Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Portland small businesses grapple with rising costs, reputation challenges – Axios Portland
Portland has long been seen as a haven for small businesses, a city with the ingenuity and creative spirit that fosters off-beat shops, innovative restaurants and funky new brands, but standing up and sustaining those business isn’t easy these days.
PDXWIT is back with a new hiring event – Portland Business Journal
“My goal is definitely to serve the community, serve the women that are in tech that are 1) looking for jobs, 2) looking for network connections, 3) looking for support, 4) looking for technical education,” she said. “The last would be supporting the other groups that are here. I see the great stuff that Rose City Techies are doing, that the AI groups — Portland AI and Portland AI engineer groups — I would love to help support them as well.”
Hardware Happy Hour Portland | Meetup
We welcome anyone interested in any kind of hardware from beginner to expert: Arduino DIYers, engineers, hardware start up founders, e-textile experimenters, LED-curious folks, 3D printing enthusiasts or robotics geeks.
Cheese Wars: Rise of the Vibe Coder | by Steve Yegge | Medium
It turns out, the world will still need engineers. Software comes in all shapes and sizes. The most ambitious, Google-sized software will still require human engineers for years to come: Trained, human, professional software developers. That’s you, Vault Hunter. There will be jobs in Big Software.
AI doesn’t ‘see’ the way that you do, and that could be a problem when it categorizes objects and scenes
Because when AI systems learn to categorize objects, they often rely on visual cues – like surface texture or simple patterns in pixels. This tendency makes them vulnerable to getting confused by small changes that have little effect on human perception.
Elevate Capital March 2026 Newsletter
Forging great companies with venture capital and mentorship to help underserved entrepreneurs reach their highest potential.
NBA arena funding, boycotts, Trump pushback: 5 takeaways from Oregon’s 2026 legislative session – oregonlive.com
After the session ended, leaders of both parties touted some bipartisan wins and acknowledged that they did not get everything they wanted. It was an amicable ending, especially compared to the 2025 long session, which saw Democrats fail spectacularly to pass a transportation funding package.
Hundreds of Oregonians sign up to run for statewide races, Congress, Legislature • Oregon Capital Chronicle
More than 350 Oregonians, veteran elected officials and newcomers alike, filed to run for statewide, congressional and legislative offices by Tuesday’s 5 p.m. deadline. Oregonians will elect a governor, labor commissioner, U.S. senator, six members of Congress, 60 state representatives and 15 state senators this year, as well as scores of city councilors, county commissioners and other local officials.
Founders Can’t Scale What Government Won’t: Policy Infrastructure Entrepreneurship Needs
Government doesn’t just enable entrepreneurship. It defines whether entrepreneurship is really even possible.
The Founder of a Portland Startup Wants to Help You Toilet Train Your Cat
Though still largely a one-woman show, Wagner has seen the company expand from 200 kits sold following the initial launch in 2023 to an estimated 2,000 in the company’s second year. Wagner, whose pre-Cat Throne résumé includes roles as a designer at Lane Health, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, spoke to WW about the rewards and pitfalls of marketing a toilet adaptation for cats.
Your Data Agents Need Context | Andreessen Horowitz
The modern data stack has undergone a decade+ transition from disparate data sources to consolidated data and cleaned definitions (which is good), but even then the consolidation is never perfect and a lot of messiness is introduced.
Khosla’s Ethan Choi On AI, Founder-First Investing And The Fate Of Entry-Level Jobs
Prior to joining Khosla in 2024, Choi was a partner at Accel, where he led and managed high-profile growth investments in companies such as 1Password, Klaviyo, Pismo (which was acquired by Visa), Nuvemshop and commercetools. Before Accel, he worked at Spectrum Equity, backing companies such as Lynda.com (acquired by LinkedIn), Headspace, Lucid Software and PicMonkey (acquired by Shutterstock).
The SaaS Reset: Why the 10x ARR Club Is Now a Ghost Town
In the zero-interest-rate world of 2021, gaining entry to the $100M club was the ultimate status symbol. Frequently rewarded with eye-watering 50x or even 100x valuation multiples based purely on the velocity of top-line growth. Today looks very different. As of late 2025, the median public software company traded closer to 5x revenue, with some data points in early 2026 near 4x.
Remembering Swooshman: The Strange Story of Nike’s Superhero Mascot – Features
Part superhero and part walking Nike logo, Swooshman remains one of the strangest figures ever created in the Swoosh universe. Introduced during the mid-1990s as part of an ambitious marketing push, the metallic alien-robot briefly embodied the energy of Nike’s basketball era before quietly disappearing from the spotlight.
Movie Premiere 🎥 The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist, Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 7:00 PM | Meetup
The film follows a father-to-be trying to make sense of the AI moment: the existential risks, the stunning possibilities, and the very human question of what we do with all of it.
More Oregon startup news
