Portland Oregon startups, tech, news, events, jobs, and community

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

What I Learned from Turning Myself Into an AI Chatbot | Jane Friedman

Soqratic took care of creating a simple interface so my potential clients could easily sign up. As it turned out, one of the biggest challenges was to make sure that the virtual coach’s answers were limited to my content. I didn’t want it pulling writing and publishing advice from Anne Lamott or Jane Friedman and passing it off as my own. The solution to this is a technique called RAG (retrieval augmented generation), which limits answers to content from a bounded data set (in this case, my books and blog posts).

If you’re a startup founder in Washington County, one of the best ways to get rapidly connected to the community is to participate in TiE Oregon’s Westside Pitch, now in its fifth year.

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

The Fundraising Tactic AI Startups Are Using to Juice Valuations – WSJ

But several VC investors and outside accounting professionals said the back-to-back or multitiered deals are novel and raise questions about how much startups are really worth in an age of frenzied artificial-intelligence investing.

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

The Last Durable Moat: Emotional Market Fit

Moats that depend on speed, optimization, pattern recognition, and scale are dying, thanks to AI, automation, and rampant access to everything all the time. Advantages based on trust, community, identity, and transformation have more staying power.

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

How to stop being boring

The people who respond negatively aren’t your people anyway. That’s the benefit of being unedited: it filters your social world. The more you hide who you actually are, the more you attract people who like the persona, which means the more alone you feel even when surrounded by friends.

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

The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself

As these technologies become better at producing knowledge work – designing classes, writing papers, suggesting experiments and summarizing difficult texts – they don’t just make universities more productive. They risk hollowing out the ecosystem of learning and mentorship upon which these institutions are built, and on which they depend.

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

How I’d answer some of the trickiest questions SF investors ask

I’ve had a tonne of messages from readers of my last post all wanting to know the same thing – so how do you answer those questions?! What are VCs looking for?