Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
The Moda Center, Lloyd Center, and Portland’s Generational Need to Think Big
At a time when we need big, catalytic ideas and initiatives that reflect broad, long-term thinking, it seems our civic dialogue is increasingly consumed by political theater, performance, and agreements coming from the fringes, rather than the prioritization of policy and plans that can actually solve our problems.
‘Prosperity Council’ wish list for Gov. Tina Kotek: lower taxes, less regulation, more land – OPB
“People love Oregon; they do not love what’s going on in Oregon,” said Renée James, a tech executive who co-chaired the Prosperity Council alongside Curtis Robinhold, executive director of the Port of Portland. “We’re just not competitive. That’s not even a judgment – it’s just fact.”
Nearly every proposed Oregon initiative won’t make it onto the November ballot • Oregon Capital Chronicle
Initiative Petition 28, an effort led by Portland-based vegan advocates to ban harming or killing all animals with almost no exceptions, had submitted 138,300 signatures as of Wednesday to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office. That’s 20,000 signatures more than what they need to qualify for the ballot. The secretary of state still needs to verify those signatures before the petition can secure a spot on the ballot.
Moneyball for Physical AI – by Animesh Garg
This essay builds a framework for the marginal utility of data, and uses it to discuss value accrual in Physical AI. We take the perspective of the scaling laws that guide how loss behaves with data, and the unit economics that govern what a dollar of data is worth. Together they give an approximate marginal utility per dollar, the on-base percentage of physical AI.
Crunchbase Data: Q2 Brought The Most Billion-Dollar Startup Exits Since 2021
Overall, we’re still well behind the prior high in terms of the number of big exits, as you can see charted below. The IPO and SPAC boom of five years ago will be hard to match for exit count.
The Bifurcation of Capital is Inevitable – by Kyle Harrison
Gin rummy is the perfect metaphor, because it names the thing most investors can’t help themselves but get focused on; selling as often as buying. Just one example from this past week was Mohnish Pabrai, a self-described “clone“ of Warren Buffett, explaining why he put 77% of his portfolio into Micron in 2023 and then sold all of it just six months later, before Micron’s stock went up 15x…
What If There Is No Moat Yet? | Tomasz Tunguz
Lagging moats are earned through years of execution. Economies of scale, brand, channel relationships, embedded workflows. They cannot be drawn on a competitive landscape matrix because they are not built yet.
How I Build Software in June 2026
Some things are quicker, but some things still take too long. Oddly, the complexity and limits of LLMs make building software both easier and harder.
Weekly Review: The Hard Half – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft
A pattern runs through this issue: the model is no longer the whole job. The work has moved to the system around it, the loop you engineer, the harness that runs it, the sandbox that contains it, and the provider and version-control layers that support it. The news side counts the cost of all that, from liquid-cooled data centers to the token bills arriving as the subsidies end.
Tweens Curated the Latest Portland Art Museum Show
The show came out of a collaboration between PAM and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art, an education-focused museum inside King Elementary in Northeast Portland. Founded in 2014 by Portland State University professors and artists Lisa Jarrett and Harrell Fletcher, the program gives kids hands-on experience working as curators, preparators, artists, gallerists, writers and docents.
Celebrate People like Om Malik and Susan Wojcicki When They’re Alive. That’s the Best Chance We Have To Make Tech Good Again. – Hunter Walk – Medium
See how people can be wildly successful but also kind, giving, approachable?
Intel’s Chip Business Shows Signs of Life After Years of Struggle – The New York Times
It is the centerpiece of President Trump’s drive to make more chips in the United States, but the company still has a long way to go before it can be called a complete turnaround.
An “infovore” shares his chats – by ChatGPT Pro Community
“The world is so interesting and so rich and so open-ended that the more you learn, the more you want to keep on going,” he adds. That curiosity shows up in almost everything he does: he reads two to three books a day, writes daily, has documented thousands of restaurants he’s visited since 2006, and has traveled to roughly 105 countries, including 33 trips to Mexico, seven to Brazil, and time living in Europe and New Zealand.
Zane Sparling, reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive, dies of cancer at 33 – oregonlive.com
“He was the kind of reporter every newsroom needs. Someone who knows where to go, who to find, what to ask and can quickly write stories that stand out,” Gunderson said. “With Zane, though, the stories were about a half-tick more entertaining than your average senior reporter, and no matter the day he’d already had, he’d happily jump on a late-breaking assignment.”
Token Tightening
Just a few months ago, heavily subsidized AI plans and a manic push by corporations to get their employees familiar with the technology led to aggressive tokenmaxxing, or measuring AI adoption by how many tokens employees use. That era appears to be over.
Oregon’s minimum wage rises Wednesday, but the pay hike reaches a smaller share of the workforce – oregonlive.com
Minimum-wage workers get a pay bump Wednesday, with wages rising 50 cents an hour across Oregon to keep pace with inflation. While welcome news for employees earning the minimum wage, the impact is likely to be muted given the small share of workers on that end of the wage spectrum.
“Burtual” Reality: AI in healthcare, round two
We brought back the panel from our AI + Healthcare event for round two. No live audience, no time limit, just Megan and Nicole finally asking the questions we didn’t get to. Janet Johnson (AI Governance Group), Dr. Arpi Chalian, and Burt Rosen joined us again.
Kotek says she supports Prosperity Council economic recommendations – Portland Business Journal
She suggested she would reverse a policy change she signed into law this spring and would instead reinstate a tax exclusion for gains made on the sale of qualified small business stocks. Kotek has said she signed Senate Bill 1507, which disconnected the Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) provision from the federal tax code, to soften the blow from the Trump Administration’s 2025 tax cuts.
