Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
OpenAI’s Fidji Simo on ads in ChatGPT and ending the Code Red
In her first extended interview since joining OpenAI last year, Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of Applications, said that OpenAI’s internal “Code Red” will hopefully end with the release of a new model, that the company is exploring a social network where peoples’ AI agents interact on their behalf, and that ChatGPT’s ad model will look a lot more like Google’s intent-based system than the Facebook ads machine she helped build.
Humanoid robot startup Apptronik has now raised $935M at a $5B+ valuation | TechCrunch
University of Texas spinout Apptronik, a builder of humanoid robots for Google DeepMind among others, on Wednesday announced that it re-opened its Series A to raise a total of $935 million for the round.
Communities are not fungible
Economists have a word for assets that can be swapped one-for-one without loss of value: fungible. A dollar is fungible. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude is fungible. A mass of people bound together by years of shared context, inside jokes and collective memory is not. And yet we keep treating communities as though they are.
A new hub by and for Black creatives opens in Old Town
The building’s owners, Cyrus Coleman and Adewale Agboola, have renamed the Columbia River Ship Supply Building, 433 NW 4th Ave., the Horizon Enterprise Building. The concept is to nurture and inspire community by making space for Portland’s BIPOC creatives. Portland’s Holst Architects have helped transform the building.
High-Spending Investors Give 2026 An Active Start
Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz ranked among the busiest venture and lead investors, while Y Combinator kept up the lead for seed deals. The list of lead investors in the largest rounds, meanwhile, had SoftBank and Tiger Global Management in the top ranks.
We Choose Our Craft – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft
I’ve lived through enough paradigm shifts in software development to recognize the pattern. Each one felt, at the time, like an ending. I understand the mourning. I also think the grief is aimed at the wrong thing. What’s dying isn’t the craft. What’s dying is one specific expression of it.
How not to fire – by Dr. Astrid J. Scholz
Building a 21st century business, whether nonprofit or for profit, on 20th century management theories that treat people as inputs and resources like so many cogs and widgets is a choice. Not aligning all aspects of your business with your values is both lazy and out of integrity. And that’s a choice, too.
The 3 curves that make a scalable business | Swizec Teller
You want users and revenue to grow exponentially. Bugs per day to grow linearly. Support work to grow logarithmically. Your goal is to make this happen.
A.I. Personalizes the Internet but Takes Away Control – The New York Times
The relentless addition of artificial intelligence in popular apps raises questions about what’s at stake. The answer: the future of the internet and its lifeblood, digital advertising.
The AI Vampire. This was an unusually hard post to… | by Steve Yegge | Feb, 2026 | Medium
I’ve collected a number of data points, and I have a theory. My belief is that this all has a very simple explanation: AI is starting to kill us all, Colin Robinson style.
Metro councilors talk ‘bad’ word growth, economic development – Portland Business Journal
“Our well-being depends on the ability of businesses and employers of all sizes to weather moments of uncertainty and use opportunities they create and sustain living-wage jobs that keep people in Portland,” Gonzalez said. “We can’t take growth for granted. A lot of times in greater Portland, the economy has been an afterthought. That’s an attitude we can’t afford to take anymore.”
‘Best of both worlds’: Seattle startup founder community Foundations is expanding to San Francisco – GeekWire
The expansion is not about abandoning Seattle so much as helping Seattle founders succeed, said Aviel Ginzburg, the venture capitalist who co-founded Foundations in 2024. Ginzburg said the goal is to support Seattle-founded companies that increasingly split time between the two tech hubs, rather than to recruit Bay Area startups.
Slaying the Dragon: Ending the Seattle vs. San Francisco Debate | Foundations – In-person, Invite-only startup community in Seattle
At Foundations, we’re mission-first, narrative-second. Our mission is grounded in data and we are in the unique position to embrace that data instead of rejecting new information that jeopardizes an established business model. Over the past six months (or a lifetime in AI years), the landscape has transformed dramatically. Today, in order to have a real impact, our mission has to evolve as well: from “Make Seattle a better place to be a founder”, to “Make Seattle Founders Successful”. Full stop.
Built Oregon retail accelerator, Oregon AI Accelerator both launch – Portland Business Journal
A pair of new accelerators announced their first cohorts recently, each aimed at supporting startups in industries that are big pieces of the state’s economy but sometimes feel worlds apart: technology and retail consumer goods.
More Oregon startup news
