Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Merchant Cash Advances: What Small Business Owners Should Know – Business Impact NW
At first glance, MCAs can feel convenient. They often come with fast approval, minimal paperwork, and quick access to funds. For business owners facing urgent needs, this speed can be appealing, especially when other financing options like SBA loans or community lender loans will take more time.
The Oregon Promise — Oregon Venture Fund
Compared with the Bay Area, VC-backed founders in Oregon and Southern Washington fail less often [roughly 50-60% vs 75-80% in the Bay Area] and tend to take a bit longer to exit [8 to 11 yrs. vs 7 to 10 in the Bay Area]. That extra time often stems from the pursuit of more responsible, sustainable growth.
What we learned in Cleveland about Seattle’s future: Advice from a Rust Belt city on the rise – GeekWire
Cleveland’s history is a cautionary tale for Seattle, which is at its own inflection point as we move from the software era to the AI era or what’s next. But the modern story of Cleveland is one of inspiration: a lesson in what becomes possible when business, civic and public leaders pull in the same direction.
Anthropic’s Safety Superpower – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
I can certainly buy the case that Fable/Mythos is in fact more capable when it comes to identifying and exploiting security issues, and that Anthropic’s cautious roll-out was justified. The problem with publicly releasing models, however, is that guardrails can be jailbroken, and apparently that is exactly what happened shortly after the release.
In Age of AI, World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes – The New York Times
For more than two decades, Farid, 60, had been the world’s leading expert in the field of digital forensics, but in the last six months he’d stopped trusting his own eyes. He’d made a career of differentiating visual reality from deepfakes as he fielded requests each day from governments, human rights organizations, journalists, law enforcement and thousands of others who were increasingly confused and deceived by the online world. Farid’s own research had proven that most people could no longer distinguish a real photograph from a digital creation, a real voice from an A.I. clone, a real video clip from a wholesale fabrication. Lately, he was failing his own tests.
Happy Hour with AI Portland · Luma
This is the perfect opportunity to unwind and mingle with fellow AI enthusiasts and professionals.
It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests
A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of AI tools.
University of Oregon breaks ground on $83 million Ballmer Institute expansion project – OPB
UO launched the Ballmer Institute in 2022. Its core goal is to address Oregon’s lack of child behavioral health services, which is limited by a shortage of trained workers. The institute’s founders have set a goal to lead the region and the nation in educating a new generation of specialized healthcare workers.
Paving paradise: Dismantling the US Roadless Rule threatens to disrupt wildlife, water and peace in the last quiet places in America
As ecologists who have spent decades studying wilderness and the animals and ecological functions that depend on undisturbed habitats, we believe it’s important to understand that preserving roadless areas has value for environmental health, clean water, wildlife survival and people’s own well-being.
The AI Startup Funding Boom Is Not A Global Phenomenon
So far in 2026, U.S. companies have pulled in nearly 80% of global seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase data. That’s a sharp divergence from the years leading up to the AI boom, when American companies typically secured less than half of all investment.
No, everyone is not using AI for everything. – by yegg
This tracks with Microsoft’s new United States AI Diffusion site, based on “anonymized, aggregated Microsoft telemetry.” Their associated blog reports “more than 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [meaning about 70% isn’t], an increase of 3 percentage points from the end of 2025.” The underlying academic paper specifies that usage is defined as “engagement with major AI services including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and others….with at least 90 minutes of usage time in a given month.”
The nature of launch day | Seth’s Blog
Launch day matters when distribution is scarce. If a movie opens poorly, the theatre puts a different film in next week. But most of the time, planting the right seeds in the right place is more important than hustling for noise.
Vertical AI Is Blurring Enterprise & Consumer
One of Nikhil’s core convictions at Footwork is that some of biggest companies in the world serve both consumers and enterprises. While he does believe in early focus, expecting founders to “pick a lane” and stick to it can be short-sighted. About three-quarters of Footwork’s 25 investments are companies that “self-identify as both consumer and enterprise in their DNA.”
Software Is Not A Single-Player Game
What I actually want to argue is that building software that lasts, grows, and that people can depend on is and will remain a multiplayer game. The earlier stages this pushback points to are part of that game, not separate from it. Code review is one of the primary places where the game gets played, and the artifact the game is played on is shifting in a way that makes review more central, not less.
Why Your Next Pivot Costs More Than You Think
93% of successful startups pivoted from their initial ideas. That statistic gets quoted like a permission slip. But here’s the part that doesn’t make it into the LinkedIn posts: startups that pivot more than twice perform significantly worse than those that pivot once or twice.
Weekly Review: Pulled Offline – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft
Welcome back to Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers, and thank you for being here for a heavy news week. The defining story is sobering: a US government directive forced Anthropic to pull Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline for every customer, the first time a nation has recalled a deployed frontier model. A model you build on can now vanish overnight. So the rest of this issue leans into the hedge: build from first principles, route to smaller models, own more of your stack.
Inside the Room Where America’s Brightest Game Out How to Avoid an AI Apocalypse – WSJ
They were some 40 leading thinkers in economics, technology and public policy, and they had come to the Peterson Institute for International Economics to contemplate a vision of U.S. society in 2030. Provided with workbooks, easel pads and Sharpies, they arrived ready to game out responses to some of AI’s biggest risks—to jobs, the economy, political stability.
Leaving Mozilla
After more than 15 years, I will be leaving Mozilla on July 21. Friday, June 12th will be my last “real” day, as I am planning on using my 200+ hours of vacation backlog. I’ve had the honor of working with some of you, and others have no idea who I am, but you might have a sticker of mine. While I have mostly enjoyed my time here, there are a few things I wish to say upon my departure…
Pilot complete, Oregon AI Accelerator seeks funding partners – Portland Business Journal
The idea of an accelerator for founders building AI companies has been kicking around the community for the last couple of years. Groups involved in this coalition spun up an AI bootcamp in June of last year that had 40 founders participate. That bootcamp was meant to be a testing ground for a full accelerator.
Non-Horror Story Lessons from Pitching VCs – David Cummings on Startups
My takeaway after those experiences is to always assume that VCs are looking at all of the players in the space, and that the information you share is going to the investment committee and will be used as part of their decision to invest in the space, regardless of whether they invest in your company.
Yes, founders trick themselves. – by Mike Vladimer
When someone tells a baker that the oven is hot, they don’t accept it at face value. The baker asks for the temperature. In that same way, as a founder, if someone tells you that an interview means something, I hope you’ll ask them: How did you measure it? And if they didn’t use content analysis or something similar, it’s likely that they’re tricking themselves.
Introducing the C1 Autonomous Worker
As the work moves to agents, C1 becomes the layer it all runs through: the place the work gets done, and the place it gets governed. The work that always got pushed is about to get done. Here’s what that looks like as we build toward it.
The Raise Isn’t the Win – by David Mandell – Massive Ideas
It may be strange to hear this from a venture investor, but getting funded is just a tool to reach a business objective, it’s not the objective itself.
