Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Nvidia CEO says missing China AI market would be ‘tremendous loss’
Nvidia said it would take a $5.5 billion quarterly charge due to the restriction, the strongest sign so far that the company’s historic growth could be slowed because of U.S.-China trade tensions. Later in April, Huang said at a tech conference in Washington, D.C., that China is “not behind” in AI, and that Huawei is “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world.”
Generative AI surpasses cybersecurity in 2025 IT budgets, AWS survey finds
Generative AI will surpass cybersecurity in many corporate tech budgets this year — with 45% of global IT leaders naming it their top spending priority for 2025, according to a new report commissioned by Amazon Web Services.
AI agents: from co-pilot to autopilot
AI agents are not new but they are becoming ever more sophisticated. In their basic form they are simply tools built to carry out tasks such as answering queries to a script, as chatbots do, or fetching information from the web. These functions are limited, requiring no follow-up action without further input. Such reactive AI systems operate solely on programmed responses.
PDX Startup Week returns with 45 events across Portland – Portland Business Journal
The last time the community had a week like this dedicated to startup events was in 2019. Obviously, the pandemic years took a toll on events across the board, and the startup community has been slowly returning to previous levels of sociability.
The Unsung Ingredient in Stripe, Square and Linear’s Success: Taste
Taste may look effortless, but underneath the hood, there many finely-tuned gears cranking in unison. And for the companies doing it right, you don’t have to sacrifice speed and horsepower to get there.
Cloud Native PDX May Meeting » Calagator: Portland’s Tech Calendar
In this talk, we’ll explore how Platformer games and Platform Engineering have a lot more in common than we think. Let’s breakdown some of Super Mario’s decades old best practices and see how we can use them to build better platforms that helps us beat our big bad boss: developer friction and cognitive load.
When Is an AI Image Truly Art? – IEEE Spectrum
Curating digital art is not that different from any other art form. Whether painting or photography or print, we all look at the sophistication of a concept and how it is translated into a medium. So my curatorial choices are not driven by the technology. If you’re a curator of painting, the selection of a work for an exhibition would not be driven by a specific paint or technique for a brush stroke.
Pricing Guide for Early-Stage Startups
This episode examines common pricing models used before achieving PMF, the strategic risks and rewards of setting prices early, conversion data from early monetization experiments, and case studies illustrating key approaches. The goal is to provide a structured look at how young startups price their products when the primary objective is learning and user adoption rather than immediate profit.
Reflections after a Month Back in VC – Version One Ventures
Before I stepped away in late 2019, I’d spent nearly eight years in venture at Compound before leaving to build something deeply personal to me. Returning now has been simultaneously both very familiar and quite surprising. In some ways, it feels like I never left. At the end of the day, it’s still a business that’s fundamentally about the people and the privilege of learning every day from brilliant, ambitious and sometimes crazy (in a good way!) founders. At the same time, the ecosystem has evolved dramatically in all of the ways you’d expect – pace, scale, structure and the sheer number of talented early-stage investors.
More Portland startup news
