Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
The Death of the Angel Investor
The historical “place” of an angel investor is to help nurture a company along from the idea phase to the revenue-generating phase, which is where VCs can jump in to help bankroll growth going forward. That’s obviously no longer the case. For one, the span from the “idea phase” to the “revenue-generating phase” can now be measured in a matter of hours. VC has caught up to this, too: there are now scores of funds focused entirely on the pre-seed (or earlier) segment. Running around collecting small checks from different value-add angels is a bit less palatable compared to just grabbing a pre-seed fund to fund your whole initial round.
Expensify Announces Referral Agreement With Visa to Help Companies Simplify Expense Management
“Corporate cardholders shouldn’t have to give up the points, perks, and banking relationships they’ve built just to get modern spend controls,” said Nick Tooker, Head of Partnerships at Expensify. “Our pitch is simple: Link your Visa card to Expensify and you get world-class expense management without changing anything about how you pay.”
Imagine Cup 2027: Why this is an opportunity for early-stage founders – Microsoft for Startups Blog
After 25 years of helping innovators bring bold ideas to life, the competition is expanding across seven categories to welcome more early-stage startups and recognize founders solving real customer problems with the potential for enterprise adoption, commercial success, and scale.
Opinion: San Francisco is delivering, while Seattle is still deliberating – GeekWire
If we believe Seattle is a progressive city, we should ask whether our policies deliver the progress we promise. That means questioning our assumptions and changing programs when results fall short. Reconsidering an approach can feel like abandoning our values, but those values should compel us to change when people are still in need of help.
Y Combinator’s Graham: Build ‘stuff you’re genuinely interested in’ | Cornell Chronicle
“The best startup ideas don’t come from sitting around talking about startup ideas,” Graham said. “They come from building stuff you’re genuinely interested in, and only later realizing it could lead to a startup. This is how Apple and Google and Meta got started. They grew out of projects.”
DIKO Puts Killer Spin on Home Shopping for Rumpl and Liquid Death Collaboration — LBB
The collaboration brings together Liquid Death, the beverage brand known for its irreverent marketing, and Rumpl, the brand known for its technical blankets made with post-consumer recycled materials. Rumpl’s use of recycled plastic also connects with Liquid Death’s ‘Death to Plastic’ mission. Both brands show that making quality products doesn’t mean taking yourself too seriously.
Product Hunt is swamped now · mahl.me
Product Hunt used to feel like a shelf; now it feels like a queue. The count is not a precise measure of startup formation, but it is a decent measure of what a reader has to wade through, and by that measure Product Hunt is swamped now.
(2010) Love Instagram for iPhone photography? Well, here’s another reason to love it, Portland
You know Instagram, that wickedly popular photo app for the iPhone? Yeah, well they’ve got a Portland connection too.
AI on the Ballot – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
My thesis — driven not just by national results and the Texas governorship, but also the fact that, as this thread documents, nearly every relevant local ballot measure opposing data centers won or is winning (the only exception so far was in North Dakota) — is that the constraint on AI dispersion has shifted once again. First we were short on compute, but that ramped; now we are short on memory, but that will ramp; we were coming close to being short on power, but that will be rectified. The final constraint is political, and that may be the most imposing constraint of all. Not only is it harder to solve, but it actually interferes with solving the other constraints. Many of the theories about AI assume that it becomes a commodity; I think it’s just as likely we are looking at scarcity for much longer than we expected, which will have ripple effects on everything.
BREAKING: Sequoia shuts London office in shock European retreat with only one partner confirmed remaining so far
US venture capital giant Sequoia Capital is closing its London office, ending the six-year run of a significant European presence and triggering a shake-up of its investment team. In a bombshell announcement on X, the Silicon Valley firm said it would retreat to its Bay Area headquarters, despite continuing to back European startups.
Three Members Behind Claude Code Leave Anthropic Within 10
Anthropic has seen three employees associated with its Claude Code product leave the company within 10 days. The departures include Thariq Shihipar, Anthony Morris and Cat Wu, who worked on the development and product management of the AI coding tool.
PHP2Shell Is a Wakeup Call for AI in Cybersecurity – IEEE Spectrum
“One of the things we’re witnessing now is that all the legacy software that was written by humans over the last 40 years is being exposed,” says Matt Suiche, AI security research lead at the cybersecurity startup Tolmo. “Now it is time for the technical debt to be paid off.”
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Kotek wins second term as Oregon governor – oregonlive.com
Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek secured a second term Tuesday, extending Democratic control of Oregon for another four years and delivering a blow to Republicans who had hoped to notch a historic upset.
Early Returns Show Shannon Singleton Leading Multnomah County Chair Race
The contest for county chair has been one of this fall’s fiercest, pitting three former and current county commissioners against each other. In Multnomah County government, the chair wields immense power. As its chief executive and personnel officer, the chair sets the Board of County Commissioners’ agenda and has great oversight over the county budget.
Agility Robotics de-SPAC set, gross capital raised drops – Portland Business Journal
Oregon is set to have a new publicly traded company this week after shareholders of special purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp. XI (Nasdaq: CCXI) approved a merger with Agility Robotics.
Portland bat Ryan GosWING tops the BLM Bat Beauty Contest, Oregon takes 4 wins in a row
With a handsome smile not unlike that of his on-screen namesake, Ryan GosWING racked up the votes during the beauty contest held leading up to Halloween in celebration of Bat Week.
Siri AI is now open to all developers
Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal, is designed to be deeply integrated into Apple’s operating systems and the apps people use every day, including the apps from our vast ecosystem of developers. Thousands of developers have already built integrations with Siri to let users ask for directions, manage a to-do list, send a message, or catch up on an audiobook. Siri AI is available in many languages, including English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish and will soon expand to support Traditional Chinese, Norwegian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. People around the world are turning to Siri AI to get things done every day, which means more customers can discover and use apps just by asking.
Accelerating engineering for the physical world | OpenAI
Today, we’re sharing advances in how OpenAI models help engineers design, simulate, and build physical products. These capabilities span mechanical and electrical engineering and end-to-end system design, and are already helping our internal teams test ideas and iterate faster.
It Just Got Harder to Win from Vancouver — Chris Neumann
As of Sunday morning, the province of British Columbia moved to permanent daylight savings time. And in doing so, it made things more challenging for Vancouver’s startups to compete.
2026: The State of Enterprise AI | Menlo Ventures
In 2026, AI became an economy-scale force. Enterprise AI deployment spending surged from $33 billion to $177 billion in just one year. That’s over $140 billion in new annual spending, more than four times the size of the entire market a year ago.
How to make friends before fundraising – by Aaron Harris
Long before you formally raise, you should be engaging with investors. You want to impress investors enough that they lean in without divulging so much that they can fully evaluate your company and quietly decide. The purpose is to work through a list of potential leads and identify the ones with whom you’d genuinely want to work.
