Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Kotek strikes blow to Salem data center project – Portland Business Journal
The governor’s move came before Verrus had formally begun the land use process. The company revealed its plans earlier this month as rumors of a data center project were swirling in Salem. A discussion of the project at a Salem City Council meeting on Monday brought forth an overflow crowd of people overwhelmingly opposed to the project.
Launching the Housing Innovation Coworking Space: How PIE is Helping to Reimagine Innovation in Housing
Inspired in part by PIE’s existing partnership with Autodesk, a company with deep roots in architectural software, the PIE team opened up an application and built a cohort of organizations working on different pieces of the housing puzzle. The Missing Middle Housing Fund was a part of that cohort, which is where MMHF’s relationship with PIE began.
(2015) Why just work when you can cowork? Portland startup Workfrom spearheads local arm of International Coworking Week
Portland is no stranger to coworking. It’s been popular as both an office format—and an ad hoc coffeeshop format—here since the turn of the century. But we’re not the only ones who love it anymore. It seems these days every city and town has their own set of awesome coworking spaces. And with this whole Portland coworking renaissance taking place, it’s nice to see Portland startup Workfrom organizing Portland’s own arm of International Coworking Week, next week.
Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations
After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.
Google Earth: How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran
Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?
A Leaked Memo Ties Cyberattacks on Minnesota Water Utilities to Iran | WIRED
A memo obtained by WIRED, issued by the water utilities information sharing group WaterISAC, links dozens of cyberattacks against Minnesota water utilities to Tehran.
AI labels to be compulsory on authentic-looking content under EU rules | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian
Under the rules, synthetic text, images, video and audio designed to look truthful must be visibly marked as AI-generated and contain a digital watermark to show the artificial origins of the content.
This AI notetaker won’t sell surveillance to your boss
And so this week I talked to Chris Pedregal. Pedregal is the co-founder and CEO of Granola, which has been my own AI notetaker since shortly after it launched. Pedregal started the company after a long tenure at Google, which he joined as an associate product manager in 2008. He left the company after a few years to start Socratic, a homework-helper app that Google acquired in 2018. In 2022, he left again to play around with the pre-ChatGPT large language models from OpenAI, and soon he and co-founder Sam Stephenson went on to launch Granola.
The $1tn AI build-out: Power, capital and contractors under pressure – Capacity
Hyperscaler AI capex has passed $1tn, reshaping data centre construction, power pro-curement and financing risk across the global infrastructure sector.
The End of an Era – Hugh Howey
Some of us have known for decades, have been writing and pontificating about this since Ken Jennings lost at Jeopardy and Kasparov lost at chess. The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at least well enough to cause confusion and speculation — and that’s creating an existential crisis among authors, confusion among readers, and legal action within the industry.
Why I Shut Down My Bootstrapped Health AI Startup After 7 Years | by Rachel Draelos, MD, PhD | Data Science Collective | Medium
My experience as a founder was an intense crash-course in health AI implementation. After reading this article, I hope you can leverage the lessons I learned to guide your own health AI venture to success.
The Session You Cannot Take With You | EARENDIL
Inference APIs are frustratingly moving away from that property, at least somewhat. They increasingly return a mixture of text and provider-bound state that is very intentionally non-portable.
These Are Sectors Where Seed Rounds Of $5M To $10M Are Clustering This Year
Using this methodology we identified multiple popular investment themes and zeroed in on five. The first — cybersecurity — we tackled in a separate piece. Here we delve into the other four: proptech, cancer therapeutics, space tech and robotics.
Americans feel the sting of high prices every day, so why does the Fed need so many ways to measure inflation?
This confusion is a big reason why the once-obscure argument over the best inflation speedometer is heating up. And the outcome of this debate could change how the Fed thinks about where it sets interest rates. It isn’t just an academic debate: These discussions can dictate mortgage rates, wage growth and daily household budgets, a chief concern for inflation-weary Americans.
Don’t Hit the NOS Too Soon: A Founder’s Guide to PR
In his role on speedrun, Lester Chen has worked with hundreds of founders launching new companies. And he spends a lot of that time helping them understand a more practical way to think about PR and media relations. Below are the tips he shares most often with actual a16z speedrun teams.
Miscellaneous Thoughts About Building Stuff with AI in July 2026 – Brent Ozar Unlimited®
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been using the bejeezus out of AI. I don’t really feel like an expert by any means – it’s so hard to keep up with the advancements – but I’ve been enjoying reading Grant Fritchey’s series on building stuff with AI, and I thought you might enjoy some of my lessons learned as well.
LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated ‘slop’ | TechCrunch
LinkedIn is taking aim at the “AI slop” — low-quality, artificially generated content — filling its feed. On Thursday, the company announced that it’s adding a new feature to let users click a “seems like AI slop” button when someone’s post appears to have been written with AI.
Adidas’s Viral Bowling Shoes Are Back and Kookier Than Ever | GQ
Last year, Brain Dead did something that nobody saw coming. Right in the middle of the boom of boxing shoes and football boots and trail runners, the LA streetwear label linked up with Adidas for the Bowling—a literal bowling shoe dug out from deep in the Three Stripes archives.
More Oregon startup news
