Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Oregon’s Data Center Explosion: Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost?
What is not alive but grows surprisingly well in Oregon? Data centers. These huge facilities that are the lifeblood of major corporations like Amazon, Google and OpenAI have certainly found a home in the Beaver State. Today on the show, you’ll hear from a longtime business and tech reporter for The Oregonian who has found that our fertile environment is going to help grow enough data centers to occupy the entire acreage of Springfield.
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast
I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It’s available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here are my highlights from our conversation, with relevant links.
Civic Tech + AI Incubation Lab (OSU AI Week), Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 3:00 PM | Meetup
A first-of-its-kind collaboration bringing together Portland’s civic leaders and technology community. The City of Portland, Oregon State University, Technology Association of Oregon, AI Portland, Code PDX, and the UpStart Collective are bringing a collaborative, action-oriented effort to explore how emerging technologies can strengthen public services and improve outcomes for Portlanders.
Bad Analogies – Not Boring by Packy McCormick
Jeff Bezos is a generational entrepreneur who came from a hedge fund and made a very calculated decision to lose money in the short term if it meant making more of it in the long term. In his 1997 Letter to Shareholders, his first as a public company CEO, he makes the trade-off he’s willing to make clear: “When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.”
Crea8tive Club connects Portland creatives to small businesses – Portland Business Journal
Crea8tive Club has held two events in Portland that connected small business owners who have specific challenges and needs to a team of talent that could address them. At a Nemo Design-hosted function in late March, 42 creatives worked with seven small businesses.
In Japan, the robot isn’t coming for your job; it’s filling the one nobody wants | TechCrunch
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said in March 2026 that it aims to build a domestic physical AI sector and capture a 30% share of the global market by 2040. The country already holds a strong position in industrial robotics, with Japanese manufacturers accounting for about 70% of the global market in 2022, according to the ministry.
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI – Lalit Maganti
Beyond making the project exist at all, AI is also the reason it shipped as complete as it did. Every open source project has a long tail of features that are important but not critical: the things you know theoretically how to do but keep deprioritizing because the core work is more pressing.
A Global Jet Fuel Shortage Is Coming Soon | Medium
“The reality is, jet fuel prices have more than doubled in the last three weeks,” he said. “If prices stayed at this level, it would mean an extra $11B in annual expense just for jet fuel. For perspective, in United’s best year ever, we made less than $5B.”
Blazers, Timbers, Business Chamber and Performance Groups Urge Council to Kill Ride-Hailing Proposal
The Portland Metro Chamber and a coalition that includes the city’s professional sports teams and arts groups implored the Portland City Council in a letter today not to pass a proposed policy that would restrict the portion of a fare that ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft could take from each trip.
Oregon sees drop in largest foreign tourist group following Trump political tensions • Oregon Capital Chronicle
The Beaver State falls behind national averages in many areas, but its tourism industry is an area that excels, bringing in $14 billion to Oregon and employing more than 120,000 people. In 2024, international visits and spending to Oregon outpaced the U.S. average, according to a Travel Oregon report prepared by Oxford company Tourism Economics.
Continual learning for AI agents
Most discussions of continual learning in AI focus on one thing: updating model weights. But for AI agents, learning can happen at three distinct layers: the model, the harness, and the context. Understanding the difference changes how you think about building systems that improve over time.
I Still Prefer MCP Over Skills | David Mohl
TL;DR: The AI space is pushing hard for “Skills” as the new standard for giving LLMs capabilities, but I’m not a fan. Skills are great for pure knowledge and teaching an LLM how to use an existing tool. But for giving an LLM actual access to services, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the far superior, more pragmatic architectural choice. We should be building connectors, not just more CLIs.
Weekly Review: Know Your Harness – by Sam Keen
This week’s recurring message: the infrastructure around models matters more than the models themselves. Sebastian Raschka maps the six components of a coding agent, Martin Fowler makes the case for versioning team AI instructions, and Cursor redesigns the IDE around parallel agents. Gemma 4 and Ollama 0.19 also arrive to make local-first AI genuinely practical.
Stop trying to make people read instructions: 10 startup lessons from Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis – GeekWire
At this week’s Seattle AI Startup Summit, it was his experience building Convoy, the one-time unicorn trucking startup that shuttered in 2023, that he wanted to talk about.
15 ideas to help you build a better personal network
I wrote 15 pieces of tactical advice related to helping you build a better network that I think you’ll actually find helpful. Helpful as in it’ll help you achieve your goals faster. Hint: None of it involves going to happy hours and posting slop on LinkedIn.
Economists Are Drawing Stronger Connections Between A.I. and Jobs – The New York Times
Artificial intelligence hasn’t disrupted the labor market, economists say, but they are increasingly convinced that it will — and that policymakers are unprepared.
New Oregon law puts safeguards around AI chatbot ‘companions’ – Portland Business Journal
A new Oregon law will take effect next year placing safeguards around the use of AI “companions,” reflecting growing awareness about the mental health risks post by interactions with human-like chatbots, especially for children.
Google’s data centers drink more Oregon water, bringing fresh concerns over secrecy – oregonlive.com
Google’s data centers gulped down nearly 550 million gallons of water in The Dalles in 2025. That’s nearly 40% of all the water consumed in the entire city and a huge jump from the year before.
PNW Climate Week 2026:: Portland Visioning + Collaboration Night · Luma
PNW Climate Week is a week of community-powered events that shine a spotlight on the Pacific Northwest’s role in climate leadership and innovation.
GitHub Copilot Dev Days | Portland, OR · Luma
Join us for a community-led developer event focused on AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot. This event brings together developers to explore practical workflows, real-world use cases, and hands-on experiences using GitHub Copilot.
Butter or sand in the gears? The question every founder must ask before choosing SF or Seattle – GeekWire
When weighing their decision to relocate to San Francisco or stay in the Pacific Northwest, Zhang proposed that entrepreneurs ask whether they’re building a “butter” or a “sand in the gears” startup.
