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

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Oregon-based Agility Robotics doesn’t get the local attention it so richly deserves. They’re one of the leading companies in the humanoid robotics space and they’re right here in Oregon. Oh well. At least the Wall Street Journal gets it.

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

The In-Between Week

And, of course, we close with One Last Thing… by the one and only Angel Medina. This one’s a longer read. A reflection on December, January, uncertainty, pride, and why we keep going, even when it feels hard.

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

Why $1-10M ARR is the Hardest

Most founders think the hardest part of growth is getting to the first $1M. Martin Roth’s story is a reminder that a revenue leader’s job doesn’t get any less challenging as a startup scales—it gets harder in many ways, easier in some, and most importantly, what it takes to win changes radically.

You know me. I always love when startup founders get back on the startup path and start building something new. Experience matters. Even if it’s a whole new AI world. And that’s why I’m excited to see Nat Parker — cofounder and CEO of successfully exited GlobeSherpa — start something new. Meet CleanHaus.

Typical startup accelerator programs usually have an average of 10 startups in a single cohort. The Oregon UAS Accelerator…? Slightly more for this batch. They just revealed the 34 companies that will be participating in this round of the unique startup accelerator program focused on the flight facility in Pendleton, Oregon.

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

The Shape of Artificial Intelligence – by Alberto Romero

We are the earliest historians of this weird, elusive technology, and as such, it’s our duty to begin a conversation that’s likely to take decades (or centuries, if we remain alive by then) to be fully fleshed out, once spatial and temporal distance reveal what we’re looking at.

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

Why Do A.I. Chatbots Use ‘I’? – The New York Times

Shneiderman and a host of other experts in a field known as human-computer interaction object to this approach. They say that making these systems act like humanlike entities, rather than as tools with no inner life, creates cognitive dissonance for users about what exactly they are interacting with and how much to trust it.

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

These Startups Went From Zero To Unicorn In Under 3 Years

Predictably, it’s an AI-centric group. The three most highly valued among recently funded unicorns founded in the past three years — xAI, Mistral AI and Safe Superintelligence — are all generative AI companies. Overall, a whopping 36 out of the 46 companies on the list are in AI industry categories.