Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
OEN Angel Oregon Fall Cohort 2026
OEN’s Angel Oregon ‘Capital & Fundraising Literacy’ programs are designed specifically for early-stage founders across Oregon and SW Washington. Whether you’re building a technology company, consumer product brand, or life or bio science venture, our goal is to help you better understand the fundraising landscape while building the skills and confidence you’ll need when the time is right.
Powered by Ingenuity: NSBE PDX Entrepreneurship GBM Social Mixer Tickets, Wednesday, August 5 • 5 PM – 8 PM | Eventbrite
This is a space for Black and Brown engineers, entrepreneurs, and community members to connect, surface who in our community is already building something — and what they need to succeed.
The remix is the on-ramp | Vibes DIY Blog
It began with a bug fix. Dr. Dea’s Drum Machine — a classic 16-step sequencer with synthesized kicks, snares, and cowbells — had two copies of its playback scheduler fighting over the same timer. We collapsed them into one, gave it a four-on-the-floor default so PLAY makes a sound immediately, and shipped it. That’s maintenance.
MenuMingle brings video to restaurant menus in Portland – Portland Business Journal
MenuMingle isn’t trying to replace Toast, Square, DoorDash, Resy or OpenTable. It is designed to help the guest decide and then route the guest into the systems the restaurant already uses. Its focus is the menu and what the menu and menu engagement can tell the operator. Operators can control what and when people see items and communicate prep time expectations.
Deschutes Tech Guild – July Meetup, Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 6:00 PM | Meetup
How self-sufficient can you be in solving a programming challenge? What if you had to not only build the solution yourself, but also the language in which that solution was written? Can you implement that language in itself? This talk explores my adventures in seeking this “visceral sense of self-sufficiency” and the side-quests along the way. We’ll hit the technical highlights of how I built my own interpreter and compiler, including some fun extras like supporting first class continuations and demonstrating a self-perpetuating compiler backdoor. We’ll trace the lineage of thinkers this project draws on back through Graham, Sussman, McCarthy, and Church, among others. And finally, we’ll try to square my subjective experience of searching for self-sufficiency yet finding mostly gratitude for all the things I did not build.
Ship it dark: the scariest change is the smallest line you write | Vibes DIY Blog
When social-graph notifications went live on Vibes DIY — someone asks to follow you and your phone buzzes; a new follower shows up in your notifications and the weekly digest — the pull request that actually turned the feature on was the smallest one in the whole effort. Around ninety lines: one helper and two call sites. The PR that sounds the scariest, the one that takes a dormant feature and makes it fire for real, was the least risky line anyone wrote.
(2015) Did AWS Device Farm sound familiar? That’s because Amazon acquired Portland startup AppThwack to build it – Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community
Last week, the Web was all abuzz with this nifty new mobile testing environment from Amazon called AWS Device Farm. Folks were waxing philosophic about the magic of being able to test their mobile apps on real physical devices. And we, here in Portland, were sort of scratching our heads. Wasn’t this what AppThwack does? Well, yes. And yes. You see AWS Device Farm is AppThwack.
Hyperscale AI data centers paused in New York: executive order – Fast Company
On Tuesday, Governor Kathy Hochul is set to sign an executive order that would halt construction permits for hyperscale data centers, multiple media outlets reported. According to the New York Times, the order would apply to “so-called hyperscale” data centers, any locations that use at least 50 megawatts of power to function.
Simulating everything, sort of: The promise and limits of world models – Ars Technica
From these conversations, we learned that while LLMs-as-a-product started with an interface (chat) and then sought a use case, the big players in world models right now are arguably working in the other direction: They’re starting with specific use cases and applications in robotics, research, and asset generation, but it’s unclear exactly how the interfaces, systems, and tools will ultimately look.
Nearly 6 in 10 young women get health, wellness info from influencers | Pew Research Center
This is especially true for young women: 57% of women ages 18 to 29 say they ever get health and wellness information from influencers. That is 10 percentage points higher than the share of young men, according to a fall 2025 Pew Research Center survey.
Punch Yourself in the Face with Reality | Adi
I know you want to use AI as an escape. It is so tempting. You get to sit in your bubble and imagine everything and see it come to life and your agent buddy will keep cheering you on while you get nothing done with your life. And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.
The PacWest Center Pine Tree Has Died at Age 42
The quirky fixture of the Portland skyline was removed for safety reasons, according to Wyatt Cerny, vice president of real estate at Fountainhead Development, the Fairbanks, Alaska–based company that has owned PacWest Center since October 2025. An exact cause of death was not given, but an arborist evaluated the pine and determined it was “in declining health and no longer viable,” Cerny said.
Portland’s Voodoo Doughnut Opens in NYC
Expansion began locally in 2008, and Voodoo migrated out of state, first to Colorado, five years later. In 2017, the private equity firm Fundamental Capital took a majority stake, and expansion ratcheted up along with more corporate sensibilities. “I like to think when we open a new Voodoo in a new city, we bring a little bit of that old-school Portland with us but allow the city to shape us, too,” Waterman says. (In its early days, the shop hosted competitions to see who could stack the most doughnuts on his, uh, member. The winner got $50 and a cream-filled Cock ‘n’ Balls doughnut — almost certainly making it the only Fundamental holding that once hosted dick-measuring contests.)
Why It’s So Hard For Us to See Our Own Problem Habits | by Markham Heid | The Escape | Jul, 2026 | Medium
Poor performers in many social and intellectual domains seem largely unaware of just how deficient their expertise is. Top performers tend to underestimate their performances.
Fuji to Hood
Japanese-American craft beer, cider, sake, food, music, art, performance, and culture festival rotating biennially between Tokyo, Japan and Portland, Oregon
Portland Waterfront Park Design Competition
One of the most consequential civic projects this decade, it will activate the river’s edge and foster a ‘toes in the water’ human connection as well as create new and inspiring views to the Park and the Willamette River. Improved physical connections to neighboring Downtown are expected along with advancing the Willamette’s ecological recovery and biodiversity.
The Most Human Technology Ever Made | Andreessen Horowitz
But I think the more interesting thing about AI is that it’s also the other kind of technology, the paintbrush kind, the kind that lets us express ourselves as humans. A few technologies in history have managed to be both: language, the printing press, and the steam engine are all tools that saved enormous labor and, almost as a side effect, expanded what a person could be. AI belongs to that small category. It makes making things feel more possible.
Inspire Vancouver Grants for Arts, Culture & Science | I’m Into This Place
Inspire Vancouver is poised to grant more than $6 million to arts, culture, heritage, and science programming and education. Where did this money come from, how are they distributing it, and how is this going to change the landscape for our community?
Large language models often prioritize Western moral values, overlooking other cultures
There is a real risk of cultural bias if AI assumes the whole world, ranging from Argentina and Egypt to Japan and Zimbabwe, ought to pursue the same values as the Western world.
So Far, 2026 Is A Solid Year For Cybersecurity Startup Funding
Overall, the past few months have given cybersecurity startup investors and founders a case for optimism, but we aren’t seeing anything close resembling the hoopla and valuation escalation around foundational AI. Still, there are some encouraging signs. Exits are happening. Big rounds are getting done. And as AI agents continue to proliferate, it’s a given we’ll need more sophisticated security to monitor their activities.
Control the ideas, not the code – <antirez>
I have a doubt only regarding young programmers that don’t have enough experience, and can’t build a mental model. We don’t know, yet, if they will require or not to understand very well how a given piece of code works, but I believe they should learn how to write programs. Yet, I’m not sure checking the LLM output is the right thing they should do. It may be a lot more useful if they learn some programming language and implement a small interpreter, a small database, an hash table and so forth. Reviewing some Javascript stuff of some web site for a customer? Hell, no, don’t lose time with that shit.
What will be left for us to work on?
I made three arguments. First, the AI as Normal Technology framework is a correct and useful as a way to think about AI’s impacts, unless and until there is some future discontinuity such as through recursive self-improvement. Second, even though we should take recursive self-improvement seriously, there is no milestone that companies might achieve in the lab that will suddenly put us all out of work. Third and finally, jobs of the future will be radically different, and a lot of adaptation will be needed. I shared my thinking about what this might look like and ended with a vision of human/AI “co-superintelligence”.
Techworks on Tap 2026 » Techworks
Join us for Techworks on Tap 2026—a vibrant, purpose-driven happy hour happening Thursday, July 16 from 4:00–6:00 PM at Metropolitan Tavern in Portland. This isn’t just networking—it’s an engaging evening where tech leaders, founders, and innovators come together to share insights, ask bold questions, and explore real solutions to real challenges.
Oregon team of nearly 100 partners awarded NSF Regional Innovation Engine Award, set up to receive up to $160 million to grow state’s semiconductor industry | Newsroom | Oregon State University
Frontiers of Advanced Semiconductor Technology, known as FAST, an Oregon consortium that includes nearly 100 partners from across Oregon, will receive up to $160 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) during the next 10 years to grow the state’s semiconductor ecosystem. Oregon State University is the administrative home for FAST.
Head of Developer Growth Marketing Job at Depot Technologies, Inc. in Portland, Oregon | Silicon Florist
We’re looking for a Head of Developer Growth Marketing to own Depot’s developer acquisition engine and lead the marketing function through a period of rapid growth. You’ll run the demand program that drives trials and new customers, and work with a small, high-leverage team that performs like one several times its size. We’re scaling deliberately, not by brute-force headcount, because we expect everyone here to operate with serious leverage.
Verrus pursues ‘better data center’ in Salem, Oregon – Portland Business Journal
A Silicon Valley startup is proposing a data center project in Salem that it claims addresses the issues that are making such facilities increasingly unwelcome in communities.
This Houston geothermal startup is betting it can beat fossil fuels on cost – Fast Company
Hidden in a forest south of Bend, Oregon, a first-of-its-kind clean energy project is starting to take shape. Called Project Obsidian, the “superhot” geothermal power plant will deliver 24/7 electricity—and could soon compete on cost with fossil fuels as it pioneers new drilling technology.
