Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Portrait of a Man in Crisis – Cari Luna
When the interview began, I saw a clean and well put-together older man, well-spoken and polite, asking only for respect, asking only that I not insult his intelligence. From that first impression, I would have never predicted that the interview would go off the rails the way it did. I wish that I had met him on one of his better days, because on those days I bet he has a lot to share. I wish that I had recognized sooner that I wasn’t qualified to deal with him on a bad day. I hope he is doing better now. I hope I didn’t cause him harm.
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OpenAI and Broadcom unveil LLM-optimized inference chip | OpenAI
OpenAI and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) today unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first Intelligence Processor: an accelerator architected around OpenAI’s vision for the future of LLM inference, and the first AI accelerator in a multi-generation compute platform the companies are building together to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people.
Exclusive | Agility, Maker of Humanlike Robots, to Go Public in $2.5 Billion SPAC Deal – WSJ
Agility Robotics, a startup that makes humanlike robots used in manufacturing facilities and warehouses, is set to go public in a deal valuing it at about $2.5 billion, its executives told The Wall Street Journal.
In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words – The Old New Thing
Tony made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).
Oregon robotics company Agility to go public in SPAC merger – Portland Business Journal
Agility Robotics announced Wednesday that it will become a publicly traded company through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp. XI.
The Cost of Hubris — Chris Neumann
“There’s always one,” Marvin continued. “One founder who thinks they’re special. One founder who thinks the rules don’t apply to them. One founder who thinks they know better than everyone else.”
7 Mistakes Founders Make When Chasing Their First Deals
I’m Macy Mills and I lead GTM at a16z speedrun. My job is to give our speedrun founders an unfair advantage by helping them accelerate their traction. We do this with large-scale events, customer introductions, and hands-on advice.
Every Moat Becomes Moot – by Kyle Harrison – Investing 101
Over the last three years, I’ve written over and over and over again about competitive moats in large part because they represent a paradox to me; simultaneously held up as one of the most critical aspects of any business, while also acknowledging material evidence that they almost never really exist.
Six Months into the “Hero’s Journey” – by Robin Guo
Perhaps this is what founders mean when they say they have conviction. Conviction not just in the idea of what you’re doing, but in the path before you and how to walk it.
The Coming Loop | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings
There is already an agent loop inside every coding agent. The model calls a tool, incorporates the result, calls another tool, reads a file, edits a file, runs tests, and eventually produces some answer. That loop is one we have been quite familiar with for a long time. The other loop is the harness level loop: the loop outside the agent loop. That loop is also not new. We have been doing versions of this since early Claude Code days, but that loop is becoming ever more present in agentic engineering and in recent weeks it has started to dominate the Twitter discourse.
Startup ennui and the forgotten art of risk-taking – Text Incubation
Startups & technology feel like they’ve taken a vulgar connotation, culturally; not just among the buyers of late-2010s “techlash” (whose opinions I candidly don’t care about), but even among the people at the very center of it who are doing well. It’s not some hot social or cultural conflict; it’s an ambient negativity.
Absci receives $100M investment from Eli Lily and other investors – Portland Business Journal
Absci announced it will use the proceeds from the offering — 13.5 million shares of common stock priced at $7.41 per share — to fund advancement of its AI-designed antibody to treat pattern hair loss and endometriosis and for working capital and other general corporate expenses.
‘Digit’ maker Agility Robotics to go public in $2.5B deal — here’s what the filings say about its finances – GeekWire
Salem, Ore.-based Agility Robotics, whose two-legged Digit robots have been tested inside Amazon warehouses, is set to become the first publicly traded U.S. company dedicated solely to humanoid robots, beating its Silicon Valley and East Coast rivals to Wall Street.
AI Data Curation: Data Principles for Context Summaries | by Nitin Mayande | Jun, 2026 | Medium
While we often obsess over model architecture, the real decision “challenge “lies in how we curate the signal from the noise. Therefore, to generate a contextual summary that actually makes sense, we have to master three specific areas: Data Cleaning, Data Filtering, and Handling The Long Tail.
