Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Every Industry Is An Airport Lounge Now
I’m not being hyperbolic. Everywhere you go, everything you do, every service you pay for—it feels like customer service simply no longer exists. And even worse, most places you go actually make you feel like an asshole for daring to be a customer in the first place. I catch myself constantly asking, “Why am I putting up with this shit?” right before looking down at the Cheez-Doodles or baseball cap I’ve somehow convinced myself I can’t live without.
Ex-Work & Co. partner plans experimental coworking, retail space – Portland Business Journal
Called, It’s Just a Feeling, the space is by design agency veteran Jessica Bauer-Greene. It’s the result of Bauer-Greene’s own yearning for a third space that felt comfortable and offered community for both times of working or merely relaxing in a public space. “It’s sort of like a social club. It’s a third space. You know, it’s not work, it’s not home, it’s someplace new,” she said.
Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena switching to reusable cups from Portland startup – GeekWire
Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle is switching to a reusable cup program facilitated by Bold Reuse, a Portland-based startup, in the venue’s ongoing bid to eliminate waste at sports and entertainment events.
Intel gets $5.7 billion from Trump deal while details are ‘ironed out’
Intel CFO David Zinser said that the semiconductor giant received $5.7 billion from the U.S. government on Wednesday evening.
Mikiko Mochi Donuts is voted the best doughnut in the Portland area in our Readers Choice Awards – oregonlive.com
We have never heard from so many people on a Readers Choice Awards topic, and your comments were incredibly passionate! So without further ado, here are the winners you voted for.
Dutch Bros CEO Christine Barone aims to double footprint by 2029 – Portland Business Journal
We’re also getting a lot of data now from our app, so we know 72% of all customers that come through Dutch Bros are actually members of our rewards program. So they’ve signed up with us and we can watch what they’re doing over time. When do they have their first beverage? What is that first beverage? And so we’re using the data across all of our teams to help make us better.
Mass Intelligence – by Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing
More than a billion people use AI chatbots regularly. ChatGPT has over 700 million weekly users. Gemini and other leading AIs add hundreds of millions more. In my posts, I often focus on the advances that AI is making (for example, in the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Google AIs chatbots got gold medals in the International Math Olympiad), but that obscures a broader shift that’s been building: we’re entering an era of Mass Intelligence, where powerful AI is becoming as accessible as a Google search.
The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 | TIME
Meet the innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.
Overnight Success – A founder’s point of view
Real founder stories. Years in the making. Join intimate conversations with founders who built category-defining companies. Hear what really happened during those quiet years before anyone noticed.
Open Source is one person | Open Source Security
Here’s the thing. Almost all open source is literally one person. What I mean by that is if you look at all the open source projects out there, and there are a lot, we see a pattern of one person no matter how we slice and dice the data.
Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
A lot of engineers design by trying to think of the “ideal” system: something well-factored, near-infinitely scalable, elegantly distributed, and so on. I think this is entirely the wrong way to go about software design. Instead, spend that time understanding the current system deeply, then do the simplest thing that could possibly work.
Oregon startup community connections – Airtable
Helping the growing Oregon startup community connect and meet one another.
More Portland startup stories
