Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Oregon falls in Tax Foundation’s State Competitiveness Index – Portland Business Journal
Since 2019, Oregon has fallen 28 places in the nonpartisan foundation’s rankings. Oregon also fared poorly in CNBC’s America’s Top States for Business rankings, out earlier this year, falling from 28th place to 39th, the lowest score for Oregon in the history of those rankings.
Why overregulation is killing Oregon – Portland Business Journal
Many Oregon electeds seem to start from the premise that business can’t be trusted. It’s likely why ours is one of the most regulated states in the country and, if your goal is to drive out business and gut our economy, it’s working.
Portland small businesses offer free meals for SNAP recipients – Portland Business Journal
Restaurants and food businesses across the metro have announced free meal programs, even as many small businesses themselves are navigating their own challenges with a sluggish economy. Portland’s new Office of Small Business has pulled together an online document for people to add their efforts.
Free software scares normal people—Daniel De Laney
This problem is rampant in free software. The FOSS world is full of powerful tools that only have a “power user” UI. As a result, people give up. Or worse: they ask people like you and I to do it for them.
AI Agents Are Terrible Freelance Workers | WIRED
A new benchmark measures how well AI agents can automate economically valuable chores. Human-level AI is still some ways off.
Big Tech Is Spending More Than Ever on AI and It’s Still Not Enough – WSJ
Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are already planning to pour $400 billion into artificial intelligence efforts this year. They all say it’s nowhere near enough.
How fast can an LLM go?
Reading these benchmarks made me curious as to how good our inference software is actually getting. Lets make some assumptions, and then work it through.
The Smol Training Playbook: The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMs – a Hugging Face Space by HuggingFaceTB
A practical journey through the challenges, decisions, and messy reality behind training state-of-the-art language models
$555B of Cloud Spend | Tomasz Tunguz
Microsoft & Google both announced earnings yesterday, & the scale of AI adoption remains staggering. The infrastructure businesses are growing at accelerating growth rates that are the envy of businesses one-hundredth the size.
How to Find Your Wedge – by a16z speedrun and Jon Lai
When pitching a startup, how big should your initial product vision be? a16z speedrun General Partner Jon Lai has some tips.
When Should You Stop Clinging to Product and Hire Your First PM? Advice From a Founder and CPO
Saumil Mehta outlines a framework for early-stage founders on timing the first product manager hire.
The Cult of Busyness – by Tamara – Museguided
Their inboxes are cathedrals of guilt, their calendars sacred scrolls of self-importance, their very identities bound not by love or leisure or laughter but by logistics. These are the faithful of the new religion: the Church of Constant Doing.
Pivots, Paths, and Prototypes – by Deb Liu – Perspectives
There are times in life when you reach a crossroads. You put your heart into something that isn’t clicking. You convince yourself that if you just keep pushing, it will eventually fall into place. You stay in the job, the project, or the relationship because you believe you’re supposed to finish what you start. But you are stuck.
Humans Need Entropy | Daniel Miessler
On Karpathy’s observation about human collapse and the importance of exposure to new inputs
Taking Money off the Table
Anyway, fuck it, here’s the bottom line: take that money, queen.
Most of What We Call Progress – Yusuf Aytas
The illusion of progress often looks exactly like progress: more systems, more layers, more abstraction. It feels like forward motion until it is not.
More Oregon startup stories
