Silicon Florist links arrangement for October 21, 2026

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

Some final words on Foursquare. – by Dennis Crowley

Translation: The Foursquare acquisition was a $0 outcome for equity holders – $0 for preferred, $0 for common. It’s bittersweet to see these details surface publicly – at least now there’s an opportunity to comment on them.

PDX Code & Coffee – Beaverton @ Fly Chai, Mon, Oct 26, 2026, 9:00 AM | Meetup

Code & Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session: drink your beverage of choice, bring your laptop, and hang out with your peers! Have engaging conversations, or focus on work or projects. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work.

ZincFive says Nasdaq unaffected by SPAC delisting – Portland Business Journal

Spark I Acquisition Corp., the SPAC ZincFive plans to merge with and use to reach the public markets, was recently bounced from the Nasdaq. The exchange cited Spark’s failure to complete a business combination — the whole point of forming a SPAC — within Nasdaq’s required three years.

US Startup Achieves First Deep-Sea Geothermal Power Generation at Underwater Volcano, Netting 2 Kilowatts; Commercialization Faces Steep Hurdles — BigGo Finance

The experiment was conducted on September 27 at Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano located in the Pacific Ocean about 480 kilometers off the coast of Oregon. A 3-ton test device called “Adélie” was installed on the seafloor and remotely operated from an operations base in Seattle through the “Regional Cabled Array,” a subsea fiber-optic network owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

(2015) Builders gonna build: PDX Code Community forms to support those in PDX Code School limbo

If you haven’t been following the PDX Code School story, you should jump over to Malia Spencer’s coverage of what’s happening. It’s been a mess but her work has been nothing short of excellent. To summarize, PDX Code School abruptly closed over the weekend—as in locks changed and stuff—leaving students and instructors in a lurch. A few days later? The industrious and motivated community has formed their own group: PDX Code Community.

PHP: Security advisory: Critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, update now

Who is at risk: all PHP installations serving web requests, including PHP-FPM, Apache with mod_php, php-cgi, FrankenPHP and LiteSpeed. We consider the risk highest for mod_php, with a demonstrated exploit where an unauthenticated request can trigger the attack before any application code runs.

Nvidia picks OpenShell to tame AI gents

Nvidia on Wednesday introduced its OpenShell Reference Architecture. Based on the company’s OpenShell secure runtime, It’s a recipe for creating, operating, observing, and policing AI agents using OpenShell on Nvidia hardware.

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise

The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores.

EXCLUSIVE: EBay to lay off 9% of workforce in push to simplify operations, internal memo shows | Reuters

The move will eliminate around ​1,100 jobs, based on the 12,300 employees eBay had at ​the end of last year. The company also let go ⁠about 6% of its workforce, or 800 employees, in February as part of ​efforts to streamline operations.

Oregon campaign-finance data: download & analyze · Portland Civic Lab

All current records held in our published Oregon ledger, not all ORESTAR history or a complete election cycle. Includes all observed filers, not only council/governor campaigns. Federal FEC records are excluded.

The Myth of ‘Polybius’

When it comes to urban legends surrounding arcade video game culture in the early 1980s, one game rules them all: Polybius. Aside from the many 21st century accounts of people who played (and reacted) to this malevolent machine, the first online mention appeared in a 1998 article at Coinop.org. Since then, stories of the brief November 1981 sightings of this rarest of black box cabinets have excited the imaginations of game nerds and journalistic sleuths.

More than 800 city of Portland workers poised to strike – OPB

The union represents 800 city workers in largely behind-the-scenes positions, ranging from financial analysts to multimedia specialists to technology staff. CPPW was formed in 2023 and adopted its first two–year contract last year. Its members are currently negotiating over wage increases and layoff protections — a piece of that original contract that both parties had agreed to renegotiate this year.

Coxon Day – by Rufus Knuppel – The New Critic

Over the next decade, our political life will undergo a total transformation. The tectonic continents of Left and Right will shudder, fracture, and re-form. Ideas and ideologies, so long fossilized in our institutions, will be liquidated and repoured. The first glimmers of that societal revolution are, right now, appearing all around us. But the battle lines of this new era will be drawn from geography altogether strange and foreign to the electorate: the once obscure, and often extreme, Bay Area factions that have so long labored and lamented over the most significant technological creation of our time.

Making every harness durable – Vercel

Developers are familiar with running coding agents locally through harnesses like Pi, Claude Code, and others. They are reliable daily drivers for generating code, but keeping agents running around the clock requires your computer to be on and awake, which led to the laptop lid memes and Mac mini demand spike.

Your product is not the center of the universe · Andy Peatling · Working with React.js, TypeScript, LLMs, & Agents

I think this product-centric view has an expiry date. Once someone’s agent can work across all their tools, visiting each product one at a time starts to feel like friction. Coding and personal agents are bringing that date a lot closer.

Pivot! – by Zack Urlocker – Build To Scale

A pivot can feel like an admission of failure, because often it is one. The current strategy has stopped working, and admitting that is the only way forward. But a pivot can also be the best thing that happens to a company: a chance to redefine it and refocus everyone on a winning strategy. That’s the exciting part.

You Can’t Vibe-Code a Network – by Euclid Ventures

Coyne Lloyd was on the founding team at Snapdocs, the mortgage closing platform that now supports roughly 1 in 4 U.S. mortgage transactions and raised a $150M Series D at a valuation over $1.5B in 2021. He went on to become a partner at Fractal Software and has since helped incubate Layer (embedded accounting and bookkeeping for SMB platforms) and Reach (embedded marketing tools), both sold through Vertical SaaS platforms. He’s also an angel in companies like Moxie and Vesta. He’ll share his view on why the AI copy threat is real, and why the defensibility that’s left looks a lot like what made Snapdocs work long before LLMs.

America Next 250: Rebuilding Albina

Our goal is not to define Black Portland’s terms of engagement. Our goal is to secure and steward the place that belongs to us.