Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Opinion: Make Democracy capitalist again – GeekWire
I have a confession to make. I’m a Democrat. And a capitalist. Both, at the same time.
Your April dispatch from the Office of Small Business
April is Financial Literacy Month—a perfect time to take a step back and assess your money management habits, particularly as they pertain to your small business. Check out this guest blog post from My Money Motto about business credit or learn about how to obtain funding through financing.
Your codebase doesn’t care how it got written | Robby on Rails
I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t threaten my business model. My entire consultancy is built around being involved in the strategy and implementation of those types of client ideas.
SBA America’s Seed Fund programs renewed – Portland Business Journal
The Small Business Administration’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs have been reauthorized after a five-month lapse, once again opening up billions of dollars to qualified businesses.
Stop Flock
Flock’s expansion is part of a broader movement toward ubiquitous mass surveillance – where your associations, online comments, purchases, movements, and more may be logged, indexed, analyzed by AI, and made easily searchable by almost any government agency at any time.
The Markdown File That Beat a $50M Vector Database | by Micheal Lanham | Mar, 2026 | Medium
Three of the most successful AI agent platforms in production right now store memory the same way you store grocery lists. Here’s why that’s not as crazy as it sounds.
Election 2026: Your guide to Oregon’s May election – oregonlive.com
Oregonians will vote on a slate of key races and measures during the May primary, including a fiercely contested Republican primary for governor, competitive battles for Portland‑area legislative seats, coveted county commission posts and a statewide vote on raising gas and transportation taxes.
Before he wrote AI 2027, he predicted the world in 2026. How did he do?
AI 2027 wasn’t his first foray into long-form prediction. In August of 2021, Daniel wrote an essay called “What 2026 Looks Like.” This essay came out before the launch of ChatGPT, let alone the explosion of AI across the global economy. Now that it’s 2026, I thought it was time to evaluate Daniel’s predictions — and it brings me no joy to say that they are frighteningly accurate.
Five hyperscalers now own over two-thirds of global AI compute
Five companies — Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Oracle — now control about two-thirds of the world’s compute, up slightly from ~60% at the start of 2024.
Moats Don’t Work When Bridges Are Free
The gap between “I wish this existed” and “this exists” collapsed into an afternoon. I’ve been in software long enough to know what it takes to build a tool like that, and watching it materialize from a prompt was the first time the pace of change stopped feeling theoretical and started feeling immediate. This piece is what I’ve been thinking about since.
Cannon Fodder: Pre-Seed Investing in the Age of AI
In medieval warfare, sieges were often decided by sheer volume. An invading army would throw thousands of soldiers at fortified walls. Casualties were obscene. Most died before they got close. But occasionally, someone made it over. That’s what pre-seed investing feels like right now.
Iran conflict drives down consumer sentiment – Portland Business Journal
The Portland metro area remained dead last among U.S. in consumer sentiment as national outlook sunk in the first quarter.
NIH awards $9M to OHSU to develop ‘organ-on-a-chip’ models – Portland Business Journal
Taken together, all three grant projects use “organs-on-a-chip,” which are small transparent devices that contain living human cells arranged to mimic real human tissue, bone, blood vessels and organs. They allow researchers to observe cancer behavior at a single-cell resolution in real time.
Portland-based fanwear brand Official League to open first retail store alongside new headquarters | The Portland Tribune
Over the past four years, Official League has grown from a Portland startup into a globally recognized name in fanwear and culture-driven apparel. The company produces licensed merchandise connected to major professional leagues, including Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.
An Amazon warehouse worker died on the job at Oregon facility | TechCrunch
The PDX9 warehouse has a reputation for having harsh working conditions. In 2018, an investigation from Reveal, an investigative journalism outlet, found that 26% of employees at the warehouse had sustained injuries. A report based on 2024 OSHA data showed that the company’s fulfillment centers report serious injuries at a rate more than 2x the warehouse industry average.
Reluctantly Influential: Inside Lenny Rachitsky’s Demandingly Chill Life
With millions of subscribers across platforms, Lenny Rachitsky is one of the most prolific people in tech media. But what drives him — and what keeps him up at night — is a story most people don’t know.
More Oregon startup news
