Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
States move to shut door on startup tax break expanded under Trump’s OBBBA – InvestmentNews
Maine and Oregon became the latest states to decouple from the federal qualified small business stock, or QSBS, exclusion last month, requiring investors to pay state income tax on gains that are sheltered at the federal level.
PDX Code & Coffee @ Kiln, Fri, May 22, 2026, 9:00 AM | Meetup
Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks.
Nvidia embraces AI investor, topping $40 billion in equity bets 2026
Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the artificial intelligence boom, producing the graphics processing units required to train AI models and run large workloads. The global scramble to secure GPUs has lifted Nvidia’s stock by more than 11-fold in four years, propelling the company to a roughly $5.2 trillion market cap and making it the most valuable business in the world.
OpenAI launches the OpenAI Deployment Company to help businesses build around intelligence | OpenAI
The OpenAI Deployment Company is a committed partnership between OpenAI and 19 leading global investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators. The partnership is led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, and B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp., Warburg Pincus, and WCAS as founding partners.
The Vibe Coding Hangover
The PM and product function matters more in an AI-first company. Someone has to own the output contract and define what “good” looks like before the evals can measure it. Someone has to decide whether a given interaction should route to Slack, stay in-app, ask a clarifying question, or just answer. Those decisions don’t make themselves, and the model won’t make them for you.
A Day Without Child Care: Universal problem requires a universal solution • Oregon Capital Chronicle
In every corner of the state, families are struggling to access the affordable, equitable, quality child care they need, and entire communities are suffering the effects. When families cannot find child care, they cannot work. When families cannot work, local businesses become short-staffed and families decrease their spending. From there, windows are forced to shutter and the economy shrinks.
WW’s May 2026 Endorsements: Congress
Merkley, 69, isn’t thinking about his nominal opposition in the primary or his eventual race against a Republican challenger (see our next endorsement). He clearly views the president as his actual adversary.
Useful Memories Become Faulty When Continuously Updated by LLMs
When an LLM agent rewrites its own experience into textual lessons, more updates don’t always make the memory more useful. In several settings we looked at, the agent ended up performing worse than the same model with no memory at all — sometimes even on problems it had previously solved.
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Enterprise AI, Space Tech And Biotech Top The Ranks
Another week, another infusion of big AI rounds. For this past week, the largest fundraiser by a long shot was Sierra, a developer of AI customer experience tools that picked up $950 million. Other big rounds went to companies in sectors including satellite development, biotech, and, yes, more vertical AI and AI infrastructure.
The vibes around vibecoding – Text Incubation
Management is more unpleasant when you’re not defending humans, and when the blame you’re absorbing is not on behalf of humans. Leadership is more fun. You have a vision, and you’re comfortable going angry-Steve-Jobs on your team until they produce the Apple iMac. The Apple iMac shows up, and it’s all worth it. But management – which is a distinct discipline, understated at your own peril – is no fun when you take out the people.
Weekly Review: The Stack Around the Model – by Sam Keen
The throughline this edition is plumbing: production-grade agent work has moved into the stack around the model. Memory turns into a lifecycle, SRE agent earns its place at the back of a deterministic funnel, and harness frameworks turn last week’s editorial argument into shipped code. The model is the cheapest part of the system.
James Shore: You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs
So now you’re producing two months of work in a month, and let’s say you’ve doubled how much each “month” of output costs to maintain. Next month’s maintenance costs quadruple.
In the Scramble to Power AI, Investors Bet $140 Million on Data Centers at Sea
The company’s nodes are nearly 300 feet long. A bulbous sphere at the top floats on the ocean’s surface, and a lengthy tube-like housing beneath holds computer servers. As the node bobs up and down on the waves, the movement forces water up through a tube into a pressurized reservoir where it drives a turbine to generate electricity for the chips.
2026 Build Challenge: AI for a Better PDX (Portland Startup Week) · Luma
AI Portland Build Challenge is a one‑day civic‑focused hackathon where teams build AI-powered projects to make life in Portland better, culminating in a 3 pm showcase in front of our panel of judges.
The Inference Shift – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
The fundamental driver of the ongoing surge in semiconductor stocks is, of course, AI, particularly the realization that agents are going to need a lot of compute. What Cerebras represents, however, is something broader: while the compute story for AI has been largely about GPUs, particularly from Nvidia, the future is going to look increasingly heterogeneous.