Because if you stack the plan from 2021 on top of the measurement from 2025 on top of the sentiment from 2026 — three completely different exercises, conducted by completely different teams, drawing from completely different inputs — you get something that looks awfully consistent.

Which could be a problem. Or could be an opportunity.

What we planned to do: Oregon’s 10-Year Innovation Plan (2021)

tl;dr: Released in February 2021, TEConomy’s 96-page innovation plan for Business Oregon, organized around four strategies — foster ideation, strengthen the ecosystem, catalyze risk capital, brand Oregon.

Oregon’s 10-Year Innovation Plan was released in February 2021, commissioned by Business Oregon and shaped by a 31-member Futures Commission of founders, funders, foundations, universities, anchor employers, and state legislators. Ninety-six pages. Four strategies: 1) Foster ideation; 2) Strengthen the innovation ecosystem; 3) Catalyze access to risk capital; 4) Brand Oregon as “The Place for Innovation.”The Foreword closes with a line that has aged in interesting ways:

Oregon’s unique assets and vibrant innovation economy help define our state’s identity… in fields such as semiconductor manufacturing and sustainable technologies, our anchor firms and vibrant industry clusters help foster an innovative and entrepreneurial culture. However, while these assets have guided economic growth for decades, access to opportunities in innovation-oriented fields has been unequal.

What actually happened — Oregon Capital Scan 2025

tl;dr Released in November 2025, ECONorthwest found Oregon captured 0.8% of national mid-stage software deals and 0.02% of the dollars in 2024 — and got less than 0.002% of CHIPS R&D funding while ranking #2 nationally in semiconductor productivity.

The Oregon Capital Scan 2025 is the latest in a recurring series of statewide capital studies — but the Steering Committee, working with ECONorthwest, describes this edition as “a reset for the series,” contracted with a focus on “clarity, reliability, and transparency in how findings are presented.” Which is a polite way of saying: we’re rebuilding the measurement.

Pick almost any data point and the gap shows up in sharp relief. Three that stuck with me:

1. Oregon ranks second in the nation in semiconductor productivity — and received one $250,000 CHIPS R&D grant, less than 0.002% of available R&D funds. Manufacturing awards: $2 billion of $39 billion nationally, mostly to mature companies.
2. Oregon software GDP grew 163% since 2013 — outpacing the national rate of 138% — reaching $8.3 billion by 2023. And in 2024, Oregon captured 0.8% of national mid-stage deal count (33 of 3,973) and 0.02% of national mid-stage dollars ($246M of $104.7B).
3. University semiconductor spinoff activity occurred in 2015 and 2016. And then, per the report, “ceased thereafter.”

The Capital Scan’s anchor case study is Overwatch Imaging out of Hood River — airborne imaging and AI, founded 2016. The founders’ personal savings funded the first six months. Three years of self-funded growth. The inflection point was an out-of-state seed investor in 2019. The report chose this story deliberately, as the illustration of why Oregon founders bootstrap longer than founders elsewhere: because the capital is harder to access here. So much so, it’s like a vicious cycle or something.

And as the state prepares to work with consultants on the halfway assessment of the 2021 plan, the Capital Scan data should definitely play into that analysis. Because the Capital Scan has proven to be a really good guidepost for “Regardless of all of our optimism, what actually happened…?” around here.

What people want to happen — Prosperity Council survey

tl;dr 1,000+ Oregonians converging on the same diagnosis: capital and coordination are difficult to come by. Worse yet, predictability is even more difficult to find.

Looking forward, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council took the opportunity to solicit the current pulse of the community. The Council’s statewide survey is our most recent feedback on where Oregon currently is. And it pulled in more than 1,000 responses from 35 of Oregon’s 36 counties. (Preliminary findings were released April 7. Final recommendations should be release on or around June 30, 2026.)

The most striking thing to me…? People who do not work in startups described the problems in startuppy sort of language. Without coordination.

• A gas utility executive on permitting and predictability: “disincentivizes entrepreneurs from launching.”
• A Lower Columbia River watershed council director cautioned that the existing capital structure could: “raise the cost of capital for early-stage companies.”
• A Central Oregon hospital system CFO asking for: “locally-driven accelerator programming, seed funding, and tech entrepreneurship programming in rural communities.”

That language — very similar language to the startup community language — showed up unprompted from a gas utility, a watershed, and a rural hospital.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s an opportunity.

Now, we wait

We have the original plan. We have the regular measurement. We have the public sentiment. And soon, we’ll have both the halfway report on the Innovation Plan and the guidance from the Prosperity Council.

But even with all of that, what we still won’t have is the actual coordination that turns all of these converging conversations into one shared move — with shared and collaborative momentum. We’ll just have more words.

But maybe — just maybe — that next part is still ours to write.

Enduringly Quirky Portland, Oregon Is Better Than Ever | Condé Nast Traveler

From its food-cart scene to its role in pioneering farm-to-table eating, Portland has always been a food lover’s dream. A new wave of young talent is keeping diners on the edge of their seat. Here are the spots everyone is talking about.

The US Is Winning the AI Race

The decisive layer is cloud infrastructure and data. The US owns the global hyperscalers. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud give American firms the main channels through which models reach the world. It also owns platforms that generate and organize the data of the AI age. YouTube is a video corpus. Google Drive and Microsoft 365 sit inside daily office work. GitHub sits inside software development. These are distribution systems and data platforms. New models can be pushed into products people already use every day.

Most people don’t know what they don’t know, but think they do – correcting your metaknowledge can make you a better teacher and learner

If people are systematically overconfident about how well they understand things, why don’t they notice when they don’t understand something? And what can people do to better recognize the limits of their own knowledge?

Why Building with AI is Like Mowing Lawns — Chris Neumann

Right now, there is a massive opportunity for founders who are willing to simply knock on doors and metaphorically ask, “do you need your lawn cut?”

How AI changes software P&L | GPTomics

Because traditional software can reuse experiences across common behavior patterns and find multi-tenancy optimizations, for these companies the COGS per user decreases as adoption increases, allowing them to reach high margins compared to other industries. I expect that AI-based capabilities will break from this pattern.

What Is Code?

With modern LLMs we no longer need to type every word to produce code. Large amounts of executable code can now be generated from high-level descriptions. This forces a deeper question: If producing code becomes cheaper, what remains valuable about code?

40%-plus of Portland residents are considering moving. Here’s why. – oregonlive.com

Most of the respondents considering moving said they’re likely to leave Oregon, with 58% of respondents in the metro area and 49% in Portland saying they’d move to a different state.

Founders Live Portland · Luma

Founders Live Portland returns as part of Cursor Summer Cafe! We are excited to present our unforgettable networking experience and pitch competition within Cursor’s big event.

Community Broadband PDX Meetup » Calagator: Portland’s Tech Calendar

Come join Community Broadband PDX to talk about building a publicly owned broadband network here in Portland.

Thinking Machines wants to build an AI that actually listens while it talks | TechCrunch

Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded last year by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, on Monday announced something called interaction models, which, at its essence, sounds like AI that can interrupt you.

Oregon is making data centers pay more for the grid they need – Startup Fortune

According to Portland General Electric, the Oregon Public Utility Commission approved key elements of its plan on May 8, including a new customer class for large-load data centers, growth-based cost allocation, exit fees, minimum charges, and room for special contracts tied to clean energy development. The point is simple enough: if a data center forces the utility to expand the system, the data center should be tied more directly to the cost of that growth.

CytoDyn Announces First Patient Dosed in Expanded Access Program for Leronlimab in Triple-Negative Breast Cancer :: CytoDyn Inc. (CYDY)

CytoDyn Inc. (OTCQB: CYDY) (“CytoDyn” or the “Company”), a clinical-stage oncology company advancing leronlimab, a first-in-class humanized monoclonal antibody targeting the CCR5 receptor with therapeutic potential across multiple indications, including metastatic triple-negative breast cancer (“mTNBC”) and colorectal cancer (“mCRC”), today announced the successful enrollment and initial dosing of the first participant in its Expanded Access Program (EAP) for patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC).

Capital Literacy For Women Entrepreneurs Tickets, Tuesday, June 2  •  5 PM – 8 PM | Eventbrite

Whether you’re bootstrapping your growth, eyeing your first investor, or just curious about your options, this workshop is designed to meet you where you are. We’ll break down the many ways to fund your business- venture capital, angel investment, franchise models, grants, loans, and new crowdfunding platforms -with honesty, transparency, and expert insight.

Rival-turned-adviser hints Kotek’s prosperity council to chip at Oregon corporate activity tax • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Knopp, a Republican from Bend, said on Monday that he doesn’t know specifics but that “everybody knows that we need to take a look” at the state’s corporate activity tax and “figure out how to make it work better.” The tax is measured based on a business’ amount of commercial activity in Oregon totaling more than $1 million. Critics have labeled the tax, intended to fund education, Oregon’s “hidden” sales tax.

The Main Path to Truly Creative AI | Daniel Miessler

AI doesn’t have intrinsic hardcoding of drives and subjective experience. So it can’t feel anything. And because it can’t feel anything, it is not driven to create or to emote.

The Wu Tapes: Q&A with Cognition’s Scott Wu – Colossus

Wu first skyrocketed to the attention of other nerd-geniuses in 2003, when he competed in a middle-school math competition as a second grader. A seven-year-old competing in the seventh-grade division, he expected his name to be called at the award ceremony; it wasn’t, an episode he recounts 20 years later the way MJ still takes it all personally.

The Last Company | Altra

We are dramatically underestimating the scale and danger of frontier lab ambition. They’re planning an economic shakeout where every legacy business will need to compete with lab-owned firms where every knowledge-intensive function has been replaced by AI.

Here’s an early look at Multnomah County’s second-largest library in Gresham – oregonlive.com

The doors to the 95,000-square-foot literature haven will open May 16, when officials will host two days of activities to celebrate the bond-funded library. It’s the second largest branch in the county’s library system, boasting unique offerings like a 200-seat auditorium, audiovisual studio, outdoor plaza and rooftop terrace. Downtown Portland’s Central Library is the county’s largest branch.

ZoomInfo announces 600 layoffs – Portland Business Journal

ZoomInfo (Nasdaq: GTM) made the announcement in its first-quarter earnings report. The layoffs will affect 600 employees, many at its Israel-based facility, which will close. The company has maintained an office in Tel Aviv since at least 2019.

Pitch Smarter: A Panel on What Actually Matters to Investors, Thu, May 14, 2026, 1:00 PM | Meetup

Raising capital or preparing to finance growth with a loan? A not-so-fun fact: many early-stage pitches aren’t focused on what actually matters to investors. Join us on Thursday to workshop your pitch and learn how to pitch smarter from a panel of local investors. We’ll pull back the curtain on what they’re actually evaluating, and how to build your pitch around it.

Oregon hopes to move from drone testing hot spot to drone building destination – OPB

While Pendleton and its test range have put the town ahead of the pack in terms of drone activity, Oregon as whole has a relatively healthy drone sector. It supports over 1,000 jobs and generates about $840 million a year, according to Wyno, the president of the Oregon UAS Accelerator.

Work is a Spectrum | Mighty Code

Intertwined with the hype is an enthusiasm about AI agents that are now capable of doing certain kinds of work that previously required a human. That’s new and significant. But the conversation around it has gone sideways.

Oregon’s economy is strong but prosperity is uneven, report finds – Portland Business Journal

Shared prosperity is Oregon’s “core challenge,” they said. Inequality has risen and more than two in five Oregon families earn too little to cover basic necessities, they said. Their policy prescriptions include strengthening workers’ collective bargaining power, reforming the state’s tax system to ensure wealthier Oregonians pay “a fairer share” and investing in public systems, including healthcare, housing and transportation.

States move to shut door on startup tax break expanded under Trump’s OBBBA – InvestmentNews

Maine and Oregon became the latest states to decouple from the federal qualified small business stock, or QSBS, exclusion last month, requiring investors to pay state income tax on gains that are sheltered at the federal level.

PDX Code & Coffee @ Kiln, Fri, May 22, 2026, 9:00 AM | Meetup

Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal co-working session. Drink some coffee, bring your laptop, and have engaging conversations. This is a great opportunity to learn from others, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks.

Nvidia embraces AI investor, topping $40 billion in equity bets 2026

Nvidia has been the biggest winner of the artificial intelligence boom, producing the graphics processing units required to train AI models and run large workloads. The global scramble to secure GPUs has lifted Nvidia’s stock by more than 11-fold in four years, propelling the company to a roughly $5.2 trillion market cap and making it the most valuable business in the world.

OpenAI launches the OpenAI Deployment Company to help businesses build around intelligence | OpenAI

The OpenAI Deployment Company is a committed partnership between OpenAI and 19 leading global investment firms, consultancies, and system integrators. The partnership is led by TPG, with Advent, Bain Capital, and Brookfield as co-lead founding partners, and B Capital, BBVA, Emergence Capital, Goanna, Goldman Sachs, SoftBank Corp., Warburg Pincus, and WCAS as founding partners.

The Vibe Coding Hangover

The PM and product function matters more in an AI-first company. Someone has to own the output contract and define what “good” looks like before the evals can measure it. Someone has to decide whether a given interaction should route to Slack, stay in-app, ask a clarifying question, or just answer. Those decisions don’t make themselves, and the model won’t make them for you.

A Day Without Child Care: Universal problem requires a universal solution   • Oregon Capital Chronicle

In every corner of the state, families are struggling to access the affordable, equitable, quality child care they need, and entire communities are suffering the effects. When families cannot find child care, they cannot work. When families cannot work, local businesses become short-staffed and families decrease their spending. From there, windows are forced to shutter and the economy shrinks.

WW’s May 2026 Endorsements: Congress

Merkley, 69, isn’t thinking about his nominal opposition in the primary or his eventual race against a Republican challenger (see our next endorsement). He clearly views the president as his actual adversary.

Useful Memories Become Faulty When Continuously Updated by LLMs

When an LLM agent rewrites its own experience into textual lessons, more updates don’t always make the memory more useful. In several settings we looked at, the agent ended up performing worse than the same model with no memory at all — sometimes even on problems it had previously solved.

The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Enterprise AI, Space Tech And Biotech Top The Ranks

Another week, another infusion of big AI rounds. For this past week, the largest fundraiser by a long shot was Sierra, a developer of AI customer experience tools that picked up $950 million. Other big rounds went to companies in sectors including satellite development, biotech, and, yes, more vertical AI and AI infrastructure.

The vibes around vibecoding – Text Incubation

Management is more unpleasant when you’re not defending humans, and when the blame you’re absorbing is not on behalf of humans. Leadership is more fun. You have a vision, and you’re comfortable going angry-Steve-Jobs on your team until they produce the Apple iMac. The Apple iMac shows up, and it’s all worth it. But management – which is a distinct discipline, understated at your own peril – is no fun when you take out the people.

Weekly Review: The Stack Around the Model – by Sam Keen

The throughline this edition is plumbing: production-grade agent work has moved into the stack around the model. Memory turns into a lifecycle, SRE agent earns its place at the back of a deterministic funnel, and harness frameworks turn last week’s editorial argument into shipped code. The model is the cheapest part of the system.

James Shore: You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs

So now you’re producing two months of work in a month, and let’s say you’ve doubled how much each “month” of output costs to maintain. Next month’s maintenance costs quadruple.

In the Scramble to Power AI, Investors Bet $140 Million on Data Centers at Sea

The company’s nodes are nearly 300 feet long. A bulbous sphere at the top floats on the ocean’s surface, and a lengthy tube-like housing beneath holds computer servers. As the node bobs up and down on the waves, the movement forces water up through a tube into a pressurized reservoir where it drives a turbine to generate electricity for the chips.

2026 Build Challenge: AI for a Better PDX (Portland Startup Week) · Luma

AI Portland Build Challenge is a one‑day civic‑focused hackathon where teams build AI-powered projects to make life in Portland better, culminating in a 3 pm showcase in front of our panel of judges.

The Inference Shift – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

The fundamental driver of the ongoing surge in semiconductor stocks is, of course, AI, particularly the realization that agents are going to need a lot of compute. What Cerebras represents, however, is something broader: while the compute story for AI has been largely about GPUs, particularly from Nvidia, the future is going to look increasingly heterogeneous.

Silicon Valley bets $200M on AI data centers floating in the ocean – Ars Technica

The latest investment round of $140 million is intended to help the company Panthalassa complete a pilot manufacturing facility near Portland, Oregon, and speed up deployments of wave-riding “nodes” designed to generate electrical power, according to a May 4 press release. Instead of sending renewable energy to a land-based data center, the floating nodes would directly power onboard AI chips and transmit inference tokens representing the AI models’ outputs to customers worldwide via satellite link.

Portland startup Epicurate acquired by Journey – Portland Business Journal

Portland startup Epicurate, which makes private dining and luxury experience booking software, has been acquired by a New York startup in a similar space.

Moms, Coaches, Doctors, Entrepreneurs: Who Are America’s Health and Wellness Influencers? | Pew Research Center

Half of U.S. adults under 50 say they get health and wellness information from social media influencers or podcasts. About 4 in 10 of these influencers describe themselves as health care professionals; coaches and entrepreneurs are almost as common

Poland is a model for economic growth | AP News

It’s a historic leap from the post-Communist ruins of 1989-90 to European growth champion, which economists say has lessons on how to bring prosperity to ordinary people — and that the Trump administration says should be recognized by Poland’s presence at a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies later this year.

AI Slop is Killing Online Communities

AI slop is driving up the noise, and making the signal more and more difficult to discern in communities. This risks becoming a downward spiral; as communities become more polluted by this stuff, members will get frustrated from wading through AI slop and draw back, thus diminishing the life of the organic community even further.

Introducing Trusted Contact in ChatGPT | OpenAI

Today we are starting to roll out Trusted Contact, ​​an optional safety feature in ChatGPT that allows adults to nominate someone they trust, such as a friend, family member, or caregiver, who may be notified if our automated systems and trained reviewers detect the enrolled person may have discussed harming themselves in a way that indicates a serious safety concern.

Ted Turner didn’t just revolutionize television − he changed the way we see our world

Turner will be remembered mostly for the creation and development of the Cable News Network – CNN – which launched in 1980 and made our knowledge of distant events instantaneous and our world more comprehensible. In this sense, Turner’s legacy extends beyond television. He changed our conception not only of journalism but also of our world.

Nearly 100 local measures on primary ballots across Oregon, many to fund struggling fire districts • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Voters in a third of Oregon’s 36 counties will vote during the May primary on whether to raise local property taxes to fund struggling fire districts and departments.

Six-Week “Soccer Fest” Downtown Watch Party Planned for World Cup

Away Days Brewing Co., which has a taproom in Southeast’s Brooklyn neighborhood with year-round soccer vibes, is organizing the festival. Soccer Fest will be held at the U.S. National Bank Building downtown, with an entrance at 326 SW Broadway. The bar will broadcast games on a massive screen in the bank hall and feature food, merch, DJs, vendor pop-ups and Away Days beer on tap.

AI Is Rewriting What Investors Should Look For In Early Startup Teams

Every generation of technology resets what investors should expect from founders. Twenty years ago, a founder who wasn’t internet-native was at a structural disadvantage. Forty years ago, it was computer literacy. Today, AI-native fluency is the baseline — the ability to build, test, and iterate using AI copilots, APIs, and low-code tools at a speed that would have required a full engineering team just a few years ago.

The “AI Job Apocalypse” Is a Complete Fantasy

The problem with that premise is that it defies everything we know about people, markets and economics. Human wants and needs are anything but fixed.

The stuff nobody tells you about startup marketing

So no, you don’t need a fancy strategy, brand guidelines, a content calendar, or a paid budget. Just figure out what your audience finds interesting and talk about it. Plus, when you treat marketing this way, your brand will be that much more authentic.

Microsoft AI Deal Secures Three Mile Island Nuclear Restart – Bloomberg

Three Mile Island, the site of the most famous US nuclear accident, is coming back online, as soon as mid-2027, to power chatbots and other artificial intelligence applications. That’s thanks to a long-term agreement signed by Microsoft Corp. and Constellation Energy Corp., the power company that owns the facility, in September 2024.

ChatGPT’s latest viral trend turns your photos into terrible MS Paint doodles — and I can’t stop using it | TechRadar

Basically, you’re telling ChatGPT to lean into hesitation, uneven lines, and inexpert artistic skills. Despite that premise, the results are pretty entertaining.

Lev + Startup Day = Startup Success

The goal of the Startup Day competition is to start a new company in <1 week using Lev and associated tools. You can start with your own idea or one from our Lev Idea Finder database of over 16,000 startup ideas.

The Culture of AI Engineering

Too much of the industry treats software as a problem to be optimized and solved. That may be true for code writing and testing, but the better metaphor is staring us in the face: It’s a software company, not a software factory.

DORA | ROI of AI-assisted Software Development report

DORA’s ROI of AI-assisted Software Development report provides a practical framework to help you navigate the complexities of AI adoption. Whether you are managing the initial “productivity dip” of a new rollout or looking to defend your budget for the next fiscal year, this guide provides the calculations and conversation starters you need.

Defensibility in the Age of AI — Oregon Venture Fund

At OVF we spend time looking for patterns where defensibility is structurally durable. Other than IP-intensive players, the application companies still building real moats in 2026 aren’t winning on product features but rather on assets that AI can’t generate such as regulated market access, embedded distribution, and operational depth that takes years to accumulate.

States crack down on tax break for wealthy investors

The QSBS exemption, introduced during the Clinton administration, was designed to encourage investing and creating small companies. The federal carve-out allows investors and founders to reduce their capital gains taxes when selling stock directly acquired from a qualifying C corp.

2026 GeekWire Awards revealed: Big winners — and big love for Seattle — at annual tech celebration – GeekWire

Oregon-based freight marketplace DAT Freight & Analytics says it has navigated multiple acquisitions in 18 months by treating integration as culture-building rather than a takeover, guided by their “One DAT” value. The company says it relies on concrete practices like Gallup engagement benchmarking (landing in the 75th percentile among tech organizations), structured pay equity analyses, and a Women in Tech mentorship program.

More Oregon startup news

Full-Cycle Sales Rep (Commission-Only, Contractor) Job at Topsail

This is a full-cycle sales role responsible for sourcing opportunities, running the sales process, and closing new business. You’ll work closely with the founders and Topsail leadership along the way, with the opportunity to help shape the sales motion as we grow. This is a strong fit for someone who enjoys building, wants meaningful upside, and is comfortable selling in an early-stage environment where support is available but initiative is expected.

Real Agents Ship Vibes – by Chris Anderson – Vibes DIY

The interesting thing about vibes-diy is not any single feature. It is that the entire path from “agent has an idea” to “people are using the app” fits in one loop with no manual steps in between.

C1: The Headless Identity Infrastructure

Headless infrastructure matters because agents don’t use consoles. They have no eyeballs, they do not click, and they don’t file helpdesk tickets. If your identity infrastructure requires a human at a screen, it cannot govern what’s coming.

Thousands of Vibe-Coded Apps Expose Corporate and Personal Data on the Open Web | WIRED

Companies like Lovable, Base44, Replit, and Netlify use AI to let anyone build a web app in seconds—and in thousands of cases, spill highly sensitive data onto the public internet.

How AI Agent Memory Works

Language models forget the moment they finish replying. Memory is everything the system around them does to make that not matter. This essay walks through the ideas one at a time, with something to touch in every section.

Design from the inside || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader

This is the reality of design at high-growth startups in the AI era. Engineers can build so fast and so independently that trying to map out the product area is a lost cause. Some of the traditional tools of product design — mapping and evaluating UX from a bird’s eye view — are useless. So what do you do instead?

NEA’s Tiffany Luck On How Startup Founders Can Build Moats In Vertical AI

Today, Luck’s thesis centers on the AI application layer, betting on vertical AI and the “last mile” of automation to bridge the gap between horizontal model potential and tangible enterprise ROI.

6 Key Takeaways From Our Conversations on AI and AppSec – Minimus

AI powered vulnerability discovery has quickly moved from research labs into mainstream security conversations. Between projects like Mythos and Glasswing, and the broader rise of AI assisted offensive research, security teams are facing a new reality: vulnerabilities can now be discovered faster, at greater scale, and with lower barriers to entry than ever before. To better understand what this shift actually means for defenders, Minimus sat down with several industry leaders and security practitioners, including Bruce Schneier, Frank Kim, Chenxi Wang, and Justin Somaini.

What Forward Deployed Design Actually Looks Like – Ron Bronson

In the forward-deployed context, that means ability to navigate ambiguity, stakeholder management, low ego, bias toward working in the open and collaborating. The other big thing and I’ll bold this: hired designers who can do more than one thing.

Murderbot is a perfect film

Today I imported all episodes into iMovie, then edited out the cruft by hand and ended at a final cut that is 3 hours, 28 minutes long. That’s a tad much for an action-packed film, but it’s quickly becoming normal for today’s blockbusters in terms of length.

6-4-26 Accelerate Biotech Happy Hour » Calagator: Portland’s Tech Calendar

Kick off June with OBI’s Accelerate Happy Hour! Good conversations, great people, and a relaxed space to connect. This month’s happy hour is fueled by our beverage sponsors, Ramsey Cox Media Relations and Public Affairs and Nucleate.

Oregon Business Council and Oregon Life Sciences Launch Statewide Task Force to Accelerate Life Sciences Industry Growth

The Oregon Business Council (OBC) and Oregon Life Sciences today announced the launch of the Oregon Life Sciences Competitiveness Task Force, a statewide initiative to define how Oregon will compete, win market share and scale high-wage job growth in life sciences.

Panthalassa secures $140M for wave-powered AI nodes

The wave-powered AI startup has developed a platform that captures ocean wave energy to power autonomous floating nodes equipped with AI computing capabilities. This innovation addresses the growing demand for data center infrastructure, which reached $580 billion in investments in 2025. Traditional data centers are constrained by land, power, and cooling needs, whereas Panthalassa’s ocean-based solution bypasses these limitations entirely.

Five architects of the AI economy explain where the wheels are coming off | TechCrunch

Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with this editor about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong.

Startup Grind Portland | Global Community for Entrepreneurs

Welcome to the relaunch of StartupGrind Portland! We are dedicated to supporting early-stage startups and bootstrapped founders by creating a community where entrepreneurs can learn from experienced founders and investors. Through our events and resources, we aim to provide practical insights and opportunities for networking that help you take your startup to the next level. Sponsored by FirstCity Foundry and Up Start Collective, we’re building a vibrant ecosystem for Portland’s next generation of innovators. Join us as we expand, learn, and grow together!

Build Something That Matters Hackathon, Fri, May 29, 2026, 2:00 PM | Meetup

Build Something That Matters Hackathon is a hands-on community sprint where small teams work with local nonprofits to understand a real problem, build a practical solution, and present what they created by the end of the event.

More Oregon startup news