Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
The In-Between Week
And, of course, we close with One Last Thing… by the one and only Angel Medina. This one’s a longer read. A reflection on December, January, uncertainty, pride, and why we keep going, even when it feels hard.
2025 Year in Review for LLM Evaluation: When the Scorecard Broke | Goodeye Labs
By December 2025, the AI industry had collectively realized that static, public tests had become training data. This triggered a fundamental shift toward dynamic, adversarial, and expert-grounded evaluation. More importantly, we discovered we’d been asking the wrong question all along. Not “how smart is this model?” but “what specific capabilities does this system have, and how can we measure them independently?”
SPC Requests for Curiosity, Winter 2025
If you’re exploring any of these questions, feel free to reach out to the SPC team member listed, or apply to SPC.
Expert: Nixing Federal Tax Policy Could Ease Oregon Budget Woes | MyCentralOregon.com – Horizon Broadcasting Group, LLC
Daniel Hauser, deputy director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy, pointed to the Qualified Small Business Stock Exclusion, a federal tax break estimated to cost the country $80 billion over the next decade. He believes it largely benefits venture capitalists rather than small businesses.
Crunchbase Predicts: IPOs Picked Up In 2025 And The Outlook For 2026 Is Even More Optimistic
In this market, “a profitable company — particularly one that either is an AI play or has a good story of how AI will be a tailwind for their business — are good candidates for a 2026 IPO,” he said.
$84B story: The 10 AI mega-rounds that defined 2025 — TFN
In 2025, the U.S. AI investment landscape entered uncharted territory, with startups attracting unprecedented capital in late-stage and mega rounds. According to PitchBook, AI-focused private-market activity surged throughout the year as investors poured billions into generative AI, enterprise software, and AI infrastructure leaders. Other US tech reports similarly note that large-scale AI deals accounted for a disproportionate share of total venture capital deployed, driving a sharp year-over-year increase in funding concentration.
Big Tech basically took Trump’s unpredictable trade war lying down – Ars Technica
As the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic trade war winds down, the tech industry is stuck scratching its head, with no practical way to anticipate what twists and turns to expect in 2026.
12 Outlooks for the Future: 2026+
From talent arbitrage and “proof of craft” to hardware moats, ambient listening, homegrown software, and the end of waste – what should we expect to see in the coming year? What are the implications?
Publishing your work increases your luck
No matter how hard you work, it still takes a little bit of luck for something to hit. That can be discouraging, since luck feels like a force outside our control. But the good news is that we can increase our chances of encountering good luck. That may sound like magic, but it’s not supernatural. The trick is to increase the number of opportunities we have for good fortune to find us. The simple act of publishing your work is one of the best ways to invite a little more luck into your life.
