Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Founder Foundations – Info Session | Metro Region Innovation Hub
Learn more about Founder Foundations, our new 6-week primer built for first-time, idea-stage founders in the Portland Metro Area. Designed for those ready to trade professional experience for entrepreneurship, the program will give you real insight into what it actually takes to build a company.
Exclusive: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang defends Chinese AI amid Kimi panic
The world’s top AI chipmaker says American companies should “absolutely” be allowed to use Chinese models — a direct challenge to Trump officials and the U.S. labs lobbying Washington to shut them out.
200 US utility firms join Trump electricity pledge as data center electricity use expected to quadruple by 2035 — but does the President’s pledge have the teeth to regulate electricity pricing? | TechRadar
In an attempt to quell the national dissatisfaction with AI and the data centers needed to support capacity, over 200 entities have joined President Trump’s pledge to not pass on rising electricity costs to consumers.
Never Enough | Dark Thoughts
Two recent stories about Silicon Valley are hard to read without wondering if everyone involved has lost their mind. Once a place that celebrated “the crazy ones, the misfits and rebels who saw things differently,” it now seems to have found a new kind of crazy that isn’t born of rebellion but fear of falling behind. Everyone is chasing the person ahead of them, with little time to remember where they meant to go.
(2014) Remembering Nike Chalkbot: Five years ago, a project for Tour de France had a lasting impact on the Portland startup scene
For those of you going “Chalk-what?” allow me to introduce you to Chalkbot, a Nike campaign for the Tour de France in 2009, brilliantly executed by a contingent of folks from Wieden+Kennedy’s Portland office, among others. Chalkbot was a robot. That could receive text messages—messages of inspiration—and then “paint” them in chalk along the route of the Tour de France.
Distilling The Moat
If the AI platforms cannot deter distillation by pricing, and can only hope to stay slightly ahead of the distillers and the open-weight models by an expensive arms race, their moat is extremely shallow. It doesn’t come close to justifying trillion-dollar IPOs, covering the country in data centers, or launching them into space.
Led By DeepSeek, 10 Frontier Labs Rush Onto The Crunchbase Unicorn Board In June
A total of 34 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in June, altogether adding more than $110 billion in value. Ten of those companies were AI labs, collectively valued at $65 billion.
2030-shaped software
Many of the conversations and decisions about what we’re building now are impacted by this. More and more, we’re aiming towards building “2030-shaped software.” This is a vague aspiration and “agent-first software” isn’t much better. But, while we can’t predict the future, we can share how we’re thinking about the problem.
What I’d Tell My Team About Competition – Stay SaaSy
If our market has any value at all, we’re going to have competitors. Many of them will be formidable, because the thermodynamics of capitalism dictate that competition always eventually appears. If it didn’t, it would mean that we were doing something useless.
Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program | OpenAI
We’re announcing the launch of our ChatGPT for small businesses program, an initiative to help small businesses be more productive and scale their businesses with ChatGPT.
The 7 Hires a Hardware Startup Needs to Get Right | Andreessen Horowitz
When deploying physical hardware or dealing with a diverse set of stakeholders, business models become uniquely unforgiving. In a way, this is a good definition for what an “American Dynamism” company actually is. As a result, hiring has higher stakes for engineering and non-engineering roles alike.
Make good introductions, build strong alliances, win.
I like smart and interesting people who want to make the world a better place, and I like introducing those kinds of people to each other. The more of this kind of introduction I make, the more I build a network of this kind of people around me, and the more valuable the entire network becomes to each of its members.
A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team
Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World’s Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team. We talked about Claude Code, Claude Tag, Fable, coding agent security, evals, tool design, and how Anthropic use these tools themselves.
LLMs Are Surprisingly Bad Blog Authors
So let’s go back to the beginning: you have an idea, but writing is hard! Write anyways; write poorly. Use an LLM for research and feedback. Do not simply hand it your idea and expect it to generate something enjoyable or effective to read. And while you’re at it, lean into the imperfections, because even if they aren’t information-theoretical depictions of your ideas, they help make your writing interesting, unexpected, and yes, surprising. And that is what makes it fun to read.
The AI Bubble Is No Ordinary Bubble – The Atlantic
The value of AI-linked firms has climbed $27 trillion in the past three years—an astonishing amount, equivalent to 36 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock market today.
Three Words That It’s Time For Us To Leave Behind: Non-Technical, Unicorn, and Oversubscribed. | Hunter Walk
“Wired, Tired, Expired” was a fun feature of Wired Magazine back in the day. It would take a general concept and give you three variations – one that was ‘of the moment,’ one that was recently popular but long in the tooth, and one which needed to have a stake put through its heart.
Jury finds Nike discriminated against former employee due to her gender – OPB
One of Oregon’s most globally recognized companies spent years paying a former employee less and promoting her at a snail’s pace due, in part, to her sex. That’s the conclusion of a jury deliberating in a case brought by Heather Hender, an engineer who worked at Nike for five years.