Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Joshua Baer, Capital Factory Founder, Dies in Laredo Plane Crash – RuntimeWire
Joshua Baer, founder and CEO of Capital Factory, died in a Laredo plane crash, KXAN reported. He was a central figure in Austin and Texas startup investing.
Sixty percent of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds | TechCrunch
Together, the findings paint a picture of a rapidly evolving digital landscape where brands are trying to adapt to a world beyond Google Search and traditional SEO, while also balancing the need to appear human-authored or risk losing their audience. As companies invest more in making their brand visible to AI search engines, consumers are placing greater value on transparency and attribution.
Data centre investors navigate geopolitical strife as deals boom
Investors have poured in $58bn in financing for 42 data centre transactions so far this year, up from $34bn for 34 deals at the same point in 2025, according to Dealogic.
The founder’s playbook: Building an AI-native startup | Claude
We put together a practical playbook for building an AI-native startup. It remaps the four core stages of the startup lifecycle—Idea, MVP, Launch, and Scale—for what’s possible in 2026, with the goals, exit criteria, common failure modes, and AI-powered exercises that work at each one.
Same Journalism, Less Ink, Until September
This July and August we will conduct a significant experiment with Willamette Week’s print edition. For two months, WW will publish a print edition every other week rather than weekly.
Housing starts sink to pandemic levels as builders worry about inflation • Oregon Capital Chronicle
Starts were down to an annual rate of 1.17 million, the lowest since April 2020, and an 8.5% drop since May 2025. The drop since last year was especially severe in the South, down 15%, and the West, down 11%, but the Northeast saw a 19% increase and the Midwest increased 6%.
Under Armour will close Portland footwear office, move most jobs out of state – oregonlive.com
Under Armour is closing its Portland office and moving most of the jobs to New York and its corporate office in Baltimore, the Baltimore Business Journal reported Tuesday. It’s another blow to the region’s footwear industry.
‘This System Wasn’t Built For Me’: Black Founders Became Investors To Change Venture Capital
The consistently low numbers have led some Black founders to turn to investing in an effort to help level the playing field. Crunchbase News talked with two such founders to hear more about their experiences in raising capital and what they’ve learned from investing.
AI Can’t Survive Your C-Suite’s Magic Thinking
From what I’m seeing, much of the 95% failure rate with AI comes down to what engineering organizations have tolerated and promoted for over 15 years. That was a result of top-down mandates to be more like the rest of the business, but no mandate for the business to be more technology-centric.
How to Pivot Well – a16z speedrun
AI model capabilities shift every quarter, which means that a new pivot is theoretically possible every quarter. Should every company be pivoting accordingly? Knowing when to pivot, how fast, and toward what has quietly become a core founder skill in the AI era.
Do You Treat Your 20-Year Customers Worse Than Your New Ones? You Probably Do | SaaStrAI
We bend over backwards to get new customers. We onboard them with white glove care. We spin up Forward Deployed Engineers. We send the CEO into the sales cycle. We do custom integrations on the house. We give the new logo whatever they need to close. And then we abandon them.
There are Many Configurations of Business That Work – Commoncog
Invariably, in every single one of those conversations I say something like: “You don’t have to start a startup if you don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up on business. You can always find a business configuration that fits you and what you want out of life … if you want it enough.”
Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year – Ars Technica
The audited financial statements, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, show OpenAI’s reported revenue growing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents, writes that the company’s monthly revenues had grown to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting that its ongoing revenue rates continued to grow throughout the year.
Show Up for Small Business Tickets, Wednesday, July 22 • 5 PM – 7 PM | Eventbrite
In July we are headed to SE Portland and meeting at the ModHaus food cart pod on 3829 SE Division St. The new spot is home to Jojo PDX, Hawker Station, Makulit, Chick & Pig PDX, Shekinah Sushi, Le Fragole, Fabo’s Tacos, Burmese Corner, DesiPDX, and Shawarma Spot.
Elon Musk is looking at space for AI data centres, but this startup wants to float them at sea – CNBC TV18
The Portland, Oregon startup, believes its offshore computing hubs could help meet the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence while avoiding many of the challenges faced by land-based data centres.
Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
For the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing how bad things are inside the social media company for engineers in one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious workplaces. In this article, we walk through what’s happened, and ask what’s going through the minds of leadership who are reducing software engineering there from the profit center that it was between 2004 until very recently, to the disdained cost center that it has become in just a few weeks.
Not just for coders: UW’s upcoming AI minor will reach beyond the computer science school – GeekWire
Set for launch in Spring 2027 at the Seattle campus, the program is the latest of several moves the university has made to push itself toward global leadership in AI education and research — including new graduate programs, a partnership with Microsoft and a $10 million AI initiative.
