Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age – The Atlantic
In some sense this is normal. Every time some new labor-saving technology is introduced, there are experts (the ones who know a lot about technology but not much about psychology) who predict that people will use the technology to make life easier. Soon we’ll all be enjoying 15-hour workweeks! Instead, many people use the technology to make their life more frenetic and full. Planes, trains, and automobiles are technologies that save time and effort by making travel faster. They also enable people to take a lot more trips.
AI Hot Seat Roundtable: What’s Actually Working (And What Isn’t), Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 4:00 PM | Meetup
This event brings together founders, operators, functional leaders, and advisors making real AI decisions across companies of all sizes. We’re running structured hot seats where participants bring real AI decisions affecting their company, team, product, customers, or workflow.
Business Oregon TA Program Helps 932 New Businesses Launch
Oregon’s state-backed technical-assistance network has quietly turned ideas into storefronts, food carts and childcare centers, helping 932 entrepreneurs launch new businesses across the state since 2023. From coastal towns to high-desert communities, the program has focused on people who typically get shut out of traditional lending, and the results are showing up as new shops, added childcare slots and early-stage food businesses testing recipes at farmers markets.
My Current Approach to AI-Augmented Development
This is the development process I’m using right now for AI-augmented work. I tune it constantly, so treat it as a snapshot. It works for me at my current scale, and parts might work for you. Offered as building blocks, not a complete blueprint; we’re all in different circumstances.
The Robots Are Here
What’s interesting is that this is the first time in the physical world where a general-purpose robot — at the level of dexterity and capability we’ve written about — lets you fully decouple capital from labor in a profound way. Your production capacity becomes deeply tied to how many robots you can make.
GitHub’s former CEO launches a distributed Git network built for the agentic coding age | ZDNET
A new developer platform called Entire thinks it has the fix for an increasingly unreliable GitHub, and the pressure vibe coding puts on it: a decentralized Git network. And who’s at the helm? GitHub’s former CEO, Thomas Dohmke.
Lawmakers probe growing use of Chinese AI models in U.S. companies
U.S. lawmakers are considering how to curb the growing adoption of Chinese AI models by homegrown companies, as geopolitical tensions surrounding the rollout of artificial intelligence ramp up.
The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic
Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.
5 Red Flags I Listen for Before I’d Ever Invest in a Startup | by Aaron Dinin, PhD | Jun, 2026 | Entrepreneurship Handbook
What I’ve learned from “playing investor” is that most people assume investors are evaluating products, markets, or technologies. And those things obviously matter to some degree, but, when real money is on the line, the only thing that feels like it matters is whether a founder is good at acquiring customers.
New Oregon recycling program keeps more than 130,000 mattresses out of landfills in first year • Oregon Capital Chronicle
Of the more than 130,000 mattresses and box springs recycled in 2025, about 2,000 were donated and able to be refurbished and reused for bedding, according to a recent announcement from the Virginia-based nonprofit Mattress Recycling Council, which runs the statewide program with oversight from the environmental quality department.
Harness Engineering for Self-Improvement | Lil’Log
This one post will focus on research around harness engineering and how it contributes to RSI. Much recent work on auto-research, self-improving agents, and evolutionary program search can be organized around this question. Other work on model self-play, synthetic data, test-time training and a broader theme of continual learning also matches the RSI vision (e.g. Yuan et al. 2024, Chen et al. 2024), Zhao et al. 2025, Choi et al. 2026)) but they will not be the focus of this post.
Bing cherry
Bing, perhaps the most famous and highly regarded sweet cherry in the world, had its origin in Oregon. Since 1875, when horticulturist Seth Lewelling created the sweet cherry cultivar in Milwaukie, it has been the most widely planted cherry variety in the United States. It took until the mid-1990s for other sweet cherry cultivars to break the exclusive hold that Bing had on the industry, by offering orchardists larger fruited cultivars and harvest dates that expanded the season. Until that time, Bing was the only dark red, fresh market cherry cultivar grown commercially in the Pacific Northwest, the largest cherry production region in the United States. For many years, it was also the main cultivar grown in California and Chile.
Bend CloudOps startup Platformr lands investment – Portland Business Journal
“This investment reflects where the market is heading,” said Matt Bressler, general partner of Lookout Ventures, in a written statement. “(Managed Service Providers) and (Systems Integrators) are under real pressure to deliver more value, faster, with less overhead, and Platformr is building the platform that makes that possible.”
(2008) Community: The Secret Sauce of a Successful Internet Startup – Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community
[Editor: Like many of you, I’ve long been a fan of Portland-based COLOURlovers, a site that fosters conversations around colors and palettes. We know about it, and have likely become fans, because of its vibrant community—a community that is the direct result of careful tending by its founder, Darius A. Monsef IV. And now, we’re lucky enough to have Darius sharing some of his insights on developing one of the most sought after features of today’s Web 2.0 sites, “community.”]
Familiar Names Top Active US Investor Ranks In Q2
Per Crunchbase data, General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz stood out among the most active U.S. venture and lead venture investors in the second quarter. The highest-spending investors, meanwhile, appear to be those who co-led Anthropic’s massive financing.
Former Allbirds CEO is the new President of Sorel
Joe Vernacchio is the new President of the Sorel brand, having taken up the position on the 22nd of June. This appointment marks his return to the group. He previously served as President of Mountain Hardwear for four years before leaving to become COO and ultimately CEO of Allbirds.
What a founder, who sold his last company for $780M, is unlearning to build the next AI-native winner
The frame Zain keeps returning to: a second-time founder’s playbook is baggage, not an asset, in an AI-native company. The reflexes that made Vungle scale — bigger orgs, MRR forecasting, seat-based pricing, agency cost structures — actively slow down the kind of company Blazel needs to be. The hard work isn’t building the product; it’s unlearning the playbook that built the last one.
The Emotional Cost of Finding Product-Market Fit
I’m still not sure I can help find others find product market fit – it remains the single hardest problem in startups. But I’m now approaching my fifth time with a front row seat to the search, and I can at least help you apply some emotional bubble to cushion the next blow.
Graph based Agent Memory – by Neo Kim
One “shared” memory every AI agent can read from and write to sounds simple. Yet the obvious ways to build it don’t work well…
These Are the 50 Best Pizzerias in the US in 2026
Although it started with releasing a guide to the best pizza in Italy and limited global recommendations, it’s since grown into a worldwide resource for ranking the best pizzerias. To determine its U.S. list, judges visit hundreds of leading pizzerias across the country, identifying the best restaurants based on a variety of factors such as ingredient quality, pizza dough, atmosphere, and more.
How to Calculate the Market Size of Your Startup
One more thing worth saying bluntly: success in a small market is failure, at least from a VC’s perspective. If you build something genuinely excellent, but the ceiling of your market is $50M in total revenue, your investors don’t make money. That’s not a venture outcome.
More Oregon startup news
