Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Oregon by the Numbers 2026 for Rural Small Business Owners
The Ford Family Foundation released the ninth edition of Oregon by the Numbers on Aug. 31, 2026. It includes a profile for each of the state’s 36 counties and measures of community well-being, with rural and urban comparisons wherever the data allows. It’s important to note that technically the report counts every city and town as rural except those inside six designated urban centers, and it puts Rural Oregon at 1,248,396 people out of 4,254,293 statewide. Also, it is a snapshot rather than a diagnostic tool.
Will AI Replace SDRs? Why Top AI Companies Are Hiring More
At a recent Madrona AMA for our portfolio’s sales leaders, my teammate Eric Wong and I hosted Sam Nelson, founder of SDRLeader.com. Sam was in the first group of SDRs at Outreach in Seattle and later became my top SDR leader. He now runs a community of more than 2,500 companies.
Paw Patrol creator awards UO students cash for startup ideas | Local | kezi.com
Harary visited Gilbert Plaza as part of a six-week college tour. For about two hours, students presented their business concepts in front of a customized Airstream trailer. If Harary liked an idea, he awarded the student $500 on the spot. He also gave them seven days to compete for one of 10 $25,000 prizes.
(2011) Portland Seed Fund stages inaugural Demo Day
It seems like it was only three months ago that the Portland Seed Fund revealed their first class of startups. Oh wait. It was only three months ago. And today, those startups emerged—some all growed up and some completely transformed—to take the stage at Ziba Design for the first Portland Seed Fund Demo Day.
Agents in Games · Labs
Understanding multi-agent dynamics is one of the most pressing challenges in AI alignment. Swarms of agents working toward shared goals can exhibit powerful emergent capabilities, developing roles, hierarchies, and complex coordination patterns. These can be extremely useful, as in the thousand-agent swarms that recently obliterated hundreds of open mathematical problems, and extremely dangerous, as in the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. Like biology, studying agent dynamics requires both formal models (to describe the range of possible behaviors) and empirical research (to see what behaviors arise in practice).
Work-In Wednesday: Session 02 | Partiful
Join us for another Work-In Wednesday, a casual coworking meetup for Portland locals looking to get some work done, meet new people, and build community.
For Early Stage VCs, Non-consensus is Too Risky, Consensus is Too Boring, but Pre-consensus May Be Just Right. | by Hunter Walk | Nov, 2026 | Medium
There are many venture capitalists embracing the notion of consensus investing right now, some with glee, others with a ‘it’s the game on the field’ shrug. Regardless, the incentives at an individual level are very much pushing in this direction.
AI adoption in 2026: use, spending, and returns
There is no single AI adoption rate. Asking whether a company uses AI, observing a payment, and measuring a financial return answer different questions. A useful comparison starts with who was measured, what counted as adoption, and when.
Silicon Florist on Patreon
Join 138 patrons supporting Portland startup coverage
Want even more?Includes an absolutely and totally FREE tier
Weekly Review: Show Your Work – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft
Welcome to this week’s edition of Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers. Thank you for being here. The thread running through this issue is evidence: Meta swaps review comments for failing tests that prove a bug, Google treats alignment results as a shipping bar, and an essay on benchmarks asks who checks the people keeping score. Along the way, small on-device models keep getting more capable, and new workspaces help you track many coding agents at once.
Featured Talk What If It All Works Out | CreativeMornings
An air of negativity seems to hang over our collective feelings about the future. Lisa Jikeli believes that imagination is the answer. Not as an escapist fantasy, but a core practice for getting through uncertain times. By imagining an ideal future state, we create a path to work towards it. Watch her talk for our Berlin chapter and ask yourself, “what if it all works out?”
The return of the full-stack app – B2BaCEO by Ashu Garg
The most interesting AI app companies we’ve met this year don’t look like typical app companies. They train their own models, decide which model handles each step of the work, and build the plumbing that keeps their agents running. In other words, they look more like infra companies.
Don’t Fear Your Competitors
Your competitor launched last week. They have a beautiful website, a slick demo video, and a press release announcing that they’re “revolutionizing” your space. You feel a knot in your stomach.
SpaceX no longer needs NASA, and that’s a problem for America’s space agency – Ars Technica
The pendulum has swung so far now that SpaceX seems increasingly disinterested in the US government for most contracts outside of data services, such as Starshield for military communications and observations.
A proposal: how to hire junior engineers in the age of AI | Seldo.com
Since then I’ve been thinking about how, exactly, one could go about hiring junior engineers who would be good at the new way of doing things, specifically about how to interview them. This post is about my best idea so far.
Pile-ins, payouts, and pacing pressure: the investors behind the VCs open up | TechCrunch
That’s the typical playbook. But typical is out the window. OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s valuations have shot up so quickly that nearly everyone has piled into the same two companies on the way up, often inside the same venture firm, despite the long-standing venture convention of avoiding investments that conflict with one another. No one is complaining, either. The LPs I speak with seem unbothered by this big gamble, given the potential returns; they’re expecting a bonanza.
Filing: Chip startup Powerlattice raises $86M to ease AI’s power crunch – GeekWire
Powerlattice, a Vancouver, Wash.-based startup developing chips that cut the power demands of AI processors, has raised $86 million, according to an SEC filing on Friday. The new funding is nearly triple the $31 million the company had raised when it emerged from stealth last November with a $25 million Series A led by Playground Global and Celesta Capital. Board members include former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, a general partner at Playground, and Steve Fu of Celesta. The filing also lists Wen Hsieh, founding managing partner of Matter Venture Partners, as a director.
