Month: August 2026

We assumed it was going to be an absolutely devastating fire season. Unfortunately, that assumption is rapidly becoming fact. Which means there are hundreds — if not thousands — of rural entrepreneurs who are scrambling to survive. Our friend Brad Attig took the opportunity to round up some ways you can help. (And please, if you’re not in a position to help, please simply consider amplifying Brad’s post. The way you would for a fellow entrepreneur.)

Caught some news from The Information on our favorite bobbing sphere of AI compute, Panthalassa. Apparently — fresh on the heels of their recent raise — they’re raising $225 million more. Which would put their valuation in the realm of $2 billion. So it’s a unicorn. But it’s more like a narwhal.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

Why I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy

On Thursday, July 23rd, I resigned from OpenAI. On the 24th, I started as a Founding Researcher at Conduit. We’re building telepathy: thought-to-text models, trained on non-invasive neural data.

You’ve probably heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone. And if you haven’t — and you live on the west coast of the United States — it’s probably a topic with which you should familiarize yourself. Because yeah. Sorry. I drifted off there for a second. Anyway, some good news on that front. Now you don’t have to do the prep or figure it out or whatever. Because PDX Quake Prep is here to help.

Remember Ray King…? What about AboutUs…? Yeah. That’s a deep cut. From way back. And while Ray may not be as prevalent in the startup community as he once was, his current startup pursuit is going exceptionally well: Porkbun now manages more than 4 million domain names.

You worked the booth for three days. You had a number of the good conversation — especially the one where that one potential customer tells you exactly what is blocking the deal — and then it evaporates somewhere between teardown and the follow-up. The badge scans land in your CRM with names, maybe titles, and literally nothing else. Your notes are illegible by the flight home. What a waste. If only you had a means of capturing that critical information in real time.

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

Trump AI framework excludes open AI models

The AI framework reviewed on Tuesday defines a covered frontier model as closed-source with state-of-the-art capabilities and national security risks, multiple sources briefed on meetings held at the White House said.