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

Most of what ecosystem builders know never gets written down anywhere. It gets discussed over coffee. Or in a hallway at a conference. Or in a Slack channel at 11:00PM when somebody three states over is trying to figure out how to keep their meetup alive for one more month. That’s why Anika Horn has spent a decade collecting that stuff. Through her Social Venturers newsletter. Through the Ecosystems for Change podcast. Through conversations with more than fifty community builders around the country. So it doesn’t get lost. And as of September, she’s captured a lot of those learnings in It Takes a Valley.

Silicon Forest is an admittedly odd moniker. (Says the guy with an even more oddly named blog.) But it’s also fitting. And it’s a reminder that fabs and wafers and lithography and embedded systems and all of the rest of the deeply unglamorous physical technology business are foundational to this region. So when a16z dropped State of Markets II — written by general partner David George who leads their Growth team — and the second section announced that capital has rotated out of software and back into hardware… well, I took notice.

Oxford Economics ranks the world’s 1,000 largest cities every year. And Portland often tends to land somewhere in the respectable part of that list. The new Global Cities Index 2026 keeps that tradition going. Sort of. We came in 53rd for 2026. Which is to say similar to last year’s ranking. But three spots lower.

Geothermal. It’s becoming a — ahem — hot commodity here in Oregon. Some of that activity is happening in Central Oregon at the Newberry Volcano. But that’s not the only kind of Oregon geothermal activity. The challenge is that it’s just a bit harder to get to than the high desert. Because it’s under the ocean.

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

Why Most Startups Fail and How AI is Making it Worse

It’s about focusing on your core for long enough (and until it’s strong enough) that expansion is done through thoughtful experiments rather than existential bets to live up to investor promises or our own insecurities.

Every October for the past two decades, a whole bunch of startup folks set their sites on Bend, Oregon. For the longest time, that was purely to attend the Bend Venture Conference. But recently, the folks in Bend realized that they could offer a whole week of awesomeness. And that resulted in the formation of High Desert Innovation Week.

ZoomInfo has made another “build vs buy” decision. And it’s landed on buy. ZoomInfo announced that it has acquired DoubleO.ai, a San Francisco startup that builds agentic orchestration. In other words, software designed to get a bunch of AI agents working together reliably instead of impressively.

Chasing federal research dollars is a slog. Worth it. I mean, SBIR and STTR money is nondilutive. So you get capital without giving up ownership in your company. But a slog nonetheless. And most Oregon founders need somebody to walk them through it. Back in the day, we used to rely on Oregon BEST and VertueLab. But since that organization no longer has a significant local footprint, that’s been a gap in the community. So I’m happy to report that the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network has been awarded nearly $172,000 through the SBA’s Federal and State Technology (FAST) Partnership Program. Plus nearly $130,000 in matching funds from Business Oregon on top of that. For a total project budget of more than $301,000.

I’ve been trying to do a better job of tracking the companies around here. I mean, I always love to write up all of the awesome things people are building. But I’m equally enamoured of companies that are growing in the region. And the GeekWire 200 always provides a glimpse into how those companies are doing among Pacific Northwest startups.

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

Expensify + Claude for Small Business Webinar

See what it looks like when a small business owner asks Claude to run their books — cash flow, month-end close, and tax prep, done live, directly inside Claude for Small Business with Expensify connected.