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

Remember Ray King…? What about AboutUs…? Yeah. That’s a deep cut. From way back. And while Ray may not be as prevalent in the startup community as he once was, his current startup pursuit is going exceptionally well: Porkbun now manages more than 4 million domain names.

You worked the booth for three days. You had a number of the good conversation — especially the one where that one potential customer tells you exactly what is blocking the deal — and then it evaporates somewhere between teardown and the follow-up. The badge scans land in your CRM with names, maybe titles, and literally nothing else. Your notes are illegible by the flight home. What a waste. If only you had a means of capturing that critical information in real time.

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

Trump AI framework excludes open AI models

The AI framework reviewed on Tuesday defines a covered frontier model as closed-source with state-of-the-art capabilities and national security risks, multiple sources briefed on meetings held at the White House said.

Another Oregon State University spinout story. If you’ve ever wondered where Oregon’s chip-industry startups keep coming from, Oregon State just shared their contributions. Five semiconductor companies that spun out of OSU labs and now run R&D at ATAMI, the university’s Advanced Technology and Manufacturing Institute — Amorphyx, Inpria, nexTC, Phosio, and Valliscor.

An Oregon startup just became a key ingredient in a California solar manufacturer’s production line. Tandem PV, a maker of high-efficiency tandem solar panels, has acquired nexTC Corporation, an Oregon company that spun out of Oregon State University in 2018 to commercialize a new kind of transparent coating for solar cells.

Sometimes, it’s just easier for me to blather on about something I’ve read than write about something I’ve read. But every so often, it’s important to do both. So I wanted to make sure that you had access to a recent Medium post from Josh Carter that describes — 20 min read time in depth — his assessment of Portland’s startup problems. And where we could be doing better.

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

Waxy Refresh: Supercut.org – Waxy.org

Today’s refresh is Supercut.org, a site I first launched in 2011 as part of Seven on Seven with Michael Bell-Smith, and redesigned later that year as a browsable archive of every supercut I could find.

Portland-based Tellagence has shipped a new feature they’re calling Tellagence Discover, a contextual-intelligence platform that is now generally available. What’s new…? It reads the “why” behind shifting customer conversations. Not just the “what.”