Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

The Last Durable Moat: Emotional Market Fit

Moats that depend on speed, optimization, pattern recognition, and scale are dying, thanks to AI, automation, and rampant access to everything all the time. Advantages based on trust, community, identity, and transformation have more staying power.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

How to stop being boring

The people who respond negatively aren’t your people anyway. That’s the benefit of being unedited: it filters your social world. The more you hide who you actually are, the more you attract people who like the persona, which means the more alone you feel even when surrounded by friends.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself

As these technologies become better at producing knowledge work – designing classes, writing papers, suggesting experiments and summarizing difficult texts – they don’t just make universities more productive. They risk hollowing out the ecosystem of learning and mentorship upon which these institutions are built, and on which they depend.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

How I’d answer some of the trickiest questions SF investors ask

I’ve had a tonne of messages from readers of my last post all wanting to know the same thing – so how do you answer those questions?! What are VCs looking for?

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

Why I don’t think AGI is imminent

This piece is a sketch of my own thinking about the boundary of transformer-based large language models and human-level cognition. I have an MS degree in Machine Learning from over a decade ago, and I don’t work in the field of AI currently, but I am well-read on the underlying research.

When it rains, it pours. Earlier today we had no local AI hackathons planned. Now we have two. And they’re both happening on February 28, 2026. The first one is OpenClaw. The next one is an Anthropic Claude Code Hackathon.