Silicon Florist links arrangement for September 25, 2026

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

You Think You Need a Foot Doctor – by Dr. Astrid J. Scholz

I’ve been thinking about this because of the requests for proposals, terms of reference, and other procurement announcements that come across my desk, and the desks of my colleagues who have spent decades inside and alongside mission-driven organizations. They arrive as neat, fundable, RFP-shaped asks. We need a five-year strategic plan. We need a succession plan. We need to hire a development director. We need a new executive director. Each is a reasonable request. Each can be answered with a one-pager, a template, and an invoice. And each, in my experience, is usually the wrong place to start.

Design for the Win: Creatives Behind Women’s Sports in Portland Tickets, Wednesday, October 14  •  6 PM – 8:30 PM | Eventbrite

Join us for an inspiring evening celebrating the incredible creatives who work behind the scenes to fuel the surge of support for women’s and gender expansive sports in Portland! This event features presentations and a dynamic panel with talented individuals who have contributed their magic to teams like the Rose City Rollers, Portland Fire (WNBA), Cherry Bombs FC (USL W), Portland Cascade (AUSL), and Unmatched filmmakers who retell the iconic Portland Pilots 2005 season with legends Megan Rapinoe and Christine Sinclair.

(2007) Portland Small Business wants you

Local-startup tracker and small-business social network Portland Small Business is looking for a few good companies to review. The only qualifying factor? Portland Small Business hopes to make the pool of companies as diverse as possible. I’m looking for 10-20 small businesses to review on this site. I want a representative sample of all the…

White House is isolated in brushing off AI safety | Semafor

As a result, nations may be left setting nonbinding rules and best practices without the buy-in of the biggest companies’ home country. Meanwhile, frontier labs are pushing forward with their own self-regulatory schemes, which will ask them to agree on testing standards in a highly competitive environment.

Bill Gates warns AI is powerful enough to cause “a billion deaths”

Driving the news: “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” he will tell Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, per excerpts NBC released Friday.

Silicon Florist watch party · Luma

An opportunity to join folks from the Portland startup community for a little watch party — all from the comfort of your own keyboard.

Internal memos: Microsoft shakes up communications as Nadella makes a push to build in public – GeekWire

Microsoft is moving its communications function out of its marketing group and into the corporate, external and legal affairs organization led by Brad Smith, its vice chair and president, according to internal emails Thursday from Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

AI labs need to start funding historical research

The TLDR is that pairing historians working in collaborative groups with the current frontier models would, in my view, produce numerous advances in historical knowledge and interpretation. My guess is that many of these could end up being quite meaningful. This was not the case as recently as last year. I think AI labs, historical researchers, and funding agencies should start actively pursuing these collaborations.

Newcomer nabs another Portland high-rise as real estate influence grows – oregonlive.com

The latest power-play by a newcomer shows just how ascendant he’s become in Portland’s clubby real estate scene. It also shows how weak the bargaining position of many legacy owners remains.

Elakha Alliance, Oregon Coast Aquarium join Seattle groups studying habitat for sea otter reintroduction • Lincoln Chronicle

Except for one failed experiment and a handful of curious wayfarers, sea otters have not lived in Oregon’s coastal waters since they were hunted to extinction for their fur more than a century ago. But a new, three-year research effort with plenty of scientific heft behind it will see what it might take to re-establish a species once was found along much of the coast.

YC startups are skipping the API and shipping an MCP server | Installmap

We expected the newest companies to lead on all three. Most of them build on language models and sell to developers, so a public API seemed the obvious first step and llms.txt and MCP the later ones. The llms.txt column does rise with every batch group. The API column does not. In the newest batches an llms.txt is more common than an API, and an MCP server is nearly as common.

there are no more moats. you never had one.

back in the day you would dig a moat around the castle. then you would make it deeper. then deeper again. you would add a drawbridge. crocodiles in the water if you could get them. and if someone was dumb enough to try to swim across anyway, you would pour boiling oil on them from the wall. and it worked. for a few hundred years the castle was the dominant piece of military technology in Europe.

Why Venture Due Diligence Got Worse for Deep Tech

A reviewer with the right background can answer them in weeks, which is faster than the median founder’s wait for a Series A and slower than the frontier round closes now. That difference in speed is the whole cost of the fix, and the $4.9 billion of 2025 is the scale of capital now exposed to the question.

Why Good Product Ideas Don’t Survive – Itamar Gilad

A/B-test research shows that the vast majority of ideas deliver little or no value; some even detract value. Analyze feature usage in your product and look at past roadmaps, and you’ll see a clear power law — a small minority of your ideas create significant impact. The reason is simple: in most products most low-hanging fruit have already been picked. The odds of coming up with something novel and truly good are quite slim.

The Most Important Market in AI is the Middle | Tomasz Tunguz

AI prices are collapsing, but the competition is not at the frontier. Anthropic held the Opus line at $5 & $25 across five releases while OpenAI cut Luna 80% then 50% again, & open models now run a majority of token volume at an 86% discount to closed models. The most capable model, Fable 5.1, commanded only 3.7% of gateway spending in its first twelve days. Demand is a normal distribution with a fat middle, & as intelligence per dollar explodes the tokens may shift to commodity. Whether that happens will determine the economics of the AI market.

The Age of the Soft Skill

Anybody with an agent and a little patience can sit down with a codebase they have never seen and reason about it. I don’t mean throw a prompt at it blindly and hope. I mean actually work through it, in collaboration with the thing: what does this do? why was it built this way? what breaks if we change it? You can understand the tradeoffs in a system in an afternoon that used to take a new hire six months of pairing with the one person who knew.

Scoop: Trump world open new front to cast Anthropic CEO as face of AI doom

Why it matters: The attacks signal that Anthropic could remain a Trump target as his allies push back on Amodei’s AI safety warnings amid the midterm elections. Trump surrogates see Amodei as an easy foil because of his politics and focus on AI safety, sources told Axios.

Data centers take center stage, spur mudslinging, in competitive Gorge-based Oregon House race • Oregon Capital Chronicle

A Republican county commissioner who ushered in Google data center development in The Dalles is accusing his opponent of being a champion of data center tax breaks.

More Oregon startup news