Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
🏎️ BMW E46 inspires Building an AI-Powered Podcast Platform for Car Junkies | Car Curious
Doug chats with Ryan Williams, a software engineer who came to car culture later in life and turned that curiosity into Car Curious, an AI-powered podcast player that helps listeners identify cars, terms, and model codes in real time. The conversation mixes tech and nostalgia, from Ryan’s Portland background and family life to his first car: a yellow 1978 Mazda GLC that barely made it through high school but created lasting memories with friends, baseball trips, and wrenching with his dad. They also touch on sim racing, manual transmissions, and how podcasts sparked his deeper dive into cars.
Making beautiful work is getting harder – ❧ Slowlywilliam
Nowadays, we spend more and more of our time waiting, while reasoning agents go off and do things behind our backs. Chat boxes do almost nothing to help us understand what these agents are doing or why. They don’t provide any new ways to guide these agents as they work. These tools have a totally different goal: they want to push humans outside the workflow entirely.
What is Creative Neighborhoods? – Pickathon
We design for the weekend, but we engineer for the decade. Every project starts with a question: Where will this go next? We design permanent community assets first, then use those parts to build the festival neighborhoods. When the music stops, nothing goes to the landfill. We have turned stages into sleeping pods for veterans and stocked local high schools with tons of lumber. Now, we are expanding our designs to create a wider range of permanent assets—proving that a temporary festival can build lasting infrastructure.
PDX AI Demo Night · Luma
This Portland Startup week special edition showcases OVF portfolio companies, highlighting AI innovation across cybersecurity, marketing tech, construction/homebuilding, and professional development.
Bring! Treats for Dogs opens downtown Portland shop – Portland Business Journal
Small businesses don’t need pity. We need customers who choose us intentionally. We need policy that acknowledges the complexity of urban recovery. We need humane safety solutions, more housing and civic pride that translates into action — not just commentary.
Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot Divine launches to the public | TechCrunch
To create Divine, [former Portland resident] Evan Henshaw-Plath, an early Twitter employee and member of “and Other Stuff,” explored the Vine archive. Henshaw-Plath, who goes by “Rabble” online, explained that much of Vine’s content was originally backed up by a community archiving project known as the Archive Team.
Before GitHub | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings
Before GitHub, Open Source was a much smaller world. Not necessarily in the number of people who cared about it, but in the number of projects most of us could realistically depend on.
Who Owns the Code Claude Wrote? – by Sena Evren
Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see. Some of this is settled law, some is actively contested, and this piece is clear about which is which. If you are shipping AI-assisted code and have not thought about any of this, this piece is for you.
What courage is, how to build it and why you should take a risk
I would break courage down into three areas: taking calculated risks, accepting the possibility of failure and taking action. That sometimes means choosing principles that you’re going to uphold no matter what because it’s a matter of purpose or mission.
Oregon’s GOP seeks an upset to replace Gov. Kotek. Who will break from the pack? • Oregon Capital Chronicle
While there is significant overlap between each candidates’ policy proposals, they differ greatly in style and background
Ask: Looking for testers! | Portland Startups Switchboard
I’ve been working on an app that allows Portlanders to buy and sell home grown produce. The goal is to add another layer of food resiliency in our city that doesn’t rely on federal funding. We need more testers before we can be certain that everything works properly…
Seed Funding Is Bigger Than Ever — And Harder To Get
While more funding is going into startups at this stage, seed funding saw a marked shift in 2025: More than half of seed dollars last year went into deals of $10 million or above.
The Founder’s Guide to Blogging
Evan argues that startups winning in attention marketplaces are investing more in their written product communication, and breaks down the strategies the best founders are using.
AddyOsmani.com – Long-running Agents
A long-running AI agent can keep making progress over hours, days, or weeks. It can do this across many context windows and sandboxes, recover from failure, leave structured artifacts behind, and resume where it left off.
While Big AI Burns Cash, Here’s Where Founders Win
The practical implication: when evaluating where to build, the right question is not whether the problem requires intelligence. Everything will soon. The question is whether the solution requires something more than intelligence.
How a Seattle VC firm broke into the $1.1B seed round for a DeepMind legend’s superintelligence startup – GeekWire
Turns out it was less about check size and more about old-school hustle, networking and smarts, including years of relationship-building, a well-timed early bet, and a lot of flights to London.
Startup Grind Portland | Global Community for Entrepreneurs
Welcome to the relaunch of StartupGrind Portland! We are dedicated to supporting early-stage startups and bootstrapped founders by creating a community where entrepreneurs can learn from experienced founders and investors. Through our events and resources, we aim to provide practical insights and opportunities for networking that help you take your startup to the next level. Sponsored by FirstCity Foundry and Up Start Collective, we’re building a vibrant ecosystem for Portland’s next generation of innovators. Join us as we expand, learn, and grow together!