You Think You Need a Foot Doctor – by Dr. Astrid J. Scholz

I’ve been thinking about this because of the requests for proposals, terms of reference, and other procurement announcements that come across my desk, and the desks of my colleagues who have spent decades inside and alongside mission-driven organizations. They arrive as neat, fundable, RFP-shaped asks. We need a five-year strategic plan. We need a succession plan. We need to hire a development director. We need a new executive director. Each is a reasonable request. Each can be answered with a one-pager, a template, and an invoice. And each, in my experience, is usually the wrong place to start.

Design for the Win: Creatives Behind Women’s Sports in Portland Tickets, Wednesday, October 14  •  6 PM – 8:30 PM | Eventbrite

Join us for an inspiring evening celebrating the incredible creatives who work behind the scenes to fuel the surge of support for women’s and gender expansive sports in Portland! This event features presentations and a dynamic panel with talented individuals who have contributed their magic to teams like the Rose City Rollers, Portland Fire (WNBA), Cherry Bombs FC (USL W), Portland Cascade (AUSL), and Unmatched filmmakers who retell the iconic Portland Pilots 2005 season with legends Megan Rapinoe and Christine Sinclair.

(2007) Portland Small Business wants you

Local-startup tracker and small-business social network Portland Small Business is looking for a few good companies to review. The only qualifying factor? Portland Small Business hopes to make the pool of companies as diverse as possible. I’m looking for 10-20 small businesses to review on this site. I want a representative sample of all the…

White House is isolated in brushing off AI safety | Semafor

As a result, nations may be left setting nonbinding rules and best practices without the buy-in of the biggest companies’ home country. Meanwhile, frontier labs are pushing forward with their own self-regulatory schemes, which will ask them to agree on testing standards in a highly competitive environment.

Bill Gates warns AI is powerful enough to cause “a billion deaths”

Driving the news: “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” he will tell Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, per excerpts NBC released Friday.

Silicon Florist watch party · Luma

An opportunity to join folks from the Portland startup community for a little watch party — all from the comfort of your own keyboard.

Internal memos: Microsoft shakes up communications as Nadella makes a push to build in public – GeekWire

Microsoft is moving its communications function out of its marketing group and into the corporate, external and legal affairs organization led by Brad Smith, its vice chair and president, according to internal emails Thursday from Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

AI labs need to start funding historical research

The TLDR is that pairing historians working in collaborative groups with the current frontier models would, in my view, produce numerous advances in historical knowledge and interpretation. My guess is that many of these could end up being quite meaningful. This was not the case as recently as last year. I think AI labs, historical researchers, and funding agencies should start actively pursuing these collaborations.

Newcomer nabs another Portland high-rise as real estate influence grows – oregonlive.com

The latest power-play by a newcomer shows just how ascendant he’s become in Portland’s clubby real estate scene. It also shows how weak the bargaining position of many legacy owners remains.

Elakha Alliance, Oregon Coast Aquarium join Seattle groups studying habitat for sea otter reintroduction • Lincoln Chronicle

Except for one failed experiment and a handful of curious wayfarers, sea otters have not lived in Oregon’s coastal waters since they were hunted to extinction for their fur more than a century ago. But a new, three-year research effort with plenty of scientific heft behind it will see what it might take to re-establish a species once was found along much of the coast.

YC startups are skipping the API and shipping an MCP server | Installmap

We expected the newest companies to lead on all three. Most of them build on language models and sell to developers, so a public API seemed the obvious first step and llms.txt and MCP the later ones. The llms.txt column does rise with every batch group. The API column does not. In the newest batches an llms.txt is more common than an API, and an MCP server is nearly as common.

there are no more moats. you never had one.

back in the day you would dig a moat around the castle. then you would make it deeper. then deeper again. you would add a drawbridge. crocodiles in the water if you could get them. and if someone was dumb enough to try to swim across anyway, you would pour boiling oil on them from the wall. and it worked. for a few hundred years the castle was the dominant piece of military technology in Europe.

Why Venture Due Diligence Got Worse for Deep Tech

A reviewer with the right background can answer them in weeks, which is faster than the median founder’s wait for a Series A and slower than the frontier round closes now. That difference in speed is the whole cost of the fix, and the $4.9 billion of 2025 is the scale of capital now exposed to the question.

Why Good Product Ideas Don’t Survive – Itamar Gilad

A/B-test research shows that the vast majority of ideas deliver little or no value; some even detract value. Analyze feature usage in your product and look at past roadmaps, and you’ll see a clear power law — a small minority of your ideas create significant impact. The reason is simple: in most products most low-hanging fruit have already been picked. The odds of coming up with something novel and truly good are quite slim.

The Most Important Market in AI is the Middle | Tomasz Tunguz

AI prices are collapsing, but the competition is not at the frontier. Anthropic held the Opus line at $5 & $25 across five releases while OpenAI cut Luna 80% then 50% again, & open models now run a majority of token volume at an 86% discount to closed models. The most capable model, Fable 5.1, commanded only 3.7% of gateway spending in its first twelve days. Demand is a normal distribution with a fat middle, & as intelligence per dollar explodes the tokens may shift to commodity. Whether that happens will determine the economics of the AI market.

The Age of the Soft Skill

Anybody with an agent and a little patience can sit down with a codebase they have never seen and reason about it. I don’t mean throw a prompt at it blindly and hope. I mean actually work through it, in collaboration with the thing: what does this do? why was it built this way? what breaks if we change it? You can understand the tradeoffs in a system in an afternoon that used to take a new hire six months of pairing with the one person who knew.

Scoop: Trump world open new front to cast Anthropic CEO as face of AI doom

Why it matters: The attacks signal that Anthropic could remain a Trump target as his allies push back on Amodei’s AI safety warnings amid the midterm elections. Trump surrogates see Amodei as an easy foil because of his politics and focus on AI safety, sources told Axios.

Data centers take center stage, spur mudslinging, in competitive Gorge-based Oregon House race • Oregon Capital Chronicle

A Republican county commissioner who ushered in Google data center development in The Dalles is accusing his opponent of being a champion of data center tax breaks.

More Oregon startup news

I’m also — if embedding is allowed — embedding the entire discussion for you below. So that you can listen, assess, and make your own decisions about the candidates. Which I highly encourage you to do.

A note on the format because it shapes the answers. Suzanne Stevens, editor-in-chief of the Portland Business Journal, moderated. This was not a debate. Both candidates took the same questions in the same session — five minute openings, two minute answers, three minute closings, order drawn at random that morning. Drazan went first. The format rewarded preparation and punished rambling. And nobody got to interrupt anybody.

Campaign plans get edited. Repeatedly, by several people, over several weeks, until every sentence in the thing is one the campaign is willing to defend. That’s what makes a plan useful.

A live discussion is a completely different situation.

At a high level…

1. The one word I was obviously listening for — startups — wasn’t used by either candidate.
2. When it came to defending Oregonians, Kotek focused on Federal pressures. Drazan highlighted Portland City Council as a focal point.
3. One genuine agreement: real movement on the Corporate Activity Tax from both of them.
4. And finally, if this were decided by an applause-o-meter, I would say that Drazan elicited more positive reaction from the audience than Kotek did.

Let’s get into it my additional takeaways…

The grade

tl;dr Asked to rate Oregon’s competitiveness, Kotek said B. Drazan declined to grade but pointed to a report card littered with Fs. That is the entire event in a nutshell.

The moderator set it up with CNBC’s 2026 “America’s Top States for Business” ranking, which put Oregon 42nd. Our lowest placement in the two decades that index has existed. Down from 39th last year.

Kotek gave Oregon a B. She wants permit certainty and what she called “value based regulatory frameworks.” She noted that nine out of ten businesses here have fifty or fewer employees and need a level playing field.

Drazan declined the framing altogether. She said she doesn’t have to rate Oregon. Because outside groups already have. And they’ve landed somewhere between a D and an F on every list.

Where they actually agreed

tl;dr Both of them want Business Oregon rebuilt as a Department of Commerce. In line with the guidance from Kotek’s Prosperity Council. But they got there from different angles.

Kotek called Business Oregon a “high functioning agency.” She wants the agency redefined as a Department of Commerce. Wants workforce investment moved into it. Needs a global trade desk stood up and more proactive outreach. And wanted more tools in the toolbelt for the agency.

Drazan said Business Oregon is not a functioning agency. Her complaint was about the front door: businesses have no point of contact. And don’t know who runs the place. She said it’s mostly been used to pick winners and losers. While getting money out the door quickly.

Still she agreed that Business Oregon should become the Department of Commerce.

One of them thinks the agency is doing its job but the job is wrong. The other thinks the agency isn’t doing the job or engaging with business. They both seemed to be asking for a teardown and rebuild.

What neither candidate touched upon is: What actually goes inside it…? A Department of Commerce is a container. And whether a founder ever has a reason to call it depends entirely on what the Legislature puts in there. Neither candidate offered a glimpse into that. They just agreed on a naming convention. But that’s the actual question I know each and every founder and business leader is asking.

The CAT finally got specific

tl;dr Neither written plan told you where the Corporate Activity Tax threshold should land. Both candidates named a number today. They’re on the same side of it but very far apart.

For the founders who haven’t had the pleasure, allow me to introduce you to the CAT. It’s a 0.57% tax on any commercial activity above $1 million. Not profit. Activity. Plus a $250 flat amount. With registration and reporting kicking in at $750,000.

Which means it lands — dear startup founder — on exactly the type of venture backed, top line growing, intentionally unprofitable company you’re trying to build. At exactly the moment when your startup is burning the most cash. And has made the least money.

Fun.

Kotek started with a frame — the tax system has to be adequate and fair — and then got surprisingly concrete. She’s open to the Prosperity Council’s items like expanding the R&D credit, adjusting the CAT for different sized businesses, and creating protections for investing in Oregon companies. She also defended the CAT as an important state revenue stream. One that corrected thirty years of school underfunding.

Drazan focused on Oregon’s business taxes being too high. And then went further than the Prosperity Council did. She’s not suggesting we stop at $2 million. Because she doesn’t think $2 million is enough. Her phrasing was lower the overall cost. Not just rob Peter to pay Paul. She also named the estate tax as another culprit in the mix.

Kotek’s written plan never named CAT reform. Today she said she’d adjust it. Drazan’s plan named CAT reform. Today she said the floor is too low.

That’s movement from both of them in one afternoon. And it’s the most concrete thing for a company that’s about to cross a million in revenue without realizing a profit.

Honestly, it would be really helpful to have an actual figure before ballots go out. But realistically, I wouldn’t hold your breath.

The question nobody asked

tl;dr The question set covered taxes, permitting, Business Oregon, downtown, homelessness and Washington DC. Not one question was about where Oregon’s next company comes from.

We listened to perspectives on our competitiveness, our biggest advantage, Business Oregon, taxes, and downtown Portland.

Those are good questions.

They were OBI’s questions. Asked in OBI’s room. On behalf of OBI’s members. And it should come as a shock to absolutely no one that a business association asked questions that are top of mind for its specific members. And if what you’re building actually survives — or even gets out of the starting gates — every one of those answers will matter to you. Eventually.

But none of them were about startups. None of them were about business formation. None of them were about risk tolerant early stage capital. Or growth stage capital. Nobody asked either candidate where the next Oregon company comes from. Or how a person with a job and a mortgage and an idea gets to the point of quitting the job. Or what happens to that person’s equity if the thing actually works.

Like startups, the term QSBS never came up. Not by name. Not by SB 1507. Not as the argument a lot of us have been having all year. The closest anything got was Kotek listing “protection for investing in an Oregon company” among the Prosperity Council items. That’s at least QSBS flavored.

Personally, I would have liked to hear more from both candidates about starting in Oregon. And growing in Oregon. And investing in Oregon startups. But that wasn’t the constituency for this one. It was a different room.

And look at the wins Kotek reached for when she wanted to prove the state can deliver. She touched on Genentech’s $750 million expansion in Hillsboro with roughly 450 manufacturing and construction jobs. And Lam Research breaking ground in Tualatin. And a Lonza groundbreaking in Central Oregon. Those are real. And they’re impressive for a state that usually can’t even spell “economic development” let alone do it.

But they’re also three expansions by three large companies headquartered somewhere else. That’s recruitment. And recruitment is a legitimate and valuable thing for a governor to do. But it’s a different focus than formation. And new business formation is the primary driver of net new jobs. Not existing businesses adding roles.

Drazan’s most startup legible moments were the CAT threshold and the estate tax. Same as her written plan. Though she also said something that struck me. She mention that the idea only certain kinds of businesses should be incentivized to grow in Oregon is, in her words, “really problematic.”

There’s something there in not letting Salem handpick favorites. But that stance also has the potential to create friction with what the startup community needs. Like reconnecting QSBS. Or software R&D credit.

Every lever on the list treats one kind of company slightly differently than another. Not because those companies deserve more. But because they behave differently enough that neutral rules land on them unevenly. And that’s an issue that needs a resolution for the Governor going into the long session.

A little fact checking

tl;dr Things can get heated and challenging during a live conversation. It’s understandable. Drazan’s unemployment claim was high. Kotek’s big Lam win is on a fifteen year timeline.

I’m not scoring anybody here. But these are the numbers people will repeat in rooms all fall. So they ought to be accurate.

In her closing, Drazan said Oregon’s unemployment is the worst in the nation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has Oregon at 5.1% in August, which is roughly third highest. Tied with California and behind DC. Against a national rate of 4.1%. Third worst is not worst. But third worst is still genuinely bad.

Kotek’s Lam Research number gets an asterisk of its own. The $1.5 billion is — in actuality — a fifteen year commitment. Not a lump sum. But it includes a $620 million R&D lab. With roughly 400 new permanent jobs. That’s a substantial long term bet on Oregon. And she’s entitled to claim it as a win. I just wanted to be clear that it is not a check clearing this year.

Two numbers that hold up exactly as stated, for balance. Drazan’s “north of 27,000” homeless Oregonians is right. The 2025 point in time count came in at 27,119, the highest ever recorded here. And the CNBC 42nd that framed the opening question is accurate.

But what about us startup types…?

OBI has a room. The Portland Business Journal has a room. When they want a couple of hours of undivided attention from both people running for governor, they get it. Because they’ve done the work. Because they’ve spent decades building organizations capable of making that ask and audiences worth showing up for.

That’s not a complaint about OBI. It’s a compliment. But it’s also the assignment. For us.

The Oregon startup community does not have that room. We have an enormous number of rooms. And orgs. And entrepreneurs. But we’ve never intentionally done the work. We’ve never politicked. We’ve never built the momentum and presence that would cause both candidates for governor to take us seriously. To take two minutes on early stage capital. To discuss how much a successful founder keeps at exit. To decide whether the next Genentech gets invited here or started here.

Nobody’s keeping us out. But we’re not making people notice us, either.

Too little too late definitely rings true here. Forty days is too late for the Oregon startup community to affect this election. But it is not even remotely too late to start building it for the next one. And to make plans for the long session. And the mayoral race.

Still, I implore you to go read Kotek’s plan, read Drazan’s plan, and read my take on both of them from Tuesday. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. And share them far and wide.

And of course, once you’ve done that, please use what you’ve learned and vote.

More Oregon startup news

Knight Family commits $1B toward a college of engineering at UO | Office of the President

I share this news while also acknowledging that we are working through difficult budget conversations. This exceptional gift is designated for engineering and accelerating scientific impact. It does not resolve the work still in front of us to address our structural deficit over the coming years. But it does affirm the principles laid out for those conversations: that we would invest in the strengths that set our university apart, continue to highlight research leadership and excellence, and make the UO a destination of choice for more students.

Adam DuVander — Developer Marketing & The DEV Content Framework – Everything Is Marketing | Podcast on Spotify

On the show today is Adam DuVander. Adam is the founder of Every Developer and author of Developer Marketing Does Not Exist.

Officials claim downtown Portland is ‘back’ but office workers remain scarce

Despite the promotional figures, overall activity sits at just 77% of 2019 levels, dragged down by an office workforce that remains nearly 50% below pre-2020 numbers. Portland Metro Chamber leaders acknowledged that empty commercial space is a major obstacle, while everyday workers and visitors continue to voice skepticism over street conditions, cleanliness, and whether downtown is truly secure.

(2009) Portland’s Small Society builds an iPhone app for a little coffee shop called Starbucks

So why am I writing about it now? Well, because as it turns out, the Starbucks app was created by none other than Small Society here in Portland.

The Group Chat Where World Leaders Are Racing to Create AI Controls – WSJ

A club of Western presidents and prime ministers is leading a new push for global controls on AI, echoing the nuclear arms treaties that took root during the first decades of the Atomic Era.

Financing the AI buildout | Brookings

Financing the AI buildout projects that AI investment in data center buildings, power systems, networking infrastructure, and specialized chips and other equipment will total an enormous $10.3 trillion from 2025 to 2032, or an average of 3.63% of U.S. gross domestic product per year.

Portland City Councilors Seek to Raise Taxes on Companies With Highly Paid CEOs and Exempt More Small Businesses From Business Tax

Under the Morillo-Green proposal, the threshold for paying the BLT tax would increase to $500,000 in gross revenue, which by their telling would drop about 18,000 businesses off of the tax rolls.

China puts AI compute into orbit with Supercomputing-1 satellite — onboard processing aims to cut Earth-observation data processing from hours to minutes | Tom’s Hardware

The payload of greatest interest is the “Supercomputing-1” satellite, developed by Chinese AI computing infrastructure company S-AIDC. Also known as the S-AIDC-1, the satellite is designed to capture and process Earth-observation data in orbit instead of sending data back to terrestrial data centers. Keeping the processing local is meant to cut cross-regional data processing times from hours to minutes. The satellite features both a high-res optical payload and the image-processing AI computer.

I don’t want the details | michaelheap.com

Then I realised that “I don’t want the details” wasn’t being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying “I already believe you. Now let’s talk about what happens next”.

Here’s the trailer for Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, in theaters October 16 | TechCrunch

We live in a bewildering time, where the world’s most powerful people are trying to make themselves cyborgs, conquer the inevitability of death, and colonize outer space. But in the midst of such a jarring moment in the history of humanity, the world throws you a bone. In this cursed timeline, we have been gifted something so unfathomable that we could never have imagined it, because even in our wildest dreams, we wouldn’t have come up with something so perfect: a Nathan Fielder documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

Silicon Florist watch party · Luma

It’s Friday evening. You’re wiped. But you’re still in the mood for something entertaining. ​Well, unfortunately, this ain’t it. ​But it is an opportunity to join folks from the Portland startup community for a little watch party — all from the comfort of your own keyboard.

8 Seconds Rodeo campaign celebrates Black cowboy culture

8 Seconds Rodeo, a cultural celebration and rodeo event founded by photojournalist Ivan McClellan, is returning to Philadelphia on October 10. To promote it, McClellan has collaborated with director Devin Hampton, music producer Kaidi Tatham and creative agency Wieden+Kennedy (specifically its Black affinity group Noir) on a lively new campaign.

The Agentic Dispatch: We’re Taking Over Vegas

C1.ai Launch Week is back, with four drops shipping one per morning from September 28 through October 1. C1 Transform is two weeks out, the agenda just dropped, and C1.ai is now available in Europe. Here is everything happening right now.

More Oregon startup news

That’s one of the many things I love about Portland. When the thing the community needs doesn’t exist, somebody around here just builds it. Calagator has been doing that for the local tech community since 2008. And now the food-and-beverage side of town has its own: The List PDX, which currently maps 72 Portland pop-ups, collabs, and food events.

Tools like this exist for the consumer, but not for the makers. Before events make it to the ‘not-to-miss lists’, there are handshake deals, agreements, informal contracts, a million to-do lists, matching assets to needs that shift from place to place, team to team. Then comes the task of promotion — vying for visibility through the noise of social media stories and posts.

It’s two things at once: a public map of what’s happening, and a member-driven marketplace where industry folks list venues, concepts, work, and supply to find one another.

Founder Miriam Portney — bar manager at Canard — got quotes as high as $40,000 from web development shops before taking a run at it herself.

“I’m not a web developer, but I am stubborn,” she said. A software engineer who was a regular at her bar eventually built the site for free, and would rather not be named.

She’s funded it herself. But she isn’t trying to turn it into a company. And that, my friend, is the most important takeaway of all. Sometimes, you can just build a product to have a product. Not every product needs to be turned into a business.

For more, visit The List PDX.

More Oregon startup news

• Bloomberg: Nike Founder Phil Knight Donates $1 Billion to University of Oregon
• Forbes: Nike Founder Donates $1 Billion To The University Of Oregon
• Fortune: Phil Knight gives $1 billion to Oregon: ‘This is no time to abandon’ higher education
• Inc.: Nike Founder Phil Knight Gives $1 Billion to Build Engineering College at University of Oregon
• Inside Higher Ed: Phil Knight Gifts Univ. of Oregon $1B for Engineering College
• The New York Times: $1 Billion Donation to University of Oregon Makes History
• The Oregonian/OregonLive: Phil and Penny Knight give $1B donation to University of Oregon
• OPB: Knights pledge $1 billion to University of Oregon to create engineering college
• Portland Business Journal:Phil and Penny Knight donate $1 billion to the U. of Oregon
• Portland Business Journal:University of Oregon says Knights’ gift brings $3B to Oregon economy
• The Register-Guard: University of Oregon launches engineering college with $1B Knight gift
• KGW: Phil and Penny Knight pledge $1B to creation of new engineering college at University of Oregon

More Oregon startup news

Inclusion Is a Commitment We Intend to Keep – The Sports Bra®

The Sports Bra was created to support, promote, and empower girls and women in sports. As a place of inclusion and belonging, we want to provide a space for people who may not be comfortable in typical bar environments to enjoy sports. Our LGBTQ+ community members are enthusiastically welcome in our bar and restaurant.  To be completely clear, the “T” stands for Trans. We will always support and celebrate trans girls and trans women athletes, fans, and allies who love them.

(2015) Negative Ghost rider, the pattern is full: Skyward releases first version of air-traffic control for drones

That’s why Portland startup Skyward has been working on services that will help those commercial drones operate more effectively in shared airspace. And now, they’ve publicly launched some of their first services for commercial drones.

Mazama Energy raises $135M for Oregon geothermal project – Portland Business Journal

A Texas company has raised $135 million to fund the next phase of a novel geothermal project that could bring a new source of around-the-clock power to Oregon’s grid by 2029.

Silicon Florist watch party · Luma

It’s Friday evening. You’re wiped. But you’re still in the mood for something entertaining. ​Well, unfortunately, this ain’t it.

Opinion | Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far – The New York Times

I wanted to see how Huang perceives A.I., what his model is for thinking about it, what he thinks is going wrong and what he thinks would need to happen for it to go right. So I came out to Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., to interview him. He joins me now.

Dive in and discover what’s next on YouTube with our latest viewer features

Curate your own front page with Custom Feeds, a new feature that lets you create a dedicated tab for specific moods, routines or your latest interests, easily accessible from the Homepage.

Amazon opens its seller tools to outside AI agents, starting with Anthropic’s Claude – GeekWire

The idea is to let sellers check inventory, adjust prices and update listings without opening Seller Central, which merchants have used for years to manage their Amazon businesses. Amazon says about 90% of sellers already use some form of outside AI to run parts of their operations.

Bessent eyed for Trump’s ‘AI czar’ | Semafor

Bessent has long played a central role in the Trump administration’s AI policy, and this week he’s already held a critical early dialogue with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, ahead of Trump’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Parsing “Can” from “Should”: How Netflix’s Product Team Got Thousands of Creatives to Trust an AI Overhaul

“Many AI strategies fail at the vision stage not because the technology isn’t ready, but because they’re built around what AI can do, rather than what humans should do in the context of the industry and company,” says Lock. “At Netflix, the context was that we needed automation to massively scale the volume and diversity of our catalog, but in an industry that deeply values craft and creative control.”

Phil and Penny Knight give $1 billion to launch University of Oregon engineering school – oregonlive.com

The money will help start an engineering school in Eugene, a major boost to the university’s research ambitions and a potential competitor to Oregon State University’s well-established program just up the freeway.

Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience and Reliability (AI-Native) Job at PicoMES | Silicon Florist

We’re a six-person full-stack team (Go, React) building manufacturing execution software that runs on real factory floors. We’re adding a seventh engineer whose focus is not the next feature ticket, but helping everything the team ships be correct, well-tested, and ready for customers, and making that faster over time.

Nike Founder Phil Knight Gives $1 Billion to Build Engineering College at University of Oregon

“To make an audacious dream a reality requires more than a vivid imagination. It also requires the sort of opportunity that our great American universities, both public and private, have historically provided. This is no time to abandon them,” the Nike founder said in a statement. “Penny and I are grateful for the chance to invest in our most promising young people’s future in this important way.”

Your company needs a pricing constitution. – by Elena Verna

So if everyone is shipping more product, we’re also gonna have more monetization decisions. Every new feature comes with the same questions: Is this free? Is this paid? Which paid plan? Is it usage-gated? Is it an add-on? Does Enterprise get it?

Tech Dilution is Creeping Up Again + The Per-Employee Lens

To help give a better lens into this I’ve added headcount and per employee metrics to every company. This allows one to look at what a company is spending on equity per head independent of what stock price is doing. Combining equity grants per employee alongside revenue and FCF per employee tells you whether the workforce is generating enough money to actually pay their employees.

The plunging price of thought | Epoch AI

Over the past three years, the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter, faster than for any other transformative technology in history.

Beyond Basketball: The Sports Bra and 5wins Team Up to Take Women’s College BRAckets Year-Round

Hosted within a Sports Bra-branded experience and powered by 5wins, the website is designed to bring one of sports’ most popular fan rituals to tournaments across the college sports calendar. The collaboration will launch with the NCAA soccer Selection Sunday event on November 16,  and extend across BRAcket-based championship seasons, including basketball, softball, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, and volleyball.

It’s Raining Boxes: Amazon Drones Overwhelm a Texas Suburb – The New York Times

It began as an unnerving high-pitched hum, like a mosquito flying around a dark room at bedtime, and it grew louder as it drew closer. A family lounging in a backyard pool in Richardson, Texas, just north of Dallas, couldn’t help but notice it.

Social Beer: Sept Gathering, Thu, Sep 24, 2026, 6:00 PM | Meetup

Heading to the west side for this one. An IRL gathering of the Portland Startups Slack community. Whether you’re already part of the Portland Startups Slack community or not, please feel free to swing by, have a beverage, and connect with other startup and tech folks here in Portland.

More Oregon startup news

“To make an audacious dream a reality requires more than a vivid imagination. It also requires the sort of opportunity that our great American universities, both public and private, have historically provided. This is no time to abandon them,” the Nike founder said in a statement. “Penny and I are grateful for the chance to invest in our most promising young people’s future in this important way.” 

The university said it will use the money to start the Knight College of Engineering. It’s a new program that will share space with the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, created by a pair of $500 million donations from the Knights in 2016 and 2021.

Those facilities consist of two leading-edge research buildings just across busy Franklin Boulevard from the main University of Oregon campus. The first opened in 2020, with a second opening this year. The university said Wednesday it plans to build a third building somewhere near the existing facilities, aiming to begin construction within the next two years. But it hasn’t picked a specific site yet.

The newswire is popping with stories about this, so I’ll likely do a bit of a roundup once things calm down. I just wanted to get the news out to you as soon as I could. (And before my next meeting.)

More Oregon startup news

We’re a little over a month out from returning ballots. Hype is ramping up. Attack ads are unavoidable. And platforms are solidifying.

Ah, politics.

As part of those efforts both Governor Tina Kotek and challenger Christine Drazan have released their own flavors of their respective plans. Kotek’s “Building Oregon’s Future Together” landed September 17. Drazan’s six-part plan has been sitting on her site for a while.

So I thought I would take the opportunity to go through both of those plans. But with a specific lens. Like the perspective of startup founders and the startup community. With the hopes of giving you some grounding before you take the opportunity to dive deeper.

tl;dr Combining both plans would provide a stronger platform for Oregon startups. Neither plan is wholly comprehensive as far as benefits to startups go.

CAVEAT: I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t intimate that — at least to me — this always kind of feels like listening to teenagers giving speeches about why they deserve to be the next class president. And how they promise to extend lunch breaks. And get better snacks in the vending machines. And more pizza days in the lunchroom. It never ever happens. Because moving those needles is largely beyond their immediate control — or they have to engage with an entire caucus to actually get anything done.

This feels very similar. Granted, it’s not with ill will. It’s aspirational. And visionary. But it’s also highly unlikely to materialize. No matter how well intended the plans are.

I read both plans the way I read everything: through my incredibly myopic lens of the Oregon startup community, as is my wont. (And by “startup,” I mean early stage companies that have the potential for exponential growth — venture scale sorts of growth — whether or not those founders decide to pursue equity based venture financing or not.

Let’s get into it…

The notable small win

tl;dr Kotek’s plan uses the word “startup.” Drazan’s doesn’t. That’s not a gotcha. It’s simply a tell about the understanding of the types of companies each candidate is looking to serve.

I read the two economic sections side by side. The first thing that jumped out to me wasn’t a policy. It was a word.

You see, I’ve spent decades trying to help elected officials — and frankly anyone else who would listen — that “small business” and “startups” are not synonymous. You know, it’s like the old “Every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square” sort of thing:

Every startup is a small business at some point. But not every small business is a startup.

Kotek’s plan, under a heading called “Jumpstart Innovation and Home-Grown Ideas,” says the state should “support startups, small and local businesses, and Oregon entrepreneurs by leveling the playing field and reducing barriers to second-stage growth.”

Startups get an explicit mention. That’s a seemingly small but ultimately significant language choice. A phrasing that doesn’t conflate startups and small business. That treats them as different entities. And that’s worth noting.

Drazan’s plan, under “Reignite Oregon’s Economy,” says the state should “work for business success by creating correction periods for minor violations and establishing a Small Business Bill of Rights.” I was reading quickly but as far as I could see Drazan’s economic plan does not ever mention the word “startup.”

From my perspective, Kotek is describing a variety of companies. Including a company that’s trying to get exponentially bigger. Drazan is describing a company that’s trying not to get crushed. Those are different — yet equally valuable — perspectives.

Bootstrapping versus scaling

tl;dr Kotek lowers the cost of starting a company and raises the cost of growing one. Drazan does the reverse. Neither is wrong. They optimize opposite ends of the same lifecycle.

Kotek’s plan is friendlier to the day you start. The safety net stuff — the Child Care Infrastructure Fund, a stated pathway toward universal preschool, a defense of the Oregon Health Plan — reads like social policy. And it is.

But if you squint the right way, it’s also startup policy. Because the hardest thing about founding a company isn’t the idea. Or even building the product. It’s walking away from the salary. It’s taking on the personal burden of buying the insurance and saving for retirement (as if!). It’s finding the childcare that gives you time to work — or leave the house. It’s basically anything that lowers the personal risk of making that leap for someone who isn’t already independently wealthy.

That’s a formation lever. Whether or not anyone calls it one.

But the same plan quietly raises the cost of the day you grow. Kotek was the legislative architect of the Corporate Activity Tax — a 0.57% tax on gross receipts over $1 million.

Gross receipts. Not profit.

Which means it lands on exactly the kind of cash burning top line growing intentionally unprofitable startup that venture capital exists to fund. And it lands before that company has made a dollar. So the whole “get users on board and figure out profits later” has a tax burden.

Easier to start. More expensive to scale.

Drazan’s plan is the mirror image. She names CAT reform in her plan: a genuine startup relevant lever, since the CAT is one of the two things most actively punishing a growing company here. She’d veto new tax and fee increases and protect the kicker. That’s a scaling-and-liquidity plan: keep more of what you make as you grow and keep more of what you make when you sell.

But go looking for the formation end and… well you’ll just have to keep looking.

Her answer to healthcare and childcare costs runs through deregulation. Audit the agencies. Cut the rules and fees that raise what providers charge. Which might genuinely lower some costs. But it’s not a cushion. Deregulate the aspects of derisking the leap all you want. It doesn’t pan out if the leap is still only available to a handful of people who can afford to miss a few paychecks.

To be clear, neither of those is the wrong answer. It’s just a partial answer on each side.

A founder actually needs both: a supportive place from which to jump and a lighter tax on the growth and the exit.

Speaking of exits…

The one fight that’s in neither plan

tl;dr QSBS and SB 1507 — the biggest startup policy fight of the year — do not appear in either economic plan.

The single loudest startup-policy argument of the entire year isn’t in either economic plan. Neither one names QSBS. Neither one names SB 1507. The bill that kicked off the conversation a lot of us have been having all year is just… not there, in the platforms these two are running on.

But admittedly, it’s also not a populist issue. It’s more a nuanced thing that folks in the startup community are seeking. If it impacted every Oregonian — and the electeds — we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.

Kotek’s fix does exist. But it lives in the signing letter she attached to SB 1507. Where she promised to work toward a reconnection in the 2027 session. And in her own Prosperity Council’s June report, which recommended reconnecting QSBS, modernizing that semiconductor-only R&D credit, and lifting the CAT threshold from $1 million to $2 million.

Good things, all of them. But a signing letter and a council report are not a campaign platform.

Drazan’s plan is silent on QSBS too. She opposes tax increases as a category. So I would guess she’d sign a fix. But she hasn’t named it. Or prioritized it.

So the biggest lever on this whole list is sitting in the space between what both candidates said and what both candidates left out. Which means it’s still ours to raise.

Okay, but will any of this actually happen?

tl;dr Both plans could fail to deliver for startups. But in opposite ways. Kotek can pass big laws but might not. Drazan might want to and structurally can’t.

Kotek’s problem is not capacity. She’s the longest serving House Speaker in state history. She has actually passed big ugly complicated things: the CAT, Paid Leave Oregon, Oregon Health Plan expansions, the 2023 CHIPS Act… the list goes on and on.

So her risk isn’t whether she’s capable of getting it done. Rather, it’s will she prioritize this effort. Especially when there are a hundred other things pulling at a Democratic governor with a to-do list.

Drazan’s challenge is the exact opposite. Her record is largely a record of stopping things: the 2019 walkouts that helped block the CAT and cap-and-trade. That’s a real skill. And it’s the one that maps cleanly onto her most useful power: the Governor’s veto pen.

A Drazan governorship almost certainly means a Democratic legislature. Which makes any proactive startup ideas — restore QSBS, build a software R&D credit — structurally very hard to pass without reaching across the aisle innumerable times.

But it makes her defensive power quite real. Her likeliest contribution to Oregon startups isn’t passing the fix to SB 1507. It’s blocking the next SB 1507.

One can deliver but might not aim at startups. The other might aim at startups but can’t deliver the proactive stuff. And the class president read is that you probably shouldn’t expect either plan to arrive intact.

So in the long run, it’s not even really much of a “who you should vote for” sort of thing. It’s more of a “who you’d rather vote against.”

So what do you do with it

Now that you have the context, please go read Kotek’s plan. Go read Drazan’s plan. Actually read them. Do your own research. Formulate your own comparisons. Make your own decisions. Share your own analysis. Share it far and wide.

Because here’s the part I do care about. I care about the Oregon startup founders brave enough to take the leap. The early employees brave enough to take the equity over salary. The investors who take a flyer on an unproven concept. Those are the people of whom I am truly enamoured. Not politicians. But this is where we are, currently.

And it takes a village, am I right…?

More Oregon startup news

Anomalo Analyst is a team of AI agents that monitor your data around the clock and give you insights on anything that’s happening in the data and why it matters. Connect your data warehouse or data lake and start getting data insights without writing SQL queries or refreshing dashboards.

Your data is complex. Being insightful shouldn’t be. Connect your warehouse and start receiving insights about what’s shifting, breaking, or trending in your data all without writing a query, waiting on a dashboard, or filing a ticket with your data team. You just show up informed.

As of this writing, Anomalo Analyst is trending near the top of Product Hunt. Which is no small feat. (So if you have an extra upvote laying around, please be sure to toss it their way. Maybe we can get them to numero uno.)

For more information or to start trying it for free, visit Anomalo Analyst.

More Oregon startup news