Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Revenge of The Business Idiot
Any executive-level fuckwit you’ve met in your life now has a seemingly-powerful tool that can burp up mimicry of open source software and, if you constantly prompt it, eventually get something half-functional onto some sort of web server.
Nat Parker launches CleanHaus for Airbnb management – Portland Business Journal
Nat Parker, who previously co-founded transit mobile ticketing startup GlobeSherpa, has a new startup called CleanHaus that has secured early investors and released the first version of its product.
Oregon UAS Accelerator Opens Applications for Fall 2026 Cohort – The Des Moines Register
The Fall 2026 cohort begins August 26, 2026, and combines virtual programming with in-person engagement in Pendleton. The application deadline is July 19, 2026, and acceptance notifications will be issued on July 31, 2026.
AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here’s Exactly How That Happened | WIRED
The definitive story of how Claude Code and OpenClaw kicked off computing’s biggest transformation possibly ever.
Claude Code’s creator on the end of the software engineer
I wanted to highlight a contrasting view — someone who believes that AI really is on its way toward eliminating certain jobs. Boris Cherny is the creator and head of Claude Code — the agentic coding tool that Anthropic released last year and is, by most measures, the fastest-growing AI coding tool in the world.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we’re close to AGI
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Google’s developer conference last week that humanity is standing in the “foothills of the singularity” — and that society has only a few years left to prepare for AGI.
I’m tired of talking to AI
I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.
A portentous reunion | The Observation Deck
So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.
How AI-pilled are you? — P9 AI Fluency Index
The index condenses learnings and benchmarks from some of the most forward-thinking companies like Ramp, Fin, Shopify, Zapier and Jobber, into six levels of AI fluency across six dimensions: Culture & Talent, Team Fluency by Function, Throughput, Tooling & Context, Product, and Governance.
Anthropic to introduce AI Fluency scorecard in Claude
Anthropic is testing an AI Fluency scorecard in Claude, letting users assess and track their AI skills directly within the app’s settings panel.
Privacy isn’t dead – it’s just that tech companies have made it inconvenient
In talking to my students as a business professor at Columbia University and giving public talks around the world over the past decade, I have come to realize that people often substitute the question of whether they care about their privacy with two simpler and misleading ones: Is sharing my data worth it? And am I worried about my data being out there?
In Charts: Seed Deals Keep Getting Bigger As Odds Of Reaching Series A Fall Dramatically
The economics of seed investing have changed dramatically since the AI boom began, a review of Crunchbase data shows. Seed rounds are larger than ever, with some startups now raising $8 million to $10 million deals once associated with later stages. But the path forward has also become tougher: startups are taking longer to reach Series A, and a shrinking share are making it there at all.
Case Study: The Evolution of a Pitch Deck
To show that evolution, below we’re sharing both the decks Concorda submitted when originally applying to speedrun and when presenting at Demo Day at the conclusion of the 12-week program. (Some numbers redacted for confidentiality.)
A Letter to Technical Founders Who Say “I Hate Sales” – Cynomi
If you’re the founder, and you’re still the one doing most of the selling because your revenue doesn’t yet support a full-time sales hire, I want to make a direct ask: delete the sentence “I hate sales” from your vocabulary. Also delete “I’m just not a salesperson.” Both sentences are lies, and both are actively sabotaging the business you’re trying to build.
How Sundar Pichai is reshaping Google and the internet for the AI era | The Verge
Today, I’m talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I/O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I/O, and it’s become one of my favorite Decoder traditions.
Email Is Harder Than You Think – by Charlie Gilkey
Most people treat email like it’s the easy part of the day. The filler between blocks of real work. The thing you’ll knock out when you have 10 minutes. That framing is costing you more than you think.
Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis | TechCrunch
“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X.