Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
SBIR part 2: How SBIR Actually Works — A Practical Guide for Innovators Who Prefer Substance Over Spectacle | by Surj Patel | Apr, 2026 | Punkworks.com
At its core, SBIR is simply a structured pathway designed to help promising technologies move from concept to commercialization. It is less a labyrinth and more a well-signposted journey — albeit one that benefits from careful preparation and a reasonable tolerance for paperwork.
University of Oregon opens new $320M Knight Campus building
The newest addition to the University of Oregon will see labs refine bioengineered 3D printed biomedical tissue, serve as an incubator for startups and support the next generation of researchers.
The UK has the Most Startup Accelerators Per Capita; And…?
If you’ve spent any time in startup ecosystem development, you’ve heard some version of, “We need an accelerator.” I heard it today, in a discussion of a small town in Missouri, that some there too think they need a startup accelerator.
Our principles | OpenAI
We envision a world with widespread flourishing at a level that is currently difficult to imagine, and a world in which individual potential, agency, and fulfillment significantly increase. A lot of the things we’ve only let ourselves dream about in sci-fi could become reality, and most people could live more meaningful lives than most are able to today.
It’s OK to abandon your side-project – Robb Owen
If you’re reading this, there’s a chance that you might have recently abandoned (or are considering abandoning) a side-project. Many of us have been there. Hell, the neglected side-project has become something of a developer-meme at this point.
Oregon project aims to become world’s first superhot geothermal plant | Envirotec
US geothermal technology startup Quaise Energy says its Project Obsidian in Oregon could deliver 50MW of always-on renewable power from superhot geothermal wells by 2030, in what the company describes as the world’s first power plant built around superhot geothermal energy.
Perseverance doesn’t always pay off for companies – sometimes it’s better to ‘fail fast’
At its core, it’s about creating the conditions for faster learning: building the managerial discipline to recognize when an opportunity is unlikely to pay off, stopping before sunk costs deepen, and redirecting scarce resources to more promising bets. And this is a strategy that can work for any company, at any level, no matter how high or low the stakes.
Nearly 100 Democrats vie for party’s nomination in legislative races ahead of May primary • Oregon Capital Chronicle
A number of new, progressive Democrats are running in Oregon’s legislative primary races and challenging more moderate incumbents
Weekly Review: Around the Model – by Sam Keen
Welcome to Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers, and thanks for spending part of your Monday with us. One thread runs through this edition: the engineering leverage in AI keeps moving outward, away from the model itself and into the harness wrapped around it. A source-level read of Claude Code finds 98.4% of the codebase isn’t AI, Anthropic’s own postmortem ties a month of regressions to small infra changes, and pieces on AGENTS.md, skills, evals, and multi-agent patterns all push the same direction.
The wide path: Why most current valuation dynamics are not here to stay (and what will) – Tactical fundraising by Elizabeth Yin
This is also why you see valuations higher in San Francisco than you do abroad. There are just simply more investors willing to invest here. This upward valuation trend will continue as long as more investors continue to invest in startups. This isn’t just a recent phenomenon—it’s been happening for decades.
The Race to Make the World’s Most In-Demand Machine – WSJ
ASML is the world’s only supplier of the complex machines that are needed to make cutting-edge chips at scale. Those chips help OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini produce the instant, humanlike responses that have made them so popular.
Do I belong in tech anymore? · Ky Decker
The explosion of AI has played a significant role in my own burnout. Worse, it feels inescapable. Few tech organizations are taking a principled stance against AI use. But AI use is only one part of broader social trends within tech that leave me questioning whether I should remain here.
Oregon retail jobs are falling 5 times faster than nationally – oregonlive.com
Retail is facing many headwinds. The stimulus money dried up, inflation squeezed pocketbooks and the broad shift toward online shopping has continued unabated. E-commerce now represents 16% of all U.S. retail sales, according to federal data, compared to about 11% before the pandemic.
You Are the Most Expensive Model
This tension isn’t really about the pricing of AI models—it’s about the value of human attention. Now that you have a cheaper alternative for many tasks that used to require it, you need to figure out the optimal way to deploy AI in a way that frees up your most expensive model—you. Most businesses are getting this balance wrong in both directions: overpaying for AI on simple tasks and underusing it on ones that would free up their best people.
The Autopilot Playbook for AI Services – by Michael Ulin
Here’s the honest part. Most of what I’ve built has been tools, AI underwriting models at ZestyAI, AI research for lawyers at Paxton. Tool-side pattern recognition is where I’m sharpest. But I’ve spent real time on the services side too.
An AI hater’s guide to keeping LLMs as far from your workflow as possible in 2026 – GeekWire
To briefly summarize my feelings on the topic: I did not ask for these tools, I do not speak to these machines, I find them to be of little if any use in my day-to-day, I refuse to use them no matter how often their praises are sung, and I resent their intrusion. At least Clippy understood when he wasn’t welcome.
Launching XOXO Explore · Blog · XOXO
Each festival year now has its own index, featuring the complete lineup of every speaker, performer, artist, and project from that year, along with a detailed (and accurate!) schedule with descriptions, dates, times, and venues meticulously imported from our print attendee guide. Our recap video and conference talk videos are also prominently featured, as well as credits for each year’s patrons (thank you forever!), and, last but not least, links to a restored archive of every previous announcement, lineup, and schedule mini-site.
