Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Preservation can save the world! – Nectome’s Substack
tl;dr: Preservation offers a much safer option to those accelerationists who are rushing to AI in the hopes of saving the lives of people they love who have only a few years to live. Those people can be preserved, so there’s no need to rush anymore. Preservation gives everyone a place of psychological safety from which we can all work to do AI right even if it will take slightly longer. That’s why it’s important, today.
Floating AI Data Centers Powered by Ocean Waves Just Raised $140 Million – Gadget Review
Outputs travel to land via low-Earth-orbit satellite, with Panthalassa citing Starlink as one connectivity option. Satellite links introduce latency and bandwidth limits, making the platform better suited to batch inference and model training than to real-time consumer applications. That constraint reflects the communications architecture, not independently verified Ocean-3 performance data.
Cascadia High-Speed Rail and I-5 Program Public Survey
This survey will help WSDOT understand the priorities and needs of community members, business owners and commuters like you as they relate to these transportation projects. Your feedback will inform recommendations that will drive future planning and will help us focus on what matters most to communities when it comes to our transportation system.
SPOTLIGHT: Sarah Emmans – Oregon Journalism Project
Oregon is the state with the highest share of its general fund coming from personal income tax. As a result, things look better than they are. In Oregon right now, tax revenue growth doesn’t really come from job growth.
(2008) Thrive PDX: Making the Portland tech scene stronger
We’ve been lucky enough to develop a tightly knit community with the “Web oriented” folks here in town—those startups that focus on Web technologies, Twitter types, bloggers—all of us brought together by a common interest in technology and the potential it holds for Portland.
Reddit is turning user conversations into AI-powered product reviews | TechCrunch
To use the feature, Reddit users can search for a product or category in the app’s search bar or click on a highlighted product name they see in someone’s comment. From there, the user is taken to a screen where important conversations are summarized under a “what people are saying” heading. This will also include a visual breakdown that shows how many of those comments are positive, negative, or mixed, and what sort of things people said they liked or disliked about the item.
Every Democratic Governor in the U.S. Outperformed Kamala Harris—Except One – Oregon Journalism Project
In last week’s national blue wave, every other Democratic governor running for reelection won their races with larger percentages of the vote in their state than Harris captured in 2024. Not so in Oregon. Kotek has 53.3%, 2 percentage points below Harris’ 55.3% result.
Oregon was once a Republican stronghold. This politician started shifting the balance in 1954 – OPB
After the U.S. Civil War, Oregon Republicans successfully linked themselves to the party’s broader Union patriotism and economic development policies, while Democrats struggled to overcome associations with the defeated Confederacy. Beginning in 1880, Republicans began a long period of dominating Oregon’s state legislature. One near-forgotten politician changed that balance of power.
State of the tech job market: late 2026
This analysis is based on two proprietary datasets that I love working with: TrueUp, which powers Lenny’s Jobs and tracks global job openings at tech companies (over 9,000 companies). The second dataset comes from Live Data Technologies, which tracks job changes (hires, departures, and promotions) for 124 million professionals, and their hiring numbers below are specifically for the U.S. Looking at these together, we can triangulate common trends, and the differences between the datasets are themselves revealing. Thank you, Amit Taylor and Alex Hamilton, for sharing this amazing data with us. 🙏
Portland’s budget crunch collides with worker demands as strike begins – oregonlive.com
The action by City of Portland Professional Workers Union — or CPPW — marks the culmination of nearly a year of unsuccessful negotiations primarily over wage and cost-of-living increases, including an 11th-hour mediation session Sunday.
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Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Wyden says he’ll use most powerful Senate committee to undo Republican cuts • Oregon Capital Chronicle
When the new Congress begins in January, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, will ascend for the second time in a decade to chair of the Senate Finance Committee, the powerful committee tasked with tax, trade, revenue and healthcare policy.
The Most Surprising Question VCs Like Asking Founders | by Aaron Dinin, PhD | Nov, 2026 | Entrepreneurship Handbook
Having personally pitched hundreds of Venture Capitalists during my 15-ish year startup career, I figured I could roughly guess his response. Surely he was going to say something about a startup’s market or its competition or its customer acquisition strategy. But none of those are what he said.
The Thing I Talk To Most
Every founder I know has tried an AI co-founder by now. Most of them do a lot. They write the strategy doc. They make the deck. They summarize your calendar, draft the hiring plan, and hand you a competitive landscape with nice boxes. It feels like help. It’s mostly motion.
How Product Hunt almost died
I’ve always described entrepreneurship as a series of high highs and low lows. It’s a sine wave. The highs are incredible. The lows are devastating. Entrepreneur or not, we all face difficulties in life, professionally and personally, but there’s a uniqueness to being a founder that’s difficult to internalize until you’ve been there… especially when your company’s about to die.
Anthropic Prepares to Push Ahead With IPO Despite Market Jitters – WSJ
Anthropic executives have been huddling with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in recent days to discuss where to set the valuation range. Should the company set its sights too high, investor demand could suffer and shares could drop, while settling on too low of a range could open the company and its bankers up to criticism that they left money on the table.
The future of software – by Thomas Wolf – Thomwolf
And personalization is just one prompt and a couple million tokens away, so there is absolutely no reason anymore to wait for someone else to add this feature you want. Everyone becomes their own product manager. Want a search box, an API bridge, a custom button? It’s a couple of minutes away, mostly executed in the background of your daily life. Soon we’ll want to personalize everything.
Aaron Swartz at 40
On what would have been Aaron Swartz’s 40th birthday, we gathered to watch The Internet’s Own Boy and to hear from people who knew and worked with him. Most of them sent something in the weeks before, written or recorded for the room. We ran out of time for some of it. All of it is here, in the order it was meant to be heard.
California voters reject wealth tax on billionaires | AP News
California voters have rejected a first-in-the-nation tax on the net worth of billionaires following a contentious ballot fight that generated huge spending by some prominent tech leaders eager to stop their taxes from going up.
SXSW Pitch applications due Nov 13, 2026
SXSW Pitch is a featured startup showcase event with an “open call” for startups applying. By applying to SXSW Pitch, you agree to pay the application fee so that we can process your entry as a potential finalist. Please be aware that we do not refund application fees, including if you have not been selected as a finalist.
Startup Coffee Meetups | Collaborative EDO Events
Startup Coffee is your monthly stop for conversation, collaboration, and caffeine. Held the second Thursday of every month at 9 a.m. at LCC Downtown Campus, this recurring meetup brings together innovators and community members. No agenda, no pressure, just meaningful connections in Oregon’s startup scene.
