Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Social Beer: Mid-2026 Gathering, Tue, Jun 30, 2026, 6:00 PM | Meetup
It’s been a minute since the Portland Startups Slack community has gathered for a #social_beer. And the midpoint of 2026 seemed like the perfect excuse to get together.
Why I email complete strangers
Social media platforms rise and fall like ancient empires sped up a thousand times. Yet email endures. Like the postal service or the printed book. Is it any coincidence these technologies remain my great loves? They share a quality I struggle to name. Perhaps it’s permanence in an ephemeral world. You can tuck a letter in a drawer, discovering it decades later. A book can outlive its author by centuries. One can archive, search, and treasure an email. They’re all vessels that honor my beloved words.
A Guide to AI Inference Engineering – ByteByteGo Newsletter
Inference engineering is the discipline of running trained AI models in production efficiently. The work spans low-level GPU code, model serving frameworks, and the cloud infrastructure that ties them together. Engineers in this field optimize for some combination of latency, throughput, cost, and quality, with the specific mix depending on the product they support. A few years ago, this work happened almost entirely inside frontier AI labs. Today, it has become a broad specialty that any company running serious AI workloads invests in.
Silicon Is Back: Playground Global’s Decade-Long Bet On Hardware, Energy And Deep Tech Looks Prescient
For much of the past decade, Silicon Valley chased software and apps. Playground Global was investing elsewhere: in semiconductors, quantum computing, robotics and energy infrastructure. Now, as AI drives a scramble for chips, power and data-center capacity, Playground co-founder Peter Barrett believes the venture industry is finally returning to the physical technologies it neglected.
Agentic Code Review
I am more optimistic about agentic engineering than I have ever been. The agents are genuinely good, they get better every month, and on an ordinary day I now ship things I would not have attempted a year ago. This write-up is a map of where the interesting work went, because it did move, and most teams have not fully caught up to where.
The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear – Minid.net
Every generation of computing believes the interface it loves will last forever. It never does. I saw information move from floppy disks to BBSs, from BBSs to the Web, from the Web to Flash, from Flash back to open standards, from websites to mobile apps, and now from search engines to AI chat interfaces. The Web will not vanish overnight, but the Web as we know it, the open place where people search, click, read, browse, publish, and discover, is already being replaced by something more convenient, more centralized, and much harder to escape.
Adidas Borrowed Mercedes F1 Tech to Keep World Cup Players From Overheating | HiConsumption
The 2026 FIFA World Cup just kicked off this week, and anyone who’s spent a July afternoon in Miami, Dallas, or Monterrey knows exactly what these players are walking into. Adidas knows it too, which is why the brand just unveiled the Climacool System, a three-piece cooling rig built to chill players down before they ever touch the pitch.
Scotch Lodge, Nodoguro chef Ryan Roadhouse win big at 2026 James Beard Awards – oregonlive.com
A celebrated Portland cocktail bar and noted chef each took home awards at the 2026 James Beard Foundation Awards, extending the Rose City’s unprecedented streak at the so-called “Oscars of the Food World.”
Revino wins $5M CA grant to advance reusable bottles – Portland Business Journal
Revino has made inroads in Oregon wine country with a tiny staff and on a shoestring budget. Now a grant from CalRecycle, announced on Tuesday, will allow the B Corp to establish the Golden State’s first official “bottle washer processing facility.”
Prototype to Production
The Oregon Manufacturing Innovation Center (OMIC) R&D, in partnership with the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN), Economic Development for Central Oregon (EDCO), and Central Oregon Innovation Hub are hosting a workshop for people building physical products.
Forbes Daily: The Startup Trying To Build Floating Data Centers At Sea
Backed by Peter Thiel, Portland, Oregon startup Panthalassa has been developing floating data centers that generate their own electricity, and expects commercial units to be operational in 2027. The ocean is a massive untapped resource for power and cooling, but no large-scale systems or techniques have yet proven viable.
Back to the Future, bioregionalism edition
The main lesson here is that you need to mobilize data before you can effectively mobilize capital, which is the theme of ongoing conversations with Samantha Power, Dominic Hofstetter, Alexandra Leeper and others advocating for bioregional capital orchestration.
PDX DevOps, Thu, Jun 25, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup
Chase Douglas has focused his career on helping teams build and understand their systems. His past work includes: architecting the first browser observability solution (New Relic Browser), developing novel runtime fingerprinting tech to detect SQL and XSS injection attacks (IMMUNIO, now part of Trend Micro), and founding the cloud Infra-as-Code DevEx company Stackery (now AWS Infrastructure Composer).
