Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Start Your Startup · Luma
In this session, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and UpStart Collective co-founder Josh Carter breaks down how to treat your startup like a scientific experiment — form hypotheses, run tests, let the numbers tell you what to build next.
SeaPort Airlines sees 19% growth on Portland-Seattle route – Portland Business Journal
“The governor announces a prosperity council on a Monday, and on Tuesday, she’s signing legislation to delink Oregon from the federal tax code, eliminating bonus depreciation for capital expenditures for businesses like ours,” he said. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have both prosperity and a punitive business-regulatory environment.”
The Neocloud Boom
Even if you assume only ~20% is captured by Neoclouds, that’s over $2.5Tn of enterprise value created in the next 4.5 years. The numbers are so big, it can’t be served by only a few players.
An Incomplete List of Successful Anti-Data Center Legislation
Opposition to the massive data centers that power AI is bipartisan and growing across the country. From Maine to California, more states and local communities are passing moratoriums and bans on construction of the noisy, power and water hungry buildings. People are getting arrested for speaking too long at town halls, legislators are receiving death threats, and it’s clear that the fight against these computer warehouses will shape American politics for years to come.
Weekly Review: Past the Threshold – by Sam Keen
Simon Willison’s six-month recap names November 2025 as when coding agents crossed from often-work to mostly-work, and that shift is the spine of this edition. Tutorials cover what becomes load-bearing past the threshold: sensors, harness scaffolding, output formats, and rigorous evals. The tools track production-grade arrivals, and the editorials test popular claims with data, logic, and hard-won lessons from a year of cloud agents.
The AI Bifurcation of Tech by Neevash Ramdial
Strip away the agent framing for a second. What does a company need to do to be useful to an agent? Have a clean API. Have docs that explain it without marketing fluff. Be reliable. Be fast. Scale without falling over. Don’t hide behaviour behind cute abstractions.
Predicting AI job exposure — Benedict Evans
It would be really nice if we had some way to analyse which jobs, companies and industries were exposed to AI, and if we could assign scores, and build charts, and map that against the progress of large language models.
How VCs and founders use inflated ‘ARR’ to crown AI startups | TechCrunch
Indeed, our sources, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that fudged ARR in public declarations is a common occurrence among startups, and how, in many cases, investors are aware of the exaggerations.
The AI bubble isn’t like the internet bubble | by Cory Doctorow | May, 2026 | Medium
In other words, the story of the web at work was the opposite of the story of AI at work. Today, you can’t turn around without reading a story about bosses who are threatening to fire workers if they don’t increase their AI usage
A Year of Engaging – The Office of Small Business’s First Year — Prosper Portland Office of Small Business
Small businesses aren’t statistics. They’re people betting on themselves, often carrying the weight and stress of a dream on their shoulders. OSB’s first year was an attempt to honor that — not with grand speeches, but with presence.
What anxiety is really trying to tell you
Anxiety is not a modern glitch. It is one of the most ancient behavioral responses in the animal kingdom, predating language, culture, and even the neocortex. You can see it as the oldest alarm system in the brain.
Canopii robotic urban farming greenhouse franchise
Canopii plans to kick off a WeFunder campaign this week to raise $1.5 million to build a commercial greenhouse in Portland and demonstrate its franchise model. The startup launched in 2021 and has received $3.6 million in funding, primarily through grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with investments from Elevate Capital, Onami and Vertue Labs.
Brex Automates Identity & Cuts OpEx with C1
Brex adopted C1 as a single platform to handle the full lifecycle of access requests, access reviews, and entitlement changes. For IT, this meant no longer spending hours each week manually processing requests or removing outdated permissions and that every access decision could be tied to clear policies, with elevated just-in-time access granted only when needed and automatically revoked afterward.
