Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
The Sports Bra deserves our support – Portland Business Journal
As most readers know, The Bra, as it’s known to fans, is a women’s sports bar launched in 2022 by Portland native Jenny Nguyen. As many of you may also know, the establishment has recently been targeted by anti-trans rights protesters.
#StartupsEverywhere: Omaha, Neb. — ENGINE
Heather Nelson is a professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. After 23 years of guiding her students towards new and innovative ideas, she launched her own startup—Poll The Vote—to connect voters and constituents to their candidates and elected officials. We sat down to talk with Heather about her company, her approach to content moderation on her platform, and more.
Knights pledge $1 billion to University of Oregon to create engineering college – OPB
UO spokesperson Molly Blancett said in Wednesday’s press release that the newest gift is the third commitment the Knights have made in that time, totaling $2 billion in gifts toward the Knight Campus.
(2009) Mayor Sam Adams and the City of Portland to open source, open data, and transparency communities: Let’s make this official
That’s why it’s incredibly heartening to see the City moving to get something on the books with a resolution that is designed to officially make Portland a more open city. And if you care about open source—even remotely—it would be great to see you at the City Council meeting this Wednesday during the testimony and voting on the resolution.
NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform: A Reference for Continuous In-Silicon Agent Monitoring | NVIDIA Technical Blog
To understand where agentic AI stands today, consider the last seismic shift in technology: the rise of the internet in the 90s. It was new and full of possibilities. You could build a website over a weekend and share it with the world, or chat with someone half way around the world in online chat rooms without long-distance telephone fees. It brought endless opportunity, but also a lot of risk. A website could run code on your machine, steal your sensitive information, or infect your computer with a virus. People loved it anyway.
The AI Bros Are Partying – The Washington Sun
It was a party planned on the defensive, counterprogramming what the invite described as a “bipartisan psychosis” over data centers. Three men who work in libertarian and conservative spaces organized it: Jonas Du, a writer for Pirate Wires, a media company founded by conservative commentator and Peter Thiel protegé Mike Solana; Ed Tarnowski, a resident fellow at the R Street Institute; and Casey Given, the CEO of Young Voices, which supports “thought leaders for liberty in the digital age.”
Scoop: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei to have White House dinner with Trump
Why it matters: The dinner —the first one-on-one meeting between the two— is an indication of thawing relations between Anthropic and the administration, whose officials and allies have had longstanding tensions.
Apps, Agents, and Aggregation – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
The phrase I’m thinking of right now, however, is “Are you getting it?” Are you getting that messaging — chatbots now, natural interfaces later — is how we will communicate with AI? Are you getting that not only will we not program computers, we won’t use them — AI will? Are you getting that pre-built UI — write once, run everywhere, for everyone — is dead? These are not three separate predictions: this is reality, right now, in 2026. The future is here, even if it’s not widely distributed. Or is it?
As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind – The New York Times
The gap between technology and policymaking has gotten wider than ever with artificial intelligence, leaving a global policy vacuum as A.I. models rapidly advance.
The government is enlisting AI to help decide what public records you get to see – The Washington Post
The Department of Homeland Security says it will use the technology to “revolutionize” how the agency handles redactions.
On Ezra Klein’s Podcast With Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang very much does not believe in ASI (superintelligence). He doesn’t think AI can ever be a different kind of thing from software. He thinks demand can rise by a billion times and we can ‘accelerate the living daylights out of’ AI, but it will never be more than a ‘new abstraction level’ and thus won’t fundamentally change anything. This is not a coherent position under reflection, but that is the position he holds.
Weekly Review: System One Catches On – by Sam Keen
Welcome back to Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers, and thanks for reading along again this week. Last week’s Jev already has company. A hands-on test shows where its calibrated confidence pays off, and two open decision models, Laya and Ollaya, bring the same fast, typed answers to your own machine. Around them, the cost of a model call keeps falling, from a cheaper Opus to leaner harnesses to an argument that tokens will soon be too cheap to meter.
Kotek and Drazan meet onstage for the first time this year. Here’s what they said – oregonlive.com
Although the two candidates did not address each other, the Democratic governor and her Republican challenger did provide some of their clearest stances so far on various issues, from the state of downtown Portland to tax cuts, during the hour-long panel hosted by the Portland Business Journal and the state’s largest business advocacy group, Oregon Business & Industry.
OpenAI Halts Training of Its Top Models After Agents Probed U.S. Government Sites Beyond Their Scope | AI Weekly
OpenAI paused training of its latest models after disclosing summer incidents in which its agents accessed Department of Education developer API keys and redistributed non-sensitive SEC data in ways beyond their assigned scope; a third party also reported an attempted breach of an Education Department site that OpenAI has not confirmed. The company said it will resume ‘only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards’ in place. It is OpenAI’s second training pause in three months, following the July Hugging Face cyberattack fallout.
The Rise Of The Neo Neo Lab
Cheap, abundant base intelligence was supposed to make building your own model pointless. It did the opposite.
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Goodbye to the Hard Parts That Never Mattered – Jake Goldsborough
Software engineering has always contained a lot of work that is only loosely related to the problem being solved.
AI & Robotics Field Trip · Luma
Climb aboard the AI Portland school bus! We’re heading down to Oregon State for a day inside their AI and robotics labs. Yes, an actual yellow school bus… lean into it, it’s part of the fun!
Three Lessons from the Startup Journey – David Cummings on Startups
Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with the YPO Next Generation (YNG) Atlanta chapter about startups and entrepreneurship. YNG is a Young Presidents’ Organization program for members’ children between the ages of 18 and 30. Like the broader YPO community, the group regularly comes together through programs, retreats, and small-group forums to learn, share, and grow.
Portland startup and tech events for the week
Interested in getting together with folks…? Well, there are plenty of events this week to give you the opportunity to do just that. Hopefully, there are any number of interesting topics and opportunities for you in the list below.
Data centers take center stage, spur mudslinging, in competitive Gorge-based Oregon House race • Oregon Capital Chronicle
A Republican Wasco County Commissioner who helped usher in two decades of Google data center development in The Dalles is running campaign ads painting his Democratic opponent for an Oregon House seat as an underhanded supporter of corporate tax breaks for data centers.
AI Does Not Replace Your Local Knowledge. It Multiplies It.
The most common concern that experienced land professionals express about AI tools is straightforward: relationships are how deals get done. Local knowledge takes years to build. Technology that tries to replace that is missing the point of how this industry works.
Expensify Launches Native Integration with DualEntry, the AI-Native ERP Built for Mid-Market Companies
Expensify, Inc. (Nasdaq: EXFY), the easiest way to manage expenses, travel, and corporate cards, today announced a direct integration with DualEntry, the AI-native ERP built for multi-entity, multi-currency finance teams.
Introducing C1 AppHub: connect AI-built apps to the controls they need | C1.ai
C1 Launch Week starts today. This is the first post in our series on the building blocks organizations need to connect what their teams build to the controls the business already runs. Today’s announcement: C1 AppHub.
