Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
What It Takes To Go from 0 to 1: The Big Picture (Part I) – Pear VC
Now, all these numbers are not to discourage you as a founder! We simply want you to know the reality of just how hard this journey is before you embark on it. We think you should know exactly what you’re getting into.
Power Bills That Jump 36% Are a Volcano Startup’s Sales Pitch
Seattle startup Endurance Energy ran the first subsea geothermal power plant at Axial Seamount, an active underwater volcano about 300 miles off Oregon, and got 8.7 seconds of net-positive electricity before a software fault and a failed cable ended the test. The physics held. The business it is chasing, a 2-megawatt unit off Tonga by the end of 2027, competes with imported diesel, and that contract will be priced on reliability and fuel risk, not on heat.
PDX Infra After Hours · Luma
Infra After Hours is a private event series in PDX for builders and leaders in developer tools, data, AI, security, and other infrastructure software. Join…
Intel (INTC) Q3 earnings report 2026
Intel shares plummeted more than 20% in extended trading on Thursday after the chipmaker issued a weak fourth-quarter forecast, citing continued softness in the global PC market.
As search traffic dries up, Reddit announces it’s shifting to a logged-in experience | TechCrunch
The move is designed to protect its data from AI scraping, allowing the company to instead forge lucrative licensing deals with model providers. But just as important, such a shift could help Reddit to increase its revenue even as it faces daily active user declines in its largest market, the U.S.
&Truth Emerges From Stealth — &Truth
&Truth, a public benefit corporation, is establishing a foundational standard for provably safe code. The company is building a universal verification machine to read code in any programming language and mathematically prove that it is safe, secure, and correct, with proofs that anyone can independently check.
American views of higher ed decline, once again | Bryan Alexander
United States attitudes towards higher education soured yet again, according to a new Gallup poll. The main question asked this time was “How important is a college education today — very important, fairly important or not too important?” It’s one Gallup has asked regularly for decades.
The world needs more whimsy
One article I read about the regatta said that the first years of it had only a small turnout of a few dozen onlookers. By year four, two thousand people came out to watch. Now the event regularly brings in twenty thousand people, crowded around a tiny lake, to watch. “This is the best sporting event I’ve ever been to,” I told my boyfriend halfway through the first race.
Just Noting That Your Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions – The Atlantic
If this fact alarms you—or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared—I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as “confectioner’s glaze.” This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.
What We Fund | NSF SBIR
Between fiscal years 2016 and 2024, America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF made 4,000+ awards to startups and small businesses. Each year, we fund roughly 400 companies across nearly all technology areas and market sectors (with the exception of clinical trials and schedule I controlled substances). Select a topic area below to read more about the topic, see featured Phase I and Phase II success stories.
You Won’t Raise Venture Capital Until You Learn This One Simple Lesson About Investors
Well, it turns out a good fundraising pitch is a helpful way to start a conversation. It provides the setup and the context and the basic information about whether a conversation is even worth an investor’s time, which are all important things. But they’re not the things that raise capital. The conversation is what raises capital, which means the true purpose of a fundraising pitch is to start those conversations.
Silicon Florist on Patreon
Join 138 patrons supporting Portland startup coverage
Want even more?Includes an absolutely and totally FREE tier
The Economics of Intelligence: How and when does AGI lead to economic transformation?
How do capability improvements transform the economy, and when? In this essay, we define thresholds of economic capabilities, e.g., minimal AGI, as a function of how they transform the economy. We then track how the economy–market structure, employment, and wages–changes during the transition across capability regimes.
(2018) All this startup stuff is cool. But democracy is cooler. Please vote.
I know that, at times, startups and capitalism and consumerism can seem superficial. I get it. But the underlying system of government that has borne this whole startup thing is pretty darn cool. Especially considering that we’ve been iterating on it for more than 240 years or so. But it only works if you take part. So please vote.
What one person can actually operate – Leon Becker’s Blog
I don’t think this is the right architecture for a company with an operations team. It’s the architecture I can actually run, and I’d rather have a system I understand completely than one that’s theoretically better and practically opaque.
The Sane Asylum
I know we say this every time a breakthrough technology emerges, but there has never been a better time in history to build a highly profitable business with significant scale without raising or hiring a ton. As I study these companies, I am learning that you can operate at the exciting forefront without going insane.
How to Shut Down a Startup (and Still Get Backed Again)
That probably sounds backwards. It makes complete sense once you understand how venture math works and why hanging on costs everybody more than the loss does.
A golden age of science is coming – by Noah Smith
It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture
We Won’t “Just Hang Out”
I met a lot of my friends by writing open-source code, and participating in the community of software engineers. AI is dissolving that community by making human contributions superfluous. If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects or my technical blog posts.
You can just ask AI to do things
One of the most important skills in working with AI is agency: being willing to try new and ambitious things. This is true for what you build, but it’s also true for how you build. AI models are improving so quickly that most of us are bottlenecked1 on noticing that AI agents can help automate particular tasks. Here are some examples of that from my daily work.
On AI Safety | Jasper Croome
TL;DR – AI is not going to kill us all. There is a non-zero chance it ends up being disruptive and damaging to society, but total human annihilation is not on the table.
Key Decisions and Keystone Projects – by Charlie Gilkey
It’s the time of the year where I start reminding my readers that November is a three work-week month and December is a two work-week month for many of us in the US. Please send a lot of goodwill and patience for folks who work in retail, hospitality, and travel, for it’s their peak season and they often have to deal with us on our worst behavior.