Silicon Florist links arrangement for October 6, 2026

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

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 and organizations like the Rose City Rollers, Portland Fire (WNBA), Cherry Bombs FC (USL W), Portland Cascade (AUSL), The Sports Bra, and Unmatched filmmakers who retell the iconic Portland Pilots 2005 season with legends Megan Rapinoe and Christine Sinclair.

(2009) From Air Sharing to Zipcar: 40+ iPhone apps developed in the Silicon Forest

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Portland—and to some extent the entire Silicon Forest—has a predilection for building iPhone apps. No, it’s true. There are a number of amazing development shops in town—some one-person, some a few people—building iPhone apps that are attracting users by the thousands.

Introducing Beam: Reflection’s 501B open-weight model — Reflection

We are introducing Beam, Reflection’s first open-weight model. Beam is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 501 billion total parameters, 23 billion active, built for coding, reasoning, and agentic workloads.

Anthropic Subscriptions Offer 5x+ More Value Than OpenAI

Subscription plans are still the primary way consumers and small businesses pay for AI. These plans are highly subsidized—as we previously explained in June—but can still make economic sense as powerful customer acquisition and marketing tools.

ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons | Nieman Journalism Lab

OpenAI’s chatbot isn’t just imitating the magazine’s style. It’s also falsely attributing AI-generated images to real artists.

Mistral Large 4

Mistral Large 4 is a state-of-the-art, open-weight, general-purpose multimodal model with a granular Mixture-of-Experts architecture. It features 49B active parameters and 1.05T total parameters, and a 1.6B vision encoder.

Apply to YC | Y Combinator

The deadline to apply on-time is November 2 at 8pm PT; if you apply before the deadline, you will get a decision by December 11. If you apply after the deadline, we will still consider the application but can’t promise exactly when we’ll get back to you.

Portland Public Schools Releases Two School Closure Scenarios to School Board

The first scenario would close 14 schools—13 elementary schools and Sellwood Middle School. The second would shutter 11 schools—10 elementary schools and Sellwood. Under both scenarios, which WW has listed below, seven of the district’s 11 K-8 schools will become K-5 schools. It also recommends closing the high school at the Metropolitan Learning Center, which was targeted for closure last year and saved through advocacy. No alternative or focus option schools are targeted for closure, though Sunnyside K-8 would see its environmental focus option discontinue under both scenarios.

The 5 Questions I’d Ask Before Investing a Dollar in Any Startup | by Aaron Dinin, PhD | Oct, 2026 | Entrepreneurship Handbook

I’d want to know how much the founder had already learned about the mechanics of building the business. And I think I could learn most of what I needed to know about those mechanics from the following five surprisingly simple questions…

Portland Design Month 2026 — AIGA Portland

Every October, our city’s creative energy comes together for Portland Design Month. Studios open their doors, artists show their work, and designers gather across neighborhoods to share what they’re making. Come see what Portland is creating.