Silicon Florist links arrangement for October 3, 2025

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

Startup Location Strategy in 2025: Does It Still Matter Where You Build?

Business location once defined your entire brand. A company based in SoHo or Palo Alto was perceived differently than one in Boise or Bratislava. But perception has shifted. Customers care more about product quality and support than your HQ. And investors now hunt for deals in unexpected places, especially if the burn rate is lower and the talent pool untapped.

Two Bend startups selected as finalists in Bend Venture Conference early stage Finalist selected | The Bulletin

The early stage businesses, 360 Sierra, a platform for vehicle rentals, and Toast Wear Inc., a personal thermostat for jackets, will compete Oct. 16-17 at the annual conference at the Tower Theatre in downtown Bend.

FashioNXT set for Oct. 9 in Portland – Portland Business Journal

“I noticed that while other forms of art and culture had the support from the collective entities, fashion designers are on their own. And because their skill is fashion art, they are not necessarily the best ones to create fashion experiences or attract the right clientele that can afford this limited edition clothing,” said Chowdhury.

Oregon delegation seeks to bring 50 Best restaurants awards to Portland – oregonlive.com

Led by Mike Thelin, the Feast Portland festival co-founder, and including members of tourism bureaus Travel Oregon, Travel Portland and the Oregon Wine Board, the group’s mission was exploratory in nature: get a sense of the show’s size and scale, meet the players involved, and find out what it would take to host the event, perhaps as soon as 2027.

The Story Behind our Brand Illustration | Graze

This illustration makes a case for what we’re building. It doesn’t pretend that everything is fine or promise magic solutions. It’s kind of like a map of the terrain we find ourselves in: here’s where we’re stuck, here’s what above, and here’s how we climb out.

Sora Soars

This feels like the real dawn – after Meta’s faux dawn – of AI video becoming something more than it has been to date.

In Praise of RSS and Controlled Feeds of Information | Tom Burkert

The way we consume content on the internet is increasingly driven by walled-garden platforms and black-box feed algorithms. This shift is making our media diets miserable. Ironically, a solution to the problem predates algorithmic feeds, social media and other forms of informational junk food. It is called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and it is beautiful.

The Internet is Better on Comet

We’ve always believed that curious people lead the world. That conviction guided everything we’ve built—and today, we’re excited to share a series of announcements that build on each other to create a radically better internet.

Animals vs Ghosts | karpathy

I still think it is worth to be inspired by animals. I think there are multiple powerful ideas that LLM agents are algorithmically missing that can still be adapted from animal intelligence. And I still think the bitter lesson is correct, but I see it more as something platonic to pursue, not necessarily to reach, in our real world and practically speaking.

Move Fast and Break Nothing – The Atlantic

Every trip in a self-driving Waymo has the same dangerous moment. The robotaxi can successfully shuttle you to your destination, stopping carefully at every red light and dutifully following the speed limit. But at the very end, you, a flawed human being, will have to place your hand on the door handle, look both ways, and push the door open.

A 4-step framework for building delightful products | Nesrine Changuel (Spotify, Google, Skype)

Nesrine Changuel helped build Spotify, Google Chrome, and Google Meet. Her work has helped her discover the importance of emotional connection in building successful products. At Google, she served as a dedicated “delight PM,” a role specifically focused on making products more delightful. She recently published Product Delight, a book that provides a practical framework for creating products that serve both functional and emotional needs. Based in Paris, she now coaches founders and CPOs on implementing delight strategies in their organizations.

Reverse impostor syndrome – Wes Kao’s Newsletter

I basically realized I didn’t have imposter syndrome, but rather the opposite: that I’m quite good at my craft, and people who see my work up close would agree. The problem is: very few people see my (and your) work up close.

From Web 2.0 To AI: How True Ventures Is Backing The Next Big Shift

The firm is less interested in what it can see today, but rather thinking about where the world will be in five to 10 years. “Early-stage investing is more about duration as a feature,” Callaghan said.

I visited Oregon’s 5 smallest cities. Here’s what I found.

Of the 241 cities in Oregon, more than half have a population of less than 5,000. Seventy-six cities have fewer than 1,000 people.