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Silicon Florist links arrangement for September 14, 2026

Rick Turoczy on September 14, 2026

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

Stripe Hackathon · Luma

We’re teaming up with Stripe for a one-day hackathon where teams build payments-flavored products powered by Claude. Think AI agents that can check out a cart, reconcile an invoice, or route a payout — the kind of thing that’s genuinely hard to build well and genuinely fun to demo.

‘You cannot fund compassion from an empty treasury’: Seattle Chamber CEO frames economic growth as a civic imperative – GeekWire

Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce CEO Joe Nguyen delivered a direct message to regional leaders at the organization’s 144th annual meeting on Thursday: Seattle’s progressive social goals cannot exist without a thriving employer base.

Revant Optics names new CEO as founder Jason Bolt steps down – Portland Business Journal

Sixteen years after starting Revant Optics and three years after selling the company to a Canadian investor, Jason Bolt is handing over the CEO job to someone new.

Pitch Willamette 2026 Applications Close Sept. 14

The competition is open to seed-stage companies with a working product or clear evidence of customer demand, a defined capital raise and plans to grow beyond the region.

(2016) Continuing the conversation about early stage investment in the Portland startup community

Last week, I shared a post written by a Portland founder, recounting his experience while working to raise early stage capital, here in Portland. The post immediately sparked a conversation among Portland founders. And soon, Portland investors joined the conversation, as well.

Mark Zuckerberg – Colossus

Karen looks at me and smiles, which girds me to insist again on the question I came here to ask. What is it like for one of the most powerful men in human history—who for better or worse has, by age 42, secured a place in the books that’ll be written about his era for centuries after his death—to be your child?

Humanist AI Code of Conduct | Microsoft AI

It summarizes our approach to training and operating them, following a set of design principles we call Humanist AI. This document, and our approach more generally, is still under development so we are not using it to train our models today. Instead, we’re sharing it broadly for public consultation. We’ll take feedback, iterate on it, and publish a revised version toward the end of the year, which we’ll use to guide our model development in 2027 and beyond.

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Christine Drazan pivots from partisan attacks to personal story in Oregon governor’s race – oregonlive.com

With weeks left until the November general election, Drazan has shifted away from partisan attacks and conservative talking points and instead emphasized her life story and connection to everyday Oregonians, regardless of party.

Join us this Wednesday for In Dialogue with AI: Demystifying AI

This Wednesday, September 16, we kick off In Dialogue with AI with Roberto Santiago, an applied AI researcher whose work traces back thirty-five years to Paul Werbos, the inventor of backpropagation through time. This isn’t a technical talk, it’s an invitation to look at AI plainly, together. No background required, bring whatever you already think.

An Interview with Queso Queso | Portland Monthly

The voice behind the mask is young. I guess early twenties. Let Reddit figure it out, he jokes. He says he grew up in pregentrified North Portland, the son of Guatemalan parents busy with multiple jobs. Microwaved quesadillas were a frequent “struggle meal” of his childhood. That’s where the name comes from. “Let’s keep that a secret” was his answer to the rest of my biographical questions, “part of the Queso Queso mythology.”

Dario Amodei — We Must Pace the Frontier

But like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. I’ve written a lot about them too. They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute.

Portland data center planned inside five stories of high-rise, records show – oregonlive.com

As Portland spins its wheel trying to lure workers back downtown, a Silicon Valley tech company plans to convert five floors of an office building into data center space.

Weekly Review: Enough Is a Number – by Sam Keen

Hello again, and thanks for opening Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers. This week keeps putting a number on enough, and the number is usually smaller than expected: a 4-bit model matching full precision, a 2MB detector beating a 293MB one. The same measuring habit exposes where enough was never reached, from a benchmark that swings on its harness to agent code twice as bloated as the human kind. Measure what you actually get, then size the spend to match.

The Era of Compounding Capital – by Meltem Demirors

A company that could never borrow $100M on attractive terms may be able to raise $100M of equity at a $1B valuation. At sufficiently high valuations, dilution becomes remarkably inexpensive relative to the interest, covenants, collateral requirements and restrictions associated with debt—if debt is available at all.

Making Startups Powerful

One of the most useful heuristics I have when doing office hours with startups is to ask: what would make this company more powerful? Asking how the company could make more money is a good heuristic too, but it tends to yield incremental improvements. Whereas thinking about how to make it more powerful will sometimes make it orders of magnitude more valuable.

Why I Still Believe in Mentorship | Matthias Endler

A mentor has enough distance from the problem to question its framing and enough experience to recognize familiar patterns. They notice which details you leave out, which patterns you reach for, and which you ignore. You may sense that something is wrong without having the words to describe it.

Catching the (Venture) Bus | Andreessen Horowitz

In venture, no one talks about the mistakes of commission: investing in companies that didn’t return as promised. There’s no scoreboard for how many of your checks get buried behind the back of the shed – it’s part of the job. In fact, our losses on investments equate to just 15 cents for every dollar invested across the funds we manage. But a single winner can have an outsized impact. Our stake in Databricks alone represents 20% of our total AUM.

The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job Right

FDEs have the hottest job in AI. Labs, startups and PE firms are all hiring engineers to sit inside their customers’ operations and solve their problems. Almost none of them agree on what those engineers are supposed to accomplish, or what the strategy underneath the hiring actually is.

We are all Product Engineers now | Seldo.com

This post is an attempt to build on those and make a forecast of where the industry is going in the next 10 years. Making a 10 year forecast of anything is of course a crazy thing to try to do, and especially about the business of software right now. To make it, I had to make two very big assumptions.

Portland AI Engineers 2026 Sept Meetup · Luma

A product leader, not an engineer, built a live margin system for a Direct-to-Consumer brand that lacked visibility into the true per-order profit after discounts, shipping, third-party logistics, and ad spend. This talk walks through the build end-to-end: defining the problem in Claude Cowork with the stakeholder, developing in Claude Code through a GitHub repo that auto-deploys to a VPS, front-end in Claude Design, and n8n running the data pipeline in production. The honest throughline: how far one product person can carry a real system, and where the limits are.

PIGSquad Summer Jam Celebration

Play games from Summer Slow Jams 2026, all made by local developers over the last 3 months! If you made a game for SSJ this year, bring it out and set it up to share what you’ve made. Chat with developers about how they made their games and how you can make games with others in the community!

Silicon Florist links arrangement for September 11, 2026

Rick Turoczy on September 11, 2026

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

Statement by President and Mrs. Obama on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11 | by Barack Obama | Sep, 2026 | Medium

If you were young in 2001, or weren’t even born yet, it can be hard to imagine what 9/11 felt like. The shock of that beautiful, cloudless morning. The heartbreak of the families whose loved ones were taken with such swiftness and cruelty. The realization that the forces of malevolence and violence were closer, and the future less certain, than we knew.

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