Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
You Are Not Your Job
These statements feel like facts, but they’re fictions we’ve constructed and believed so thoroughly that we can’t separate them from our actual selves. Our ability to believe our own stories is called the secret of our species’ success. Collectively we use our stories to build societies, culture, religion — on our own, we use our labor to build identity.
Best of Portland 2026 – Willamette Week
Best of Portland is an opportunity for you to give some love to the wonderfully diverse businesses, people, and local events that make Portland…Portland. The brand of our Readers’ Poll was created by students in Portland State University’s School of Art & Design. We hope you love it as much as we do!
The Software Factory: Why Your Team Will Never Work the Same Again | alexop.dev
In a software factory, developers stop writing code by hand. AI coding agents implement features and fix bugs while developers design and improve the factory.
More! More! More! Tech Workers Max Out Their A.I. Use. – The New York Times
At a number of companies, employees compete on leaderboards to show how much A.I. they’re using. They’re racking up big bills along the way.
AI startups are eating the venture industry and the returns, so far, are good | TechCrunch
Well, the data is out. AI startups accounted for 41% of the $128 billion in venture dollars raised by companies on Carta last year — a record-high annual share. In a sense, though, we knew that. Investors last year were voracious in deploying capital to AI startups, to the point that 10% of startups accounted for half of the funding.
Is the Future of AI Local? | Tom Bedor’s Blog
If they can gain parity with hosted alternatives, local open source models have a compelling value proposition: fast, private, and free. This possibility has not gotten much attention: no one stands to get mega-rich from them. But the threat to current leaders is a potent one.
How a small Oregon company’s dealings with Amazon created a scandal – oregonlive.com
Windwave sold for $2.6 million in 2018. The Department of Justice says Windwave was really worth at least $9.5 million, more than triple its sale price. They allege Windwave’s buyers were “established community leaders who abused their authority and breached the public trust for their personal financial gain” because they didn’t account for the value of the company’s business with Amazon when they proposed the sale price.
Weekly Review: Show Your Work – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft
This week, the evidence is doing the talking. A 400-company study lands AI productivity gains at roughly 10%, a case study puts a 100-hour price tag on going from prototype to product, and a sensemaking framework argues you should ignore predictions entirely and follow field reports. Meanwhile, new coding models compete on benchmarks and pricing, and NVIDIA doubles down on agent security.
The Great Circle of Life – by Kyle Harrison – Investing 101
And until we confront the reality that AI, like software and consumer before it, is butting up against the ornery stubbornness of human behavior, we’ll keep assuming that the deployment curve is occurring as rapidly as the development curve; but that just isn’t true.
How to vet a cofounder – next play
I’ll walk you through an extremely practical approach to vetting whether or not you want to work with someone. This applies to co-founder searches (and also to teammates in general but it’s more focused on the former). I’ll also cover some strategies you can use to find someone to work with.
AWS at 20*: Inside the rise of Amazon’s cloud empire, and what’s at stake in the AI era – GeekWire
In the early days of Amazon Web Services, technical evangelist Jeff Barr was putting in long hours on the road, pitching a novel concept: rent computing power for 10 cents an hour, and storage for 15 cents a gigabyte per month — no servers to buy, no data centers to build.
10 startups chosen for Plug and Play’s third Seattle-area accelerator cohort – GeekWire
A majority of the programming will take place virtually, but startups will have access to Plug and Play’s Seattle office inside the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs. Plug and Play also has space at SNBL Global Gateway in Everett, Wash.
The Great Techie Book Exchange, Thu, May 14, 2026, 5:30 PM | Meetup
We’re excited to bring back our beloved Great Techie Book Exchange to kick off spring. Join us at one of our favorite venues and hosts, White Owl, which offers us plenty of space for lots of books and engaging conversations.