Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Thoughts on slowing the fuck down
We have basically given up all discipline and agency for a sort of addiction, where your highest goal is to produce the largest amount of code in the shortest amount of time. Consequences be damned.
Instagram’s Cofounder on Why Great Products Are Still Hard to Build
Today, we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper sits down with Mike Krieger, cofounder of Instagram and co-lead of Anthropic Labs—the team working on experimental projects within the Claude developer—to discuss how the rules of professional product development are being rewritten in real time. Krieger brings a rare perspective as someone who has been at the frontier of two transformative technology waves, the mobile and social boom, and now agent-native software.
How Apple became Apple: The definitive oral history of the company’s earliest days – Fast Company
On April 1, 1976, along with Jobs’s former coworker Ronald Wayne, the two Steves formed a partnership to market Wozniak’s latest invention, a microcomputer kit for electronics hobbyists. They called it Apple Computer Company.
Closed Source vs Open Source AI: A Cage Fight Few People Understand
The “good enough” line is the threshold where open models become functionally interchangeable with closed ones for a given use case. It moves up every quarter. Each time it does, a slice of paying customers loses their economic justification for the closed model premium.
Final training runs account for a minority of R&D compute spending
The final training run — the one that produces the model with a name — is only the last step in a long, expensive process of exploration. Before that run begins, companies burn through compute on: running experiments at various scales, generating synthetic data, testing which ideas work before committing to a final run, and training models that are never released.
Seed Funding Hasn’t Stalled, But It’s Skewing Larger And Is More Competitive Than Ever, Crunchbase Data Shows
Deal counts and amounts are down roughly 20% year over year for the pre-seed and regular seed funding range bands that include deals of $200,000 to under $5 million. (As always, that proportion will improve a bit over time as smaller seed rounds are added to Crunchbase.)
How Anthropic’s Claude Thinks – ByteByteGo Newsletter
Modern models like Claude can “think out loud,” writing extended chains of reasoning before giving a final answer. Often this produces better results. However, Anthropic’s researchers found that the relationship between the written reasoning and the actual internal computation isn’t always what it seems.
Nobody Is Coming to Save Your Career – by Steve Huynh
Most people assume someone will tap them on the shoulder when it’s time. In my experience, that assumption is the single biggest reason high performers get stuck. Here are three truths about who owns your career, and what to do if you realize that you’re trapped on the wrong side of them.
Lawmakers took a step to fix Oregon’s looming budget crisis. Now we need a leap • Oregon Capital Chronicle
The just-concluded legislative session sent Senate Bill 1507 to the governor’s desk for her signature, a good step in the right direction — but only a step. The bill helped to address the immediate budget hole created by H.R. 1 by stopping Oregon from doubling down on a few wasteful federal tax breaks that mainly benefited the rich and corporations.
Oregon attorney slapped with record fine after citing case law hallucinated by AI – oregonlive.com
The Oregon Court of Appeals issued a $10,000 fine to Bill Ghiorso, a Salem-based civil attorney, after determining he signed his name to a legal brief containing 15 bogus citations and nine quotes “that had been contrived from thin air.”
The struggle for legitimacy
Unfortunately, however, ecosystem builders themselves have been hit just as hard by changes, disruption and reallocation of federal funding. Over the last fifteen months, I have witnessed my peers get laid off because critical funding was frozen, delayed or completely eliminated. The impact? Critical infrastructure within our entrepreneurial communities has lost what little funding it had to begin with.
Washington state needs a ‘coherent’ story to compete in AI, leaders agree – GeekWire
Can these leaders take all of their ideas and turn them into action? At the very least, the WTIA secured two pledges: The Washington Roundtable and the Seattle Metro Chamber both said they would work with the Governor’s office to shape a statewide economic development strategy, and Perschbacher committed to leading a federal funding working group.
EDCO Welcomes Wendy Morgan as Venture Catalyst Director
She offers a unique blend of innovation leadership and commercialization expertise. She has dedicated her career to helping early-stage companies gain traction through customer discovery, go-to-market strategy and investor readiness. Most recently, she served as Innovation Impact Catalyst Manager at Oregon State University’s Advantage Accelerator, where she mentored a portfolio of startups and worked to increase the number of research-based ventures entering the market. Her work strengthened connections between founders, industry partners and funding opportunities.
