nationwide insurance partners or aligning them with multiple state labor laws and tax requirements, GNSA gives organizations the knowledge and ability to monitor, manage and scale every aspect of their employee management with confidence. “Navigating the complexity of multi-state registrations can be difficult at its simplest,” echoes Renee Kempka, Finance and Administration Director at a multi-state organization that is one of GNSA’s many multi-state clients. “When you layer the various state and city tax types and districts, it can be mind-boggling. As our company has grown in staff size and locations, GNSA’s staff have been most helpful with the registration, tax setup, quarterly tax payments and various other processes. To date, we have worked with 40 different state tax registrations, and process payroll in all 50 states.” Digitalization brings scalability, regardless of whether that means expanding into five states or 25. With access to a geospatial tax engine based on the employees’ addresses, organizations can automatically pinpoint the federal, state and local tax and benefit obligations for each person on their payroll. “I especially appreciated the adjustment made to employees who work in more than one state,” adds another GNSA client Cindy Harkey, Payroll & Benefits Specialist. “GNSA was able to add in a drop-down box within the payroll processing under each employee, so I can select which state they were working in for that pay cycle. This helps direct the taxes and workers’ compensation information when we run reports after each payroll and annually. The first year before we set that up, I had to manually separate earnings. This was a godsend!” However, not only are these organizations left to make sense of complex tax and benefit obligations, but now must find a way to continue training, engaging and retaining their employees remotely. Successful out-of-state recruitment, after all, is just half of the equation. The real test is successful retention. Due to Covid-19, many employers unwittingly transitioned to a multi-state model as workers left the office, sometimes returning to a different home state. Top sectors, such as professional services, technical services, finance and insurance, saw their remote workforces grow from 17 percent in 2019 to 39 percent in 2021 (American Community Survey and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). The answer to effective employee engagement in a remote world? The right digital technologies and strategies. “For new employees who are used to being in an office, we still have to create that feeling of belonging. We help clients solve that. Performance management and onboarding is all evolving, and that’s where we really empower them,” Fink explains. “Younger generations want an environment where they’re recognized. They are almost craving that family connection at work.” Curating technologies and carrying out large-scale software deployment is a daunting task for any organization, especially one unfamiliar with digital processes. By facilitating and supporting the adoption of cutting-edge human capital management (HCM) technologies, GNSA helps them cut costs, improve organization-wide visibility, get compliant and achieve the agility and resilience needed to scale and adapt to a rapidly changing world. And as a digital innovation partner, GNSA works with organizations to modernize and digitalize their processes, which, surprisingly, are often still paper-based. Beyond risk management and compliance, an HCM platform offers transformative employee engagement channels that meet changing expectations. Via one platform, employers can measure performance, maintain open channels of communication and boost engagement, for example with birthday and workplace anniversary popups. Importantly, they can also facilitate trainings and certifications. With industry-leading technologies, expertise and customer service, GNSA wants to help Oregon’s multi-state employers avoid risks and penalties, but it also sees a larger opportunity: “We want to digitalize, streamline and automate their back office so that they can focus on their core business,” Fink concludes. “If they see an opportunity, we want them to be able to go for it!”n GNSA president Katharina Fink
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Roboticist Naomi Fitter performs stand-up comedy with a small humanoid robot to gather data on human-machine interactions. In a typical black-box performance space, a 2-foot humanoid robot stands on a square IKEA end table. In this YouTube video, a human arm from the edge of the frame holds a microphone to the robot’s smooth shiny head. “Hello, I am Jon,” he says and waves his small plastic arm, the joints at his shoulder and elbow whirring. “Of course, that is not my real name, but humans have trouble pronouncing: [the sound of mid-’90s dial-up internet].” The off-screen audience erupts into delighted giggles. This is just one of many zingers performed by stand-up comedian and research tool Jon the Robot, a creation of assistant professor Naomi Fitter in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. Having graced many stages up and down the West Coast, Jon’s origin story begins some eight years earlier in Los Angeles, a city where anyone (even an android) might dream of making it big. At the time, Fitter was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California but had already been performing stand-up for years. Living in the epicenter of the entertainment world was an opportunity to fuse her passion for comedy with the research she was already conducting in social robotics and human-robot interactions. At a time when Hollywood and its talent pool are fiercely fighting the rise of AI in creativity, researchers like Fitter see humor as a means to connect robots with humans in ways beyond pure amusement. “Robots with a good sense of humor represent a pathway to helping technology successfully ‘read the room,’ in a wide range of scenarios,” Fitter tells Oregon Business. “This ability can allow new technologies to better understand their users and perhaps even better connect with them.” Jon, however, is not the first robot comedian to grace the public stage. Heather Knight, Fitter’s colleague at Oregon State and an assistant professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, had been working at the intersection of robot and comedy some years before Fitter dived in. These days Knight leads a robot theater company called Marilyn Monrobot, which features performances by her invention Ginger the Robot. While both Ginger and Jon are NAO robots — which are humanoid and programmable — Fitter identified some unchartered territory in how technology might be harnessed in robot comedy, which differs from her predecessors. “I’d say that with my system setup, I focused more on giving the robot the ability to sense things and make decisions in the way I do,” Fitter explains. “I was shooting more for a robot comedy performance that could The Analytics of Comedy BY MELANIE SEVCENKO PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN 18
almost parallel or contend with expert human comedians.” So in 2018, Jon the Robot made his stand-up comedy debut at an outdoor open mic in Los Angeles. Two years later, Jon and Fitter performed 22 shows in the greater L.A. area to gather data on how the comedic timing of a robot can impact its success among audiences. It turns out robots are funnier when they let the audience react to a joke. Although Jon’s jokes are written by Fitter and preprogrammed in a particular order to maximize comedic effect — punctuated by the small gesticulations he makes with his arms and hands — the small robot is considered autonomous because he makes use of adaptive timing. In other words, he can “read the room” by listening to the audience’s response, whether it’s applause or laughter, before he moves on to the next joke. He can also deploy machine-learning tactics in decision making, which involves adding a programmed “tag” following a joke, based on whether he gauges a negative or positive response from the audience. For instance, if Jon senses that a joke was successful, he might offer the quip: “Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to solve inverse kinematics equations to pick up a cup and then you get ‘Error 453, no solution found’? Don’t you hate that?” It means he’s got the audience on his side. Conversely, he might add: “Not a lot of robots in the crowd, I guess. That joke kills at Best Buy” if the crowd falls flat. As a stand-up comedian herself, Fitter says she’s been fascinated by how objective she can be when assessing the robot’s comedy wins and fails. “When I try to do this with my human comedy, like look at if a particular joke or different styles of jokes succeed or fail, it’s kind of excruciating,” says Fitter. “But with the robot, you can cue up [the performance] and it’s less risky than in the moment. Then you can get some full objective data on what tactics or what material is making what kind of impact, for better or worse.” Kory Mathewson agrees. He’s a senior research scientist with Google DeepMind, whose work focuses on human and machine creative collaborations. “Artificial intelligence can help us decode, analyze and understand humor,” says Mathewson. “This can lead to more sophisticated and personalized comedic experiences.” So what, exactly, goes into writing from a robot’s comedic perspective? As someone with comedy training and stand-up experience, Fitter says character and world-building exercises were really the launching point. “What is romance for a robot? What’s grief for a robot? What’s drugs for a robot?” Fitter asked herself. “So when I was starting to write, I tried to think about what are the most hack jokes that humans tell, and then I kind of mapped them to the robot’s perspective.” As gender disparity in professional comedy is still a weighted issue, Fitter explains that her choice to make Jon male-presenting was intentional but not without careful consideration. The robot was modeled after a typical Silicon Valley engineer, in regard to his monotone humanoid voice and commonplace name. While she did run tests with a female-presenting voice, Fitter found that it sounded almost “too human-like” and wanted to retain the robotic quality of the small performer. Moreover, in a study with university students, Fitter was relieved to conclude that “when you do modulate the gender presentation of the voice, there wasn’t a significant decline [in enthusiasm] that we could identify.” Roboticist and researcher Naomi Fitter with Jon the Robot Naomi Fitter and Jon perform standup in Corvallis. 19
Nuestro negocio es tuyo Kathryn Lopez, Associate Director Adventures in Spanish Hacer conexiones de negocios Portland is still a small town and relationships matter here. The Chamber hosts 80+ events each year, giving your company access to Portland’s most influential business leaders. LEARN MORE seaside is for Bringing something back from the beach EXECUTION: SEASIDE HEIRLOOM FILE NAME: seaside_ORbusiness_4.625 x 4.875_heirloom.indd PUB: Oregon Business FINAL SIZE: 4.625" wide x 4.875" tall seasideOR.com @visitseasideOR While Jon the Robot has settled into his identity, his technological developments are still ongoing. For instance, Fitter is considering upping Jon’s “snarkiness” levels in an experiment to win back the audience if they respond more negatively to a joke, or perhaps when the reaction from the crowd is lukewarm. She’s curious if maybe a playful tease or chide can bring them onboard. Fitter is also looking at what’s called “computer vision,” which would involve the robot reading facial expressions after the delivery of a joke. While technologies like that do exist, they’re often not yet mature enough to be tested in the wild (i.e., the comedy club). “We haven’t hit the nail on the head yet for how to adapt it without it being sort of equal parts creepy and entertaining,” says Fitter. The roboticist is also curious about larger language models. For example, could Jon ad- lib a joke about Chicago while performing in Chicago? “The overall processing takes quite some amount of time. So using that in comedy performance in split seconds could be really impactful,” she explains. “We haven’t quite figured it out, but we’re looking into it.” For now, Jon and Fitter have been busy playing the comedy circuit, to a generally positive reception. Fitter does recall one performance, however, in Riverside, California, where the little one was met with slight hostility. “The robot made a joke about taking people’s jobs in a setting where that’s more of a sensitive topic, so I was a little nervous for that one,” says Fitter. In the end, “the repertoire banter actually won the crowd over. So that’s one of my crowning achievements.” “Comedy can be can be tough,” she continues. “It’s not guaranteed that, even in the ideal setting, people will respond to your performance. So I usually like to say the robot performs at a similar level to its human counterparts in any given show, and that makes me pretty proud of the little guy.” For Mathewson, Fitter’s work is making a difference in its own way. “Naomi and Jon are bridging the gap between human and machine intelligence through humor, which creates engaging and enjoyable interactions in their performance,” he says. “Laughter is powerful…. Robots that can make us laugh open new possibilities for connection and interaction.” Last summer the human-robot duo tied for fourth place at Portland’s first annual Comedy Pageant, winning a special prize awarded by the judge. They also performed at the Crow in Los Angeles, sharing the bill with comedian Aparna Nancherla, and headlined at the Comedy Loft in Washington, D.C. 20
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The 2020 wildfires devastated Oregon’s wineries. A Newberg winery turned its spoiled grapes into stronger stuff — but they say another bad fire season will wipe them out. Starting on Sept. 7, 2020, the smoke poured into the fertile Willamette Valley: a toxic mix of heavy gases, soot, metals and other pollutants that covered and infiltrated all it touched. A historic windstorm had combined with hot, dry conditions to fuel five simultaneous “megafires” around Oregon. More than a million acres burned in only a few days. Wine grapes are especially susceptible to smoke. The compounds in it bind to sugar molecules during fermentation, resulting in bitter, undrinkable wine. But the really sinister thing about smoke and grapes, according to Jim Anderson, owner of Patricia Green Cellars in Newberg, is that the level of damage isn’t known until fermentation. A day after the fires began in 2020, Anderson and his team started picking what they could. He had contracts to fulfill — agreements that made no exception for smoke damage. Weeks later, after fermentation, he assessed what he had. About half that year’s vintage could be salvaged. He’d need to use every winemaking trick he knew and sell the result on his second label for half the price of a standard Patty Green pinot. But the remainder of the 2020 vintage—around 12,000 gallons of pinot noir — was, to his mind, ruined. “Anything picked after the 10th of September was pretty much shot in some way,” he tells Oregon Business. A SPIRITED RESPONSE BY GARRETT ANDREWS PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN Patricia Green Cellars owner and co-founder Jim Anderson 22
“Some of it was just hell on wheels.” Wildfire smoke from 2020 cost the wine industry $3 billion, according to a 2021 estimate published by the market research firm bw166. Patricia Green Cellars met the moment with a creative pivot that helped the business claw back some revenue and establish lines of two drinks Anderson never imagined he’d produce: brandy and whiskey. “I don’t like sweet things that much in general,” Anderson says. “I drink dry wines. I make dry wines. So to have a whiskey that fits in with that palette, that profile of things that I like, has kind of turned me off to other American whiskeys.” Winemakers are loath to toss any amount of product unless it’s totally unsalvageable. In Europe and California, producers sometimes sell smoke-tainted wine to major manufacturers to be blended into large batches. It can be used in fertilizer or made into food products, like red wine vinegar or the pinot barbecue sauce Durant Vineyards in Dayton made from 2020 smoke-spoiled grapes. Another option is to distill spoiled wine into liquor. Brandy, in fact, is typically made by distilling wine. A friend’s attempt to turn smoked wine into brandy had turned Anderson’s stomach with one taste; it seemed to amplify the smoke rather than obscure it, he says. But Anderson eventually let distiller Lynsee Sardell give it a go. Sardell, who is based in Forest Grove, has a decidedly hands-on, “analog” approach to running a still — no timers or electronic equipment. When Sardell returned with a brandy a week later, Anderson was floored. It was clean, buttery, richly textured — far from the overly sweet, butterscotchy concoctions often sold in the U.S. Anderson was now sold on brandy, but he knew producing thousands of gallons of the stuff would create another overstock problem. Sardell had another idea. As she explains, all whiskey needs two things: something sweet, often corn, that can be distilled; and something to make it taste good, typically rye or barley. Starting in 2021, Patricia Green Cellars began purchasing heritage strains of barley and rye from small farms in Oregon to be malted and distilled. The individual grain distillates were combined with small amounts of the smoked brandy to create a hybrid “grain and grape” whiskey. “I told Jim, we can make something that’s really delicious and easy to drink,” Sardell says. “And I gave him every reason to say no to me. I told him, ‘OK, this is the coolest route, but it’s also the most difficult route.’ And he was like, ‘Yep, let’s do it.’” In 2022 the Patricia Green team purchased a distillery in Forest Grove to be operated by Sardell. Today Patricia Green ages spirits in repurposed French oak wine barrels. Current production is around 300 cases with a capacity of around 1,000 (compared to 15,000 to 20,000 cases of wine produced annually by the winery). Fortified Wine The smoke problem isn’t new to the wine industry, and Patricia Green Cellars is far from the only Oregon winery hit hard by 2020 fires. Oregon’s more than 1,100 wineries and vineyards, scattered across a large and complex viticultural geography, each have a different experience every wildfire season. But because the smoke problem is so far-reaching, there’s ample energy in the industry to prepare for and remediate smoke damage, according to a spokesperson for the Oregon Wine Board. Researchers at a number of West Coast institutions are committed to helping the industry face smoke events. Washington State University researchers implemented a system of smoke detectors in Yakima Valley wine country. And with partial funding from the USDA, Oregon State University is engaged in a number of smoke-related projects in the areas of viticulture, food science and wine chemistry. For one, OSU researchers are working on a spray-on coating to mitigate smoke- volatile phenols. Viticulturist Alec Levin and his team analyze samples at OSU’s Smoke, Barrels of whiskey age in a building on the winery grounds. Distiller Lynsee Sardell 23
Wine and Grapes Analytical Chemistry Lab in Corvallis, which provides chemical analysis for wine growers around the state. As a result of 2020, many wineries now keep smoke contracts with their fruit producers. They’ve also altered their library practices. Maintaining a stocked cellar, or wine library, is common in commercial winemaking as a form of insurance for unforeseen events. Since 2020, many Oregon wineries have elected to sell from the libraries due to a shortage of current- vintage wines. Others have begun selling from 2021 and 2022 earlier than planned. Wineries in this camp, including Patricia Green, now operate on the edge with diminished reserves to draw from in the event of another 2020. Though the winds of 2020 were historic, attorney Dustin Dow says the 2020 fire season was no accident of nature. To date, Portland-based power company PacifiCorp has settled more than 1,500 claims relating to the 2020 wildfires for more than $1 billion. Patricia Green Cellars is among the 34 plaintiffs in the so-called Sokol Blosser lawsuit — named for the Dayton winery serving as lead plaintiff. With a court date set for November, the lawsuit is the first of five pending mass tort cases brought by Dow’s Ohio firm, BakerHostetler, scheduled to go to trial. PacifiCorp is accused of leaving power lines energized ahead of the Labor Day wind event despite strong warnings from public officials and even the company’s own forecasters. “This wasn’t just failing to de-energize the power lines,” Dow says. “It was failing to de-energize power lines after being warned by the state fire chief that if they left their lines energized, it was going to start fires. And that’s exactly what happened.” A spokesman for PacifiCorp said the company has a “robust” wildfire mitigation plan approved by the Oregon Public Utility Commission. “PacifiCorp has added in-house meteorologists, installed hundreds of weather stations that monitor fire conditions in real time, and continues to improve its ability to provide safe, reliable power to Oregon customers,” writes PacifiCorp spokesman Simon Gutierrez. Guiding Spirits On a brisk afternoon in early January, Jim Anderson read news updates as he prepared research forms to send to his lawyer in his ongoing case with PacifiCorp. As if poring over financials from the past four years wasn’t enough to put him in a bad mood, catastrophic wildfires were ravaging Los Angeles. It seems to Anderson that with each fire season since 2020, his winery has barely escaped disaster. But he knows luck eventually runs out. A fire could burn in Canada and all it would take to shut him down is a shift in the wind. “If another 2020 comes along, we’d be out of business,” Anderson says. “The whiskey thing is great, but we couldn’t survive on it. I mean, we lost maybe 90% in 2020, and we’re still recovering financially from it. So I’m extremely nervous.” Diversifying beyond wine has been a learning experience for both Sardell and the team at Patricia Green Cellars. Despite initial losses, they’ve succeeded in making unique whiskey, including rye and barley varieties, and often hear favorable reviews from customers. To say a product is Oregon-made isn’t unique, but few whiskeys can claim to be made here entirely — using only Oregon-grown ingredients and local labor. A dirty secret in the industry is how many Oregon distilleries simply bottle and repackage whiskey made elsewhere, Sardell says. These efforts to stay afloat since 2020 are in keeping with the real-life Patricia Green’s approach to winemaking. The winery’s namesake died in 2017 at 62 of an apparent stroke at her cabin near Roseburg. Patty Green was one of the state’s first female winery owners, and those who remember her say she was always willing to try new things. They think the distillery project would have been right up her alley. Jim and Patty met in the early 1990s when both worked at Torii Mor Winery in Dundee. In 2000 they decided to go into business together, opening their own winery on 52 acres in the Ribbon Ridge region. When it came time to give the place a name, they decided they wanted a simple name with a simple story behind it. “It came down to the wire,” recalls longtime Patricia Green winemaker Matt Russell, repeating that simple story. “They sat around the table and Jim was like, ‘Look, you’re the only marketable person here.’” Anderson sees Green’s legacy alive in the person of Lynsee Sardell, one of the few women to crack into the region’s distilling boys’ club. Anderson says Green was at least his equal in winemaking, though unwitting guests would often ask her if they could speak with the owner or the manager. Committed to sustainability and imbued with a DIY sensibility, Green also never threw anything away. She kept pieces of old equipment in bags she’d store all around the property. After she died, those bags remained. One day years later, at a critical stage of wine production, power at the winery went out suddenly. Panic started to set in until Russell had a thought. He looked up and down the property until he found it: a plastic bag containing old fuses, labeled in Green’s distinctive handwriting. “She saved our butts that day,” Russell says. “It’s cool she still helps us out.” Longime Patricia Green winemaker Matt Russell Patricia Green Cellars is among the 34 plaintiffs in the socalled Sokol Blosser lawsuit — named for the Dayton winery serving as lead plaintiff. 24
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