Silicon Florist links arrangement for October 16, 2026

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

AI Portland goes to Oregon State | AI Portland

Thank you to everyone at OSU. Every single person made us feel welcome. We felt special, we learned a ton, and we had a great time. Thank you to Burt, Rachel, and Shelly for making this happen and wrangling our groups all day, and to Kagan Tumer; Forrest Masters, Kearney Dean of Engineering; Shawn Donkin, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Agricultural Sciences; our panelists; and every researcher who walked us through their work.

Welcome to Seattle Flow

We help you discover the founders, investors, and organizations that can help you in your journey. We find the news, podcasts, and videos about our founders and startups, amplify them, and send you straight to the source. And we help the ecosystem connect by finding the right events for founders and builders, and the jobs at the region’s startups.

Agility Robotics Selects Nyobolt as its Ultra-Fast Charging Battery Technology Partner for Digit 5 | Agility

Agility Robotics, a leading humanoid robotics and physical AI company, today announced that Nyobolt, a pioneer of high-power, ultra-fast charging solutions, is the technology provider to Agility. The technology powers one of Digit® 5’s most significant upgrades: a fast recharge battery system that enables Digit to work more than 20 hours in a 24-hour day.

Amazon’s drone hub plans at Portland fulfillment center on hold – Portland Business Journal

Amazon⁠ appears to be hitting the brakes on its plan to bring a drone delivery hub to its fulfillment center in North Portland after it canceled a pre-application conference that was supposed to take place next week.

Oregon chip startup Mueon raises $65 million for more efficient computing – oregonlive.com

Former Intel scientist Wilfred Gomes launched Mueon last year. The startup is introducing a new feature in computer architecture it calls Cubelets, designed to integrate computing power, memory and power management into a package better suited for artificial intelligence.

Campfire + Expensify Integration

Expensify’s direct integration with Campfire© ERP brings faster expense reconciliation, automated receipt sync, and cleaner books. Say goodbye to manual data entry across tools.

(2013) Angel central: Bend launches Cascade Angels to invest in Central Oregon startups

It’s been nice to see the entrepreneurial spirit of Oregonians taking root in other towns. And where startups emerge, capital is wont to follow. Portland has been home to OEN’s Angel Oregon. Eugene has the Willamette Angel Conference. The Columbia Gorge has Gorge Bootcamp. Even Roseburg has its own group of angels. And now Bend—already home to things like the Bend Venture Conference—has upped the ante with the launch of Cascade Angels.

Portland Zine Symposium

The Portland Zine Symposium (PZS) is an organization that hosts, among other events, a yearly free conference and zine social exploring facets of independent publishing and DIY culture. This event has been held in Portland, Oregon every summer since 2001 and hosts over 150 zinesters from around the world each year, as well as many free workshops, panels, and discussions.

The Road Show: Portland Coffee + Donuts · Luma

As part of “The Road Show,” a year-long series where I’m hosting a venture capital event in every state in the US, I’m coming to Portland for coffee, donuts, and a conversation with local founders, investors, and operators. Join me on October 23 at 9:00 AM PT. The venue is TBD; the meeting spot will be shared privately with confirmed guests. Attendance is by approval only; the venue and meetup instructions will be shared privately with confirmed guests. Please do not come unless your registration has been approved.

My 2026 Summer Reading & Music Lists | by Barack Obama | Medium

It’s that time of year again: here are some of the books I’ve enjoyed this summer. If you’ve read any good ones, let me know!

How Codex Happened

Today, Codex is the centerpiece of OpenAI’s comeback—the product that has swallowed ChatGPT from the inside and become the foundation for everything the company is building next. But that summer it was still a scrappy effort to build an AI software engineer. A version launched in the cloud a few months earlier hadn’t found product-market fit, and the team was mid-pivot to a new version that ran on a developer’s computer in their terminal and in their code editor.

#StartupsEverywhere: Coral Gables, Fla. — ENGINE

Coral Gables, Florida-based startup DraftyAI builds research and drafting software for immigration attorneys, turning their evidence and case information into complete legal briefs, including exhibit lists. We sat down with co-founder and CEO Nadine Navarro to discuss her path from running a solo immigration practice to building legal tech, the AI and data privacy questions facing startups that handle sensitive client information, and what U.S. immigration policy means for startups, as well as international talent.

On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture – by Steve Huynh

Amazon’s writing culture survived the pandemic. The printouts may have moved online, and study hall may have transformed into a shared doc with comments down the margin, but that was fine. People still wrote the documents, and people still read them. But it did not survive the advent of AI.

How to Train Your Robot – by Brian Potter

Training an AI model, whether it’s an LLM or a model used for controlling robots, fundamentally requires lots and lots of examples of something being done correctly (or enough knowledge of what a correct action looks like that you can score an attempt). You feed a model some set of inputs, you compare the model’s output to the actual, correct output, and you use the difference between the two to modify the parameters of the model to reduce this difference via some flavor of gradient descent.

The Cost of Getting a Job Today

I used to have grand ideas about meritocracy. People should be hired on their skills and nothing else. I couldn’t have been more wrong. How you behave, how you relate to others, how you approach problems and the energy you bring to a team matter as much as your technical ability, and often more.

Write the Docs PDX + PSU Tech Comms Supermeetup, Thu, Nov 12, 2026, 5:30 PM | Meetup

Join us for our next meetup on Thursday, November 12 @ 5:30 PM. It’s our annual supermeetup with the Tech Comms program at Portland State University. We’ll meet somewhere TBD at the PSU campus, but you can also join us remotely using the Zoom link you get after you RSVP on Meetup.

Guest column: Next governor can make Oregon a startup state | The Bulletin

Reports and campaign agendas do not create jobs. Governors do — through what they fund, fix, and prioritize. For more high-wage jobs, investment, and competitiveness, Oregon must begin with the small businesses that already make up the bulk of our economy. We’re all eager for action. OEN is ready to help.

Panic TestFlight Team

Panic has a couple of iOS game ports in the works, and we’re looking for interested and engaged players to provide us feedback.

Even Benchmark thinks AI is eroding the venture pact against backing rivals | TechCrunch

For decades, the unwritten rule of venture capital was that a firm doesn’t back two companies that compete head-on. But speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this week, the partners of Benchmark readily acknowledged that the AI boom is straining that rule.

In Dialogue with AI: The AI Culture (Night 2) · Luma

Roberto A. Santiago is an applied AI researcher who has spent thirty-five years inside this field, in a lineage that runs directly back to Paul Werbos, the inventor of backpropagation through time. He builds these systems, and he has watched the culture around them form.