Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
The 30 Best Pieces of Company Building Advice We Heard in 2025
While many of last year’s tech headlines featured record growth and eye-popping valuations, we found our curiosity drawn to the untold stories of quiet execution, scrappy experiments and contrarian bets that paved the way — starting with founders who ask, imagine if this could be different or better or faster?
Wyld acquires Grön as Oregon cannabis leaders unite – Portland Business Journal
Wyld is acquiring Grön in a deal that brings together two startups from the early days of legal recreational cannabis in Oregon that have survived the tumult and grown to become national leaders.
It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me
Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
AI and the Human Condition – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
I get the logic of Patel and Trammell’s argument, but I — perhaps, once again, over-optimistically — am skeptical about this being a problem, particularly one that needs to be addressed right here right now before the AI takeoff occurs, especially given the acute need for more capital investment at this moment in time.
Try to Take My Position: The Best Promotion Advice I Ever Got – AGY
This engineer was doing exactly what my CTO had told me to do, they were trying to take my position. They were thinking about the problems I thought about. They were taking ownership of team-level issues, not just their individual tasks. They came with a solution, not just a complaint.
TriMet Announces Steep Service Cuts to Close Budget Gap
On Monday, TriMet unveiled the specifics of a plan to reduce bus and train service in the Portland metro area to help fill a gaping budget hole. The upshot? Twenty bus routes altered, another 15 eliminated, and a light rail line that will stop at its halfway point, requiring a transfer to get from Clackamas Town Center to downtown Portland.
Gross Profit per Token | Tomasz Tunguz
Publicly traded software companies have gross margins of 71-72%. AI companies run lower. Gross profit per token may be a better indicator of earnings potential. Some AI companies already use gross profit as a quota metric rather than revenue.
OpenAI to Buy Pinterest? Strategic Analysis – by nekuda
In reality, an acquisition would likely combine all four to some extent: leverage the taste graph for recommendations, migrate Pinterest’s Gen Z user base into ChatGPT, keep the Pinterest app alive but supercharged with conversational AI and bolt on the ad network for monetization.
Crunchbase Predicts: Why Top VCs Expect More Venture Dollars, Bigger Rounds And Fewer Winners In 2026
To get a sense of the startup funding outlook for the year ahead, Crunchbase News reached out to four investors via email: George Mathew, managing director at Insight Partners; Tim Tully, partner at Menlo Ventures; Matt Murphy, managing director and partner at Menlo Ventures; and Anders Ranum, partner at Sapphire Ventures. The following interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity.
The Next Two Years of Software Engineering
Meanwhile, a new generation of developers is entering the workforce with a different calculus: pragmatic about career stability, skeptical of hustle culture, and raised on AI assistance from day one.
Every great Portland neighborhood started as someone’s ‘streetcar to nowhere’
Portland has struggled in recent years to maintain basic infrastructure, communicate clearly and manage public space. Those failures make any new capital investment feel reckless. That reaction is understandable, but also dangerous.
Why the Book Is Never Going Away – by Jelani Memory
I’ve spent most of my career telling stories and building products. I can tell you this plainly: the book is the most perfect product ever made.
