Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
The Prenup Nobody Wants to Sign: How Co-Founder Conflict Kills More Startups Than Bad Ideas
Most co-founder conflict begins quietly, almost invisibly. One founder is working weekends. The other keeps normal hours and doesn’t see the problem. One wants to raise a seed round immediately. The other thinks bootstrapping is the only honest path forward. One believes the product should go to enterprise customers first. The other is completely focused on the consumer opportunity. These are not small differences of opinion.
Ian Peterman Mentors “Cultured Care” to 3rd Place at PSU Entrepreneurship 2026 Finals — Peterman Design Firm | PRLog
Ian Peterman, founder of Peterman Design Firm and long-time startup mentor, is proud to announce that the student-led startup Cultured Care has secured 3rd Place in the Everyday Entrepreneur category at the 2026 Cleantech Challenge/Everyday Entrepreneur (CTC/EE) Finals.
The nerds are building a new internet, and I could feel it in the room
Tuesday evening, Ladd’s Addition. About thirty people packed into Jason Lengstorf’s Code TV studio on SE Poplar — an actual TV and internet streaming set — for the first ATProto PDX meetup since AtmosphereConf. Aerons, a couple of low couches, a few canned drinks, a box of donuts. A small brass plaque on the wall thanking Algolia for making the set build possible. Above the whiteboard, in dot-matrix LEDs: ATPROTO PDX.
Civic Tech + AI Incubation Lab (OSU AI Week), Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 3:00 PM | Meetup
Dive into real civic challenges from the City of Portland. Collaborate in multidisciplinary work groups, generate bold ideas, and begin shaping concepts that could meaningfully improve how Portland operates and serves its communities.
Oregon’s Gas Prices Are the Fifth Highest in the Nation — Oregon Journalism Project
Oregon has the fifth-highest gas prices in the country. That’s due to several factors: It’s the only West Coast state without an oil refinery; cargos that unload at the state’s main terminals in Portland must bear the expense of traveling up the Columbia River, and Oregon has mirrored California’s clean-air policies. Freese says the impact of the state’s Clean Fuels Program, for instance, adds about 26 cents to the price of a gallon of gas.
AI Portland X Prosper Portland Happy Hour · Luma
Join AI Portland and Prosper Portland for a relaxed evening of conversation and connection at our Happy Hour!
Claude Managed Agents: get to production 10x faster | Claude
Until now, building agents meant spending development cycles on secure infrastructure, state management, permissioning, and reworking your agent loops for every model upgrade. Managed Agents pairs an agent harness tuned for performance with production infrastructure to go from prototype to launch in days rather than months.
Walton Family Foundation-Gallup Gen Z Research Hub
Students are also becoming more cautious about how AI should be used in schools, and employees are increasingly uncertain about its impact in the workplace. Even so, most Gen Zers acknowledge that AI will be a critical part of their academic and professional futures.
Exclusive | Neo Turned a $150 Million Fund Into $1.2 Billion, Rare for the 2021 Vintage – WSJ
These results, mostly unrealized, show how crucial it is for venture funds to get into the best companies early. Case in point: The combined $4 million initial investments Neo made in Cursor and Kalshi are worth about $1.4 billion as of the end of the first quarter, according to Neo’s estimates.
The Importance of Being Idle – The American Scholar
Here was a committed Marxist—and the great man’s son-in-law, to boot—asserting that workers, rather than strike for the right to work, should instead protest for the right to be lazy. Machines, he believed, could become “humanity’s savior, the god who will redeem man from the sordidae artes [manual labor] and give him leisure and liberty.”
Feedback Flywheel
Every AI interaction generates signal: prompts that worked, context that was missing, patterns that succeeded, failures worth preventing. Most teams discard this signal. I propose a structured feedback practice that harvests learnings from AI sessions and feeds them back into the team’s shared artifacts, turning individual experience into collective improvement.
Where Enterprises are Actually Adopting AI
AI has upended that norm. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and immediately spotlighted the potential of AI to consumers and enterprises alike. In doing so, they unleashed a storm of interest in AI that previous generations of technology never elicited, and large enterprises have been willing to take a bet on newer products earlier than they ever have before. The result: just over 3 years later, almost one-third of the Fortune 500 and one-fifth of the Global 2000 have real enterprise AI deployments in their organizations.
Oregon Technology Awards 2026
The Oregon Tech Awards will be held at the Hilton Downtown Portland on Tuesday, May 5, 2026. We’re thrilled to bring this year’s celebration to the heart of downtown Portland and look forward to gathering the tech community in such a vibrant, central location.
The Last Problem For AI to Solve is Health
Every meaningful wave of technology works this way: it absorbs the drudgery and creates new possibilities. Abundance. That is the real magic.
MBA seminars offer support and guidance to UO startups | OregonNews
“The more we can expose founders to the principles of organizing and planning their business launch and to the expectations they’ll encounter as they progress to fund and grow their business, the better prepared they will be,” said Hull, who has experience in venture capital and in corporate strategic investment at Nike and Intel.
Building for the Next Era of WordPress with the Abilities API, Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup
Nik McLaughlin will introduce us to the Abilities API that was added to WordPress in version 6.9 and go beyond the (justifiable) AI hype to show how it lays the foundation for a future of standardized interoperability in WordPress.
What Mayors Have to Say About the Housing Shortage
In 39 states, almost two-thirds of households can’t afford to buy a median-priced home in the community where they live. A February 2026 survey by the brokerage website Redfin found that half of all Americans struggle to cover their rents or mortgages. For GenZers, it’s more than two-thirds.
Urban Future Prize Competition
For the tenth consecutive year, the Urban Future Lab is proud to present the Urban Future Prize Competition, which identifies and supports top climatetech startups. Thanks to the generous support of MUFG Bank, The New York Community Trust, NYSERDA, and NYU Tandon School of Engineering, two winners will each receive a $50,000 cash prize and admission into the ACRE Incubator—New York’s longest-running and most successful climatetech program. Additionally, for the first time in the competition’s history, the runner-up teams in each track will also receive $10,000 cash prizes and admission into the program.
More Oregon startup news
