Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
New tech employment report shows growth in Portland metro – Portland Business Journal
Portland ranks No. 6 for metros where the tech industry makes up the largest percentage of the local economy at 14%. The top three are San Jose, at 51%, Seattle at 31% and San Francisco at 20%.
Presentations — Benedict Evans
Twice a year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in May 2026, ‘AI eats the world’.
how to enter side doors – by maja – velvet noise
Behind every company are actual humans, tired and ambitious and distracted and overextended, trying to solve problems with limited time, limited attention, and limited imagination. A job is one way they ask for help. A side door is another way of offering it.
Agent Evaluation: A Detailed Guide
Agents are difficult to properly evaluate due to their complexity and autonomy. To accurately measure the capabilities of an agent system, we must build harnesses that are realistic and capable of testing agents similarly to how they are used in practice. Building such evaluation capabilities is now more important than ever due to the growing adoption of agents in high-stakes applications like coding and medicine.
Venture Capital Is Concentrating Faster Than Ever. What Happens To Everyone Else?
In 2025, 70% of U.S. funding — more than $200 billion — was invested in 389 companies that raised rounds of $100 million and over, Crunchbase data shows. Of that, $90 billion went to just six companies that each raised more than $5 billion last year.
The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam – WSJ
In one poll after another in recent weeks, respondents have overwhelmingly voiced concerns about AI, a challenge to claims by industry executives that their technology would gain popularity by improving people’s lives.
Don’t answer the first question – Lalit Maganti
Instead, the confusion that produced the wrong question is itself an opening, and the conversation it sparks is valuable to both sides. The user walks away with a better mental model of the tool. I walk away with a clearer picture of where the product confuses people. And sometimes, between us, we figure out that the product itself needs to change.
Mistakes new startup founders should avoid — according to those who made them – GeekWire
Kittleson and other seasoned founders at Startup Day have lived most of these statistics. They’ve built and sold companies to Snapchat, Oracle, American Express and Palo Alto Networks for billions, collectively. They’ve also fundraised for months with nothing to show for it, hired the wrong people, and seen their businesses nearly collapse before recovering.
BREAKING: Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic
Karpathy started this week at Anthropic working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph, and will build a new team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research itself.
Portland | Claude Code for EVERYONE · Luma
We’re taking over The Upstart Collective for a full day of building with Claude – Portland’s first all-day deep dive into everything Anthropic has to offer. Agents. Artifacts. APIs. And yes, Claude Code for everyone.
More Oregon startup news
