Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Trade-offs to Investing Regionally — Oregon Venture Fund
Since its founding in 2007, Oregon Venture Fund has limited its investments to startups with a presence in Oregon and Southern Washington. More specifically, our criteria is – at minimum – at least one founder or key leader should have a primary residence in our region.
OVF 2025 Annual Meeting — Oregon Venture Fund
The Oregon Venture Fund’s 2025 Annual Meeting this week brought together the fund’s entrepreneurs and investors for company updates, thoughtful conversations, and shared connection — we are grateful to everyone who joined us. This year’s meeting was a fun celebration of our community’s achievements and milestones and also a testament to the vibrant, collaborative spirit that fuels innovation and growth in our region.
Distributional: Interview With Co-Founder & CEO Scott Clark About The Enterprise AI Testing Company
Distributional is a modern platform for enterprise AI testing and evaluation to make AI safe, reliable, and secure. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Distributional co-founder and CEO Scott Clark to learn more about the company.
Don’t make Google sell Chrome
Look, Google’s trillion-dollar business depends on a thriving web that can be searched by Google.com, that can be plastered in AdSense, and that now can feed the wisdom of AI. Thus, Google’s incredible work to further the web isn’t an act of charity, it’s of economic self-interest, and that’s why it works. Capitalism doesn’t run on benevolence, but incentives.
What to Expect as Tariffs Hit Gadget Imports: Higher Prices, Fewer Updates and Empty Shelves – WSJ
What does that mean for us? Prices will go up. Shelves will get emptier. Software updates will be more common than hardware upgrades. And you might face even more subscriptions.
How To Get The Most Out Of Vibe Coding | Startup School
YC’s Tom Blomfield has spent the last month building side projects with tools like Claude Code, Windsurf, and Aqua, seeing just how far you can push modern LLMs. From writing full-stack apps to debugging with a single paste of an error message, AI is becoming a legit collaborator in the dev process. This video is a playbook for anyone who wants to get the most out of vibe coding and build faster.
F*ck Your Value-Add – by Brian Sugar – AirSugar
Every startup is a pressure cooker of complexity. A founding team, chronically under-resourced and sleep-deprived, chases product-market fit with code held together by duct tape and prayers. Now add an investor who’s rewriting your Slack copy or tweaking outbound messaging like it’s their job, because suddenly, they think it is.
10 Re-Engagement Email Examples to Win Back Customers & Grow Revenue
Rather than paying to acquire new customers, re-engagement campaigns nurture existing relationships. More importantly, they protect your sender reputation and improve overall deliverability. However, not all re-engagement campaigns are created equal. To help you design a campaign that converts, we’ve curated a list of our top re-engagement email examples and trusted tips for crafting a high-performing campaign.
Portland Linux/Unix Group General Monthly Meeting: ZFS is pretty neat with Ian Shearin » Calagator: Portland’s Tech Calendar
ZFS is incredibly reliable, feature rich, and well liked. This talk surveys some of its popular features, compares them to Linux-native features, and explores how to get OpenZFS running on Linux, with a focus on Arch Linux. This is a high-level talk from the perspective of a user new to ZFS.
The OpenAI mafia: 15 of the most notable startups founded by alumni | TechCrunch
Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. Its meteoric rise to a $300 billion valuation has spurred many employees to leave the AI giant to create startups of their own.
4 Reasons Every High-Growth Startup Needs A Founder’s Office
With such limited capacity, founders must delegate tasks while also staying ruthlessly focused on the bigger picture — namely, vision, product and culture. This is where the Founder’s Office plays a critical role. It helps prevent the company’s strategic plan from dying in the gap between idea and implementation.
Portland Thorns, WNBA team break ground on joint training facility in Hillsboro – oregonlive.com
The Portland Thorns and future Portland WNBA team, both owned by Lisa Bhathal Merage of RAJ Sports, broke ground on the training facility Tuesday in front of a crowd that included youth athletes, local politicians and investors. The first phase of the project at the 12-acre property will cost approximately $75 million, with the goal of being open by early 2026 — just in time for the Thorns’ next season and ahead of the yet-to-be-named WNBA expansion team’s arrival.
Hackers release millions of files after Oregon DEQ cyberattack – OPB
A ransomware group has released over a million files that the group says it stole from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. The files appear to include sensitive information about DEQ employees.
KYVC: Know Your VC – Mostly metrics
As operators, it’s important to know which type of VC you are taking money from, and if they actually practice the strategy they espouse. Instead of KYC (know your customer) I’m calling it KYVC (Know Your VC).
The State of Startup Media – by Kyle Harrison
The blogosphere is nothing new. It was born in either 1999 or 2002 depending on who you ask. But not too long after that it became a primary vehicle for unpacking technology. The ancient texts of tech were born in individual blogs. Scattered around the internet.
Europe’s fastest growing startup?
Lovable’s growth has seemingly come from out of nowhere. The reality is that Anton built an early proto-version of Lovable, called gpt-engineer, back in June 2023 while he was CTO at another startup. The project was a hit, blowing up on GitHub with “hundreds of thousands” of users and more than 50,000 GitHub stars.
Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard – by Brian Potter
You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting someone trying to build humanoid robots. The Humanoid Robot Guide lists 47 different humanoids made by 38 different manufacturers, and this Technology Review article claims 160 companies worldwide are building humanoids. Many of these manufacturers are startups that have raised (or are raising) hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital. 1X Technologies has raised around $125 million in funding, Apptronik has raised $350 million, and Agility Robotics is looking to raise $400 million. Figure AI has raised $675 million, and is aiming to raise $1.5 billion more. Since 2015, humanoid robot startups have raised more than $7.2 billion.
More Portland startup news
