Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Meet the 17 startups that took part in Creative Destruction Lab’s latest Seattle accelerator – GeekWire
Startups innovating across advanced manufacturing and computational health made up the latest cohort of the Seattle accelerator run by Creative Destruction Lab (CDL).
Context Engineering for Claude Code by Sam Keen on Maven
Context engineering is how you close that gap. Not with longer prompts, but with agent files, custom skills, and automated hooks that load the right context at the right time. The investment compounds: every session builds on what you’ve already set up.
This humanoid robotics company is going public, but its CEO isn’t promising a robot in your home anytime soon | TechCrunch
“If we just keep our head down, keep delivering customer by customer, robot by robot, we hopefully won’t experience the same volatility,” she said. “Our biggest competitor right now is just us. How quickly we can execute, how quickly we can continue to add new skills.”
(2015) Jealous of kids getting to go to summer camps? Here’s one for you: Startup Weekend Vancouver – Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community
Ah, summer camp. That time to get away from the house. To make new friends. And to spend a few moments immersed in activities that made you the person you are today. Yes, summer camp was great. But as an adult, similar opportunities are few and far between. Except when it comes to Startup Weekends.
The Fear of Dying Before You Become Yourself – The Dailicle | The Dailicle
When people say they’re afraid of death, they’ll often add a clause without noticing: before I figure things out, before I fall in love properly, before I do something that matters, before I fix what my childhood did to me. The horror isn’t just that the movie ends. It’s that it could end right here, at this random scene, where the character on screen still feels like a placeholder. We picture ourselves dying as the wrong person. That’s the part that hurts.
Closing the Verification Loop
Agents made building cheap. The cost moved: the expensive question is no longer “can we ship this?” but “does anyone actually know it works?” A branch that compiles, passes review, and merges can still greet its first real user with a form that validates the wrong field and an email that links to the wrong thread.
Portland Arts Week
Throughout the week, museums, galleries, and nonprofit spaces across the city will present exhibitions and programming inspired by this year’s theme. Launch events include a symposium at the Portland Art Museum, a citywide gallery walk, an event at PICA, and additional downtown performances and programming.
It may be almost impossible to make data centers pay their ‘fair share’ of electricity costs
Setting a price for electricity is straightforward in principle but complicated in execution. Regulators identify the costs to provide service, allocate the costs to customers and design prices to recover those costs.
Sector Snapshot: Cleantech Startup Funding Stabilizes As Energy Demand Grows
In the first half of this year, investors poured $15 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for companies in Crunchbase cleantech, EV and sustainability-focused categories. That puts funding on track to slightly exceed the 2025 tally, which was the lowest in several years.
Weekly Review: The Burden of Proof – by Sam Keen
One thread runs through this week’s picks: the burden of proof has moved onto the output. An essay on AI confidence theater puts it plainly, sounding competent quietly replaced being competent, and the rest of the issue answers with evidence. Verify the fix, contain the code, gate the endpoint, score the prompt, prove the exploit. The claim is cheap now, so the proof is where the work lives.
The Executive AI Leverage Report: What 421 Executive Responses Say About AI
The report is a Preview Edition, published in July 2026, and it is built from a first-party read of the Open Future Forum network: 421 executive responses across seven events, spanning finance, security, growth, and founder rooms.
22 first-person blog posts by founders who sold their business
Blog posts written by founders who have sold their company are rare and not easy to find; you usually have to stumble upon them online to benefit from the insight. Yet first-person accounts can be incredibly helpful for other entrepreneurs hoping to sell a business.
The most profitable skill of the 21st century (not AI)
If you understand how the human mind works – what makes it tick, what makes it pay attention, what makes it take action… then you can make any business successful. You can distribute the software you build and effectively market any other product. You can work your way into new opportunities. You can make friends and influence people. You can navigate through life with elegance and grace because you are no longer a slave to your mind, but a master of it.
One Mistake Entrepreneurs Make: A Great Product Will Sell Itself – SKMurphy, Inc.
One mistake entrepreneurs frequently make is believing that a great product will sell itself. Many technical founders assume that if they build something innovative, customers will naturally discover it, recognize its value, and buy it.
Agentic Autonomy Levels
From the engineer standpoint, you’ll use low autonomy to limit risk and increase reversibility, but use higher autonomy for explicit activities, and fleets of parallel agents safely refactoring massive codebases. The core question about an action is always: what level does this task deserve, and what verification makes that level defensible?
Agentic test processes, LLM benchmarks, and other notes on agentic coding from Galapagos Island
LLMs are highly leveraged when it comes to testing. In terms of the amount of effort it takes, it’s easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar and yet, software seems to be lower quality than ever. A decade ago, we looked at the bugs I ran into in an arbitrary week. There were quite a few bugs then and I run into more bugs now, but I don’t think this has to be the case.
Some new agentic patterns — Massively Parallel Procrastination
I want to tell you a bit about how we’ve started shipping some changes to internal production with an “agentic user in the loop.” Letting an agent work directly with the implementer building its runloop and tooling is getting us higher-quality tools and experiences for the agent without a human in the middle of a game of telephone.
Portland AI Engineers 2026 Aug Meetup
Save the Date : Itinerary coming soon!
Oregon income distribution is the most equal in the West – oregonlive.com
By one key measure, at least, Oregon is something of an outlier in this phenomenon. Income distribution is as equitable here as it is in any state west of the Mississippi.
AI in the A.M. | Coffee at Instrument · Luma
We’re bringing AI in the AM to Instrument’s new space, with Deadstock running the espresso cart for the morning.
The Real Return Standard for Most Venture Investors – David Cummings on Startups
There is a dirty secret in the venture and investing world that does not get talked about as much because, frankly, it is both true and not fun to discuss: most startups, including venture-backed startups that raise millions of dollars, will sell for less than their last valuation.
ATProto PDX: July Meetup
This month, Graze Social founder, @DevinGaffney.com will kick off the meeting with a presentation on @CoCore.dev, a co-op experiment that allows members to freely use and share compute with each other.
Series: The Founder Performance System · Luma
Fit Founder Collective is bringing The Founder Performance System to NedSpace for a practical series on strength, nutrition, recovery, and accountability. This is not a generic wellness talk. Each session is designed to help founders build the physical and mental infrastructure required to lead, create, and sustain what they are building.
