Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Why Startup Ecosystems Fail at Scale: The Economic Development Playbook for Capacity Building
The problem is not that cities aren’t doing enough. The problem is that cities aren’t expanding their capacity to serve more of the entrepreneurs, mentors, and investors that a competitive economy now requires. As Brookings has pointed out in their analysis of innovation clusters, ecosystem performance is a function of network depth, institutional coordination, and resource density.
US economy unexpectedly sheds 92,000 jobs in February
Payrolls in the US dropped by 92,000 and the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%, according to the latest official figures, surprising analysts who had expected hiring to remain stable.
Portland AI Engineers March Meeting : Demo Night! · Luma
This will be a demo night, come show what you’ve been building with and help of AI and/or you product that leveraged AI.
Infra After Hours with Heavybit & Silicon Florist · Luma
Join Heavybit’s Portlander GP Joe Ruscio, SF-based GP Dana Oshiro, and Silicon Florist’s Rick Turoczy for an evening designed to bring the community together. No demos, no pitches, just awesome people (and bites & drinks of course).
SBIR/STTR comeback…?
After months of uncertainty following their expiration in October 2025, the Senate unanimously passed legislation Tuesday night to reauthorize two federal programs that provide non-dilutive funding for early-stage R&D. For decades, the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs have served as a lifeline for startups engaged in costly R&D activities.
Startup Coffee Meetups, Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 9:00 AM | Meetup
Fuel your morning and ideas with Startup Coffee, a monthly open meetup for entrepreneurs, innovators, students, mentors and community members at the Innovation Hub at 942 Olive. Drop by on the second Thursday of the month at 9 am to connect, share and grow.
Live updates: 2026 legislative session draws to a close • Oregon Capital Chronicle
After just more than a month of long meetings, sharp disagreements and hard-fought compromises, the Oregon Legislature must adjourn by 11:59 p.m. Sunday.
RIP Tenki: What 90 Days of Sprinting Taught Us About AI Forecasting
For the past 90 days, my co-founder Jay and I ran hard at the problem of using AI for probabilistic forecasting. We started with a simple AI-powered newsletter, evolved into a platform for AI-powered sports picks, grew to over 100 paying subscribers organically, and built some genuinely impressive technical capabilities along the way. And now we’re walking away from it.
How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion – by Dan Williams
Social media democratised public opinion, shifting influence away from elites and experts to ordinary people. LLMs will partly reverse this trend. They are a powerful, new technocratising force.
Tim Draper On The AI Boom, Bitcoin’s Future And Building ‘Human Accelerators’
Draper exudes an almost schoolboy-like enthusiasm and passion when it comes to startups, technology, bitcoin and innovation. I recently spoke with him — while he was sporting his favorite purple and gold bitcoin tie — to get his thoughts on everything from his use of digital twins, how the current AI boom compares to previous cycles, and how he wishes policymakers approached tech regulation.
The Brand Age
Brand is what’s left when the substantive differences between products disappear. But making the substantive differences between products disappear is what technology naturally tends to do. So what happened to the Swiss watch industry is not merely an interesting outlier. It’s very much a story of our times.
America’s Startup – America250
America’s Startup is a national collegiate startup competition created to spotlight early-stage business ideas with the potential to drive America’s future economic, technological, and societal progress.
Silicon Valley tech vet: ‘No better time to start companies than now’ – GeekWire
He believes the AI boom could produce the same kind of lasting infrastructure and category-defining companies that came out of earlier economic and technology shifts. Nair said this wave may be as significant as the internet, and possibly even bigger, because “for the first time, reasoning can be on tap.”
More Oregon startup news
