Silicon Florist links arrangement for August 18, 2026

Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:

Silicon Florist turns twenty — August 7, 2027

A countdown to Silicon Florist’s 20th birthday. Tending the Silicon Forest since August 7, 2007.

PSU’s Alysa Pyszka tapped as GPI interim president, CEO – Portland Business Journal

Greater Portland Inc. has hired Alisa Pyszka as interim CEO and President while the organization searches for a permanent replacement.

90 Days to Cashflow Positive (in Big Pink) · Luma

Sign up here, come to the first event Monday 21st September and then, if you choose, commit to the full 90 day experience meeting in person every Monday morning at 8:30am. Yes, the entire experience is free to all participants.

TODOS Media: New Documentary Filmmaking, in Conversation – Bridgetown Bites

If you’d like to watch Humble Kitchen, Her Way, or Memorable, the best place to do that is online at watchtodos.com. There’s a menu at the top of the site that will guide you to the different projects TODOS Media has created.

(2008) Portland Start-up Index for August 2008: Metafilter, Digital Trends premiere in top 10

It’s that time again. Time for the Techvibes Portland Start-up Index, the monthly round up of Portland-area startup companies and products, ranked by the average of their Alexa and Compete rankings.

Portland’s Commercial Vacancy Crisis: What City Hall Gets Wrong — and What to Do Instead

Our leaders at Portland City Hall are touting poorly informed solutions for addressing the city’s high commercial vacancy rate. While some believe that a vacancy tax will light a fire under landlords to make deals, others believe we can pay small businesses to launch into a retail location. Both approaches miss some core truths that need to be understood if we are going to solve this crisis.

AI slop is swamping a House office that drafts US laws – POLITICO

They said AI’s ability to quickly generate mountains of text is forcing the OLC’s lawyers to spend significantly more time reviewing and rewriting the proposals. And in many cases, the drafts are plagued by mistakes that could ripple well beyond Washington — tying up the passage of legislation and risking lawsuits over erroneously cited statutes or incorrect legal definitions.

The Amazon tax 

It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks. And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads.

Canon: A modern day MUD 

The great thing about a text-based world is that you can add anything you want just by typing “there is a [thing] here”. You’re constrained in how you can build – no fancy 3D visualizations or impressively realistic physics engines – but have unlimited freedom in what you can build.

Portland’s Best Place to Go When You Wish RadioShack Still Existed

URS Electronics is still doing what it’s done for over 90 years. The mode is to evolve with technology and nurture the next generation of nerds. The company sponsors competitive high school robotics teams throughout the Pacific Northwest, including in Portland, Oregon City, Kettle Falls and Cathlamet.

Centennial Mills demolition rocks Portland in controlled blast – oregonlive.com

The massive explosion could be heard across much of the city two weeks after fire tore through the century-old abandoned flour mill. The blast brought the water tower crumbling down into the shell of the old building.

VCs Pour Billions Into Physical AI As The Next Wave Of AI Investing Takes Shape

To give you an idea of just how much more money is going into physical AI companies, here’s a comparison. In the three years spanning 2022 to 2024 combined, venture investors put a total of $41.9 billion into physical AI companies — still several billion less than we’ve seen raised in just the first half of this year alone.

Announcing Lenny’s Jobs: The best place in the world to find, vet, and land your dream job

A laser focus on four builder roles at tech companies: product management, engineering, design, and growth/marketing. We focus exclusively on these roles because they’re what most of you are looking for—and because these roles are starting to meld together. We aggregate open roles from top startups and big tech companies, and unlike any other job directory, we vet every company we include and filter out ghost roles and generic staffing-agency posts. This is the highest-quality directory of open tech roles you’ll find anywhere.

At least 62 YC startups with over $1.9 billion in funding are hosting on Replit

A single Google Cloud IP address used by AI coding platform Replit led RuntimeWire to a much larger startup cluster: at least 62 other Y Combinator companies were serving custom domains through the platform on August 18, 2026.

Agentic AI Ontology | Skan AI

The Agentic Ontology of Work (AOW) is Skan AI’s open semantic framework for describing, governing, and scaling AI agents across enterprise operations.

Read this before you send an AI pitch deck

I start my work weeks with deck reviews. Every Monday morning, in advance of our weekly fund meeting, I look at all the decks that entrepreneurs submitted through our website in the past week. Every deck gets a rating: “Yes!” means we should definitely take a meeting with the founders. “Maybe” means we should discuss first. “Too early” means we like the team and should watch their progress. “No” means, well, no.

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