No jokes. Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
Portland Council to take up business license tax exemption – Portland Business Journal
The proposal would raise the exemption to $75,000 for the 2026 tax year and to $100,000 starting in 2027 tax year. The proposal is being brought forward by Mayor Keith Wilson and council member Eric Zimmerman.
Building for the Next Era of WordPress with the Abilities API, Tue, Apr 14, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup
Nik McLaughlin will introduce us to the Abilities API that was added to WordPress in version 6.9 and go beyond the (justifiable) AI hype to show how it lays the foundation for a future of standardized interoperability in WordPress.
Q1 2026 Shatters Venture Funding Records As AI Boom Pushes Startup Investment To Nearly $300B
Q1’s startup investment largely went to AI startups and disproportionately to a handful of U.S.-based companies in record-setting deals. Four of the five largest venture rounds ever recorded were closed in Q1 2026, with frontier labs OpenAI ($120 billion), Anthropic ($30 billion), xAI ($20 billion) and self-driving company Waymo ($16 billion) collectively raising $186 billion, or 64% of global venture investment in the quarter.
Pacific Power, PGE raise residential electricity rates again for Oregon customers • Oregon Capital Chronicle
The state’s Public Utility Commission — a three-person governor-appointed group charged with regulating the rates of privately owned electric and gas utilities in Oregon — approved both monopoly electric utilities’ requests to raise rates on residential customers at a meeting Tuesday.
Portland Frog Originator Sentenced to Three Months of Probation
Seth Todd, the original Portland protest frog, has been sentenced to three months of probation for a January arrest at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland. Todd, along with five other protesters, was arrested Jan. 8 for disorderly conduct when they refused to move to the sidewalk to clear the street for traffic.
Oregon Beer Awards
The April 4th Ceremony will be streamed here, starting at 5:45PM.
The Economics of Generative AI: Two Years Later
The bottom line upfront: Semi is a one-player game. Apps is a two-player game. Infra is the only competitive layer. The most profitable strategy in AI is still selling the shovels.
Things I Think I Think – Q1 2026 — Chris Neumann
It’s now very clear that for a certain category of companies (namely, AI-native companies whose revenue tracks usage), the growth trajectory is very different from what has historically been the case in the software world. The extreme compression of time has led to a dramatic acceleration of funding for those companies and a dramatic upswing in round sizes and valuations. And while usage-based revenue won’t last forever, the companies capitalizing on it are running away from the proverbial pack.
Why Iran targeted Amazon data centers and what that does – and doesn’t – change about warfare
This is the first time that a country has deliberately targeted commercial data centers during wartime. Data centers have been targets of espionage and cyberattacks in the past, notably when Ukrainian hackers destroyed data stored in a Russian military-affiliated data center in 2024. This, however, was a physical attack. Drones damaged buildings.
Winter’s alarmingly low snowpack offers a glimpse of the changing rhythm of water in the western US
As a result, even regions that received near- or above-normal precipitation for the season failed to build substantial snowpack. In the northern Rockies and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, any above-average snow accumulation was largely confined to the highest elevations, while middle and lower elevations had relatively little snowpack.
Product Drift — Outpost
Agents can generate features faster than you can read them. Sometimes they produce whole flows before you’ve decided what comes next. At first, this feels amazing — like the codebase can grow on its own. But quickly you notice something: the product doesn’t just move forward. It starts to drift.
Meet the Startup That Used AI and OpenClaw to Automate Its Own Developers – WSJ
As the OpenClaw craze takes over Silicon Valley, some startups are combining the tech with AI coding tools to fully automate developers’ jobs
The Subprime Technical Debt Crisis | One Happy Fellow – blog
Technical debt is not good or bad on its own, just like financial debt: it’s either worth it or not worth it. Taking a 10% interest loan makes sense if your return is 20%.
It’s not your imagination: AI seed startups are commanding higher valuations | TechCrunch
At the most recent Y Combinator Demo Day held in March, everyone was talking about how high the companies were priced, said Ashley Smith, a general partner at the early-stage fund Vermilion. Many startups had already landed six- to seven-figure customer contracts, including a company that was only eight weeks old; she said there were companies asking for $5 million at a $40 million post money.
Astronauts get set to go around the moon for first time in decades – GeekWire
The 10-day Artemis 2 mission is set to begin today with the liftoff of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket from NASA’s historic Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The two-hour launch window opens at 6:24 p.m. ET (3:24 p.m. PT), and NASA is streaming live mission coverage of the countdown on two different YouTube channels.
Why I’m Launching So Many SaaS Apps Right Now | by Ryan Merket | Apr, 2026 | Medium
I do not think enough people have fully absorbed what that means yet. The minimum viable size of a real software business is collapsing. The amount of leverage available to a focused founder is going up dramatically. The distance between seeing a problem and shipping something useful against it is getting shorter.
