Hope to see you there!

According to GeekWire:

To use the tool, founders upload a pitch deck, and Investor Match returns 20 investors ranked by fit, based on stage, check size, geography and what each firm has actually backed. It also drafts outreach emails, but it doesn’t send them.

A free preview shows all 20 matches with fit scores, with the top three fully expanded.

The full list costs $20. Which Tobias says roughly covers the API costs of running it.

Tobias was pitched by ~4500 startups last year. He wrote 10 checks. That’s a 0.2% average of pitches to checks. But every investor is different. It’s just not always obvious to founders how they differ. That’s the opportunity here.

“Just because I wasn’t the right investor for that company doesn’t mean that the right investor wasn’t out there,” Tobias told GeekWire.

Founders have told him they’ve raised more than $100 million from investors they found through the platform. (But he acknowledged he can’t verify that since he can’t see that activity from the tool.)

Take the free preview for a spin at Investor Match.

Your Company’s Attachment Problem

Underneath my desire to keep everything “okay” was a drive to avoid being abandoned. My actions were all weighed down by a misguided agenda of rescuing. If I saved, I mattered. And if that didn’t work, I could fall back on my black-belt-level skills in dissociation.

Lenny’s Newsletter Meetup in Portland (with free drinks courtesy of PostHog) · Luma

These meetups are hosted by members of Lenny’s Newsletter community, and are a great opportunity to meet new people, and have in-depth conversation about product and growth. There is a tab for free drinks. Learn more at LennysNewsletter.com/community.

(2015) Augmented reality augments Portland collaboration: Clackamas Community College, Oregon Story Board among Ivy Leagues in Microsoft HoloLens granting

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Portland is collaborative as fuuuuuu… well, um, it’s collaborative. And while that’s super helpful for many of us, it’s always nice to see others recognize the value of that collaboration. That’s why it was awesome to see Microsoft select a group of Portland area organizations for one of its exclusive HoloLens grants.

Anthropic’s Initial Public Offering

AI will have a vast impact on the world. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation dedicated to securing its benefits and mitigating its risks.

The 40 Best Portland restaurants you need to try in 2026 – oregonlive.com

To put together this guide to Portland’s 40 best restaurants, Michael Russell revisited dozens of restaurants in every quadrant of the city, then made his rankings based primarily on the quality and creativity of the food, while taking into account service, drinks, atmosphere and value. As always, he visited unannounced and paid for his own meals. Current hours are listed for each restaurant, but checking online for unexpected schedule changes or temporary closures could save you some heartache.

Is the honeymoon over for data centers in Washington? • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Across the state, communities are demanding a moratorium on data centers. Their concerns are widespread: water consumption, noise pollution, location near communities, power consumption on a strained grid, groundwater contamination and a lack of transparency from elected officials.

The fall of “what you can do” and the rise of “who you know” — Jason Wei

I am now feeling a substantial change in AI, specifically in the past five years, where who you know is becoming more important, and what you can do is becoming less important. I am obviously not saying that technical skills don’t matter, or that you cannot be successful without being well connected. Technical skills are still important and make or break your career. But I am noticing a trend. To assign arbitrary numbers, I would say that five years ago, success was 75% your skills and 25% who you knew. Now, it is maybe 55% skills and 45% who you know.

AI may quickly generate ideas, but working with people leads to more creative ones

As cognitive scientists who study creativity, we recently conducted an experiment that explored how working with AI – rather than humans – affects originality and other aspects of creativity.

The forgotten formula for lovable cities – Works in Progress Magazine

Sitte argued that the best public spaces are physically enclosed and fairly small, creating a sense of shelter and intimacy, defining picturesque views and perspectives, and making public buildings appear larger and more dignified by comparison. He denied the importance of symmetry and claimed, counterintuitively, that monuments should be pushed to the edge of squares, and that great public buildings should generally be entangled in a mass of everyday housing.

You Keep Saying “Add Value.” I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.

But “value” is not a fixed trait. It’s a spectrum. Some things have value which fades. Some things have value which lasts. Some forms of value feel transactional (when you need it, you need it—but then you’re done with it) while others feel transformational.

Welcome to the B2A Economy

Agents now make up the majority of web traffic, write more than half of new articles published online, and generate most of the code pushed to production.

Why Should Managers Exist? — Amplify Partners

To understand what’s happening, we should go back to Coase’s original thesis about what makes firms necessary and some pre-history of how “management” became a job.

Handing over humanity – by Ruxandra Teslo

I do not know whether the handoverist vision will come to pass. That the people building this technology consider it plausible, and often desirable, guarantees nothing: proximity to a technology does not correlate that well with predicting its impact on society. But they are the ones closest to it, and what they say deserves to be at least taken seriously. The rest of society, including some very intelligent people, has been far too quick to wave these scenarios away and not even get involved in the debate. Whether or not the belief is correct, it is sincerely held, and it is not “marketing hype.” I am writing this because I think it is high time that more people, inside San Francisco and out, engaged with the arguments about what our future will look like, and answered them.

Of Miracles and Moats – Not Boring by Packy McCormick

There are three arguments against this being a bubble more broadly, though, which are oft-repeated, sound right, and are exactly the things you’d expect to see in a bubble.

Yes, you should panic about AI – Rutger Bregman

For ten years, a small group of experts has been saying insane things about AI. For ten years, they’ve been proven right. Now the world is running five months ahead of their scariest predictions.

Happy Hour with Tech Professionals, Thu, Nov 19, 2026, 5:30 PM | Meetup

Whether you’re deep in the tech world or just tech-curious, if you’re in Bend and want real conversations with interesting people, you belong here. Bring a friend, bring a coworker, or come solo and leave with new connections. No presentations, no sales pitches. Just good people and good conversation.

Portland startup Panthalassa opens Vancouver plant – Portland Business Journal

Panthalassa has its headquarters in Northeast Portland. But a 70,000-square-foot industrial space a couple of miles east of downtown Vancouver is where the company is dialing in production of its autonomous ocean energy “nodes.”

Energizing Oregon: Highlights from the 2026 Bend Venture Conference – Elevate Capital

Elevate Capital was incredibly proud to be well-represented on the BVC stage, watching three of our portfolio companies take home big checks…

Not familiar with Araceli…?

Araceli Biosciences develops high-performance cellular imaging platforms designed to help researchers generate scalable, reproducible biological data for drug discovery and advanced screening applications. Founded in 2020 and spun out of Phoseon Technology in 2023, the company is headquartered in Tigard, Oregon, where most of its roughly 30 employees are based. Araceli’s Endeavor® platform and AI-driven analysis software are used by pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers across North America and Europe.

“We are excited to join an impressive group of investors in Araceli Biosciences, an innovative Oregon company developing technology with the potential to modernize scientific research and reduce the need for animal testing. We believe the future of science should be smarter, faster, and more humane. That future is already taking shape in Oregon, and we’re proud to be part of it,” said Jeff Swickard.

Total investment for this round was $4.5 million. The money will be used for “‘phase two’ of its commercialization: launching consumable products optimized for its growing installed base, with a broader rollout planned for 2027.”

For more information, visit Araceli Biosciences.

This meetup is hosted by Lucas Rollo. These meetups are hosted by members of Lenny’s Newsletter community, and are a great opportunity to meet new people, and have in-depth conversation about product and growth. There is a tab for free drinks. Learn more at LennysNewsletter.com/community.

The event takes place from 5:00PM to 8:00PM at Wayfinder Beer. It is free to attend.

To RSVP, visit Lenny’s Newsletter Meetup in Portland.

Wikipedia at 25: A Fireside Chat with Selena Deckelmann CPO/CTO Wikimedia Foundation · Luma

Long before Wikipedia, Selena helped build the Portland tech community many of us grew up in. She founded the Portland PostgreSQL Users Group, co-founded the Open Source Bridge conference, launched PyLadiesPDX and mentored startups at PIE. She then spent 9 years at Mozilla, rising to SVP of Firefox and leading about 400 people. Expect stories from all of it, plus thoughts on AI from a very unique perspective.

StitchStudio snags $8M led by Voyager Capital – Portland Business Journal

An insurance industry software maker with Portland ties has raised $8 million. StitchStudio is based in Chicago but has a Portland-based founder and chief technology officer. The round was led by Seattle-based Voyager Capital, which is active in the Rose City.

(2010) Experience The Brave New World of Media today… or at least on November 17

While we’ve still got a few days left before we’re living in the future envisioned by Aldous Huxley, we do live in a pretty entertaining time where everyone is both a creator and a consumer of media—in all of its various formats. But what does this mean for the world of media? And how is changing the business of media? Well, the folks behind the annual WebVisions conference may have composed a event that can answer that very question. Meet The Brave New World of Media.

News Release: Nov. 11, 2026 “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 Sells Over 5.2 Million Units Worldwide in First Four Days”

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (HQ: Kyoto, Minami-ku, Japan; President and Representative Director: Shuntaro Furukawa, “Nintendo” hereafter) announced that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo Switch 2 sold over 5.2 million units worldwide (including 810,000 units sold in Japan) in the first four days following its launch on November 5, 2026. This is the highest global sales for any Nintendo-published Nintendo Switch 2 game in its first four days

Opinion | I Am a Silicon Valley Veteran. We Are Sabotaging Ourselves. – The New York Times

Silicon Valley has a special talent for offering amazing products and then screwing them up with ridiculous ideas about how those products should be used.

SpaceX unveils Starlink Mini 2 with a removable battery that can last up to 4.5 hours – Digital Trends

The new portable satellite dish comes with a removable 71Wh battery that promises up to 4.5 hours of internet connectivity on a single charge. SpaceX is also taking preorders in the US, although access is currently limited to selected customers.

Portland Has Money. It’s Just Not Ours. – Edan Krolewicz

Portland is not a poor city. What it has lost, slowly and mostly through its own choices, is control over its money. Most of the capital in Portland today is owned, managed or directed by people outside the region. Most of the money Portland does control is public money, raised by voters for one purpose at a time.

Bend hopes to bolster biotech sector with Foreign Trade Zone – Portland Business Journal

Oregon has two Foreign Trade Zones, at the ports of Portland and Coos Bay, but it could get a third to benefit bio-manufacturing companies in Bend, if plans come to fruition.

In Democratic sweep, Oregon progressives grew power, pluck heading into 2027 session • Oregon Capital Chronicle

More than a dozen members of the unofficial progressive caucus, among Oregon’s 90 legislative members, are preparing to put forward ambitious proposals in the six-month legislative session that begins in January, leaders said, and to have the numbers to push back on Gov. Tina Kotek and the unofficial moderate or “mod” caucus if they strongly diverge on policy.

The era of fully autonomous companies

The ecosystem, models, and compliance barriers to make this possible have taken a long time to line up. Just six months ago I was writing about how autonomous companies need human oversight, but a lot changes in six months! The winds are shifting. And by this time next year, there will be millions of autonomous companies and many of them will be profitable. Some of them will be absurdly profitable. Let’s talk about this coming era.

OpenAI lets businesses claim their ChatGPT listing and build their own agent

OpenAI put Businesses in ChatGPT into beta on November 10th, 2026, letting companies claim a profile in Business Hub, correct the information ChatGPT uses about them, and see aggregated data on how often they are mentioned. OpenAI announced the launch in a thread on X and in its Introducing Businesses in ChatGPT post, which frames the audience as the 1.2 billion people OpenAI says use ChatGPT each week.

Aaron Swartz at 40: letters and videos for his birthday · Portland Civic Lab

Aaron would have turned 40 on November 8. We spent the afternoon at 5th Avenue Cinema watching The Internet’s Own Boy, the film about his life. People who knew him, and people still doing the work he started, sent letters and videos to Portland for the day. This page keeps all of it.

Demolicious Champion of Champions 2026, Thu, Dec 3, 2026, 5:30 PM | Meetup

After its epic relaunch in 2024, Demolicious has quickly become the stage for early-stage founders to show off their boldest ideas and biggest dreams. Every month at the UpStart Collective, these fearless founders have pitched in front of a packed, supportive crowd—honing their storytelling skills, building buzz, and giving us all a glimpse at the next wave of job-creating, game-changing companies.

Portland’s Finest Artisan Market 2026 – STEELPORT Knife Co.

Join us for Portland’s Finest Artisan Market at the STEELPORT Knife Co. Factory on Saturday, November 21st, from Noon–3pm! Stock your holiday pantry, shop for premium local gifts, sample delicious bites and drinks, and discover unforgettable holiday hosting and gifting ideas from some of Portland’s finest culinary and artisan brands.

Seattle VC firm Ascend closes $17M fund to back ‘Third Act’ startups in physical AI and hardware – GeekWire

Ascend Fund III will back more physical AI startups building robots, energy systems, defense technology and other ventures that blend software and hardware — part of a larger bet on what the Ascend team likes to call Seattle’s “Third Act.”

After its epic relaunch in 2024, Demolicious has quickly become the stage for early-stage founders to show off their boldest ideas and biggest dreams. Every month at the UpStart Collective, these fearless founders have pitched in front of a packed, supportive crowd—honing their storytelling skills, building buzz, and giving us all a glimpse at the next wave of job-creating, game-changing companies.

Now it all comes down to this: the Championship Showdown!

We’re bringing back all the monthly winners for a high-energy, founder-versus-founder battle. You’ll hear the pitches, cheer them on, and—most importantly—you’ll decide who takes home the belt, the bragging rights, and cold, hard (non-dilutive!) prize money.

The event takes place Thursday, December 3, 2026, at 6:30PM at McMenamins Mission Theater. Tickets are $20 + handling fees. So like $27 total.

For more information or to purchase your ticket, visit Demolicious Champion of Champions 2026.

Preservation can save the world! – Nectome’s Substack

tl;dr: Preservation offers a much safer option to those accelerationists who are rushing to AI in the hopes of saving the lives of people they love who have only a few years to live. Those people can be preserved, so there’s no need to rush anymore. Preservation gives everyone a place of psychological safety from which we can all work to do AI right even if it will take slightly longer. That’s why it’s important, today.

Floating AI Data Centers Powered by Ocean Waves Just Raised $140 Million – Gadget Review

Outputs travel to land via low-Earth-orbit satellite, with Panthalassa citing Starlink as one connectivity option. Satellite links introduce latency and bandwidth limits, making the platform better suited to batch inference and model training than to real-time consumer applications. That constraint reflects the communications architecture, not independently verified Ocean-3 performance data.

Cascadia High-Speed Rail and I-5 Program Public Survey

This survey will help WSDOT understand the priorities and needs of community members, business owners and commuters like you as they relate to these transportation projects. Your feedback will inform recommendations that will drive future planning and will help us focus on what matters most to communities when it comes to our transportation system.

SPOTLIGHT: Sarah Emmans – Oregon Journalism Project

Oregon is the state with the highest share of its general fund coming from personal income tax. As a result, things look better than they are. In Oregon right now, tax revenue growth doesn’t really come from job growth.

(2008) Thrive PDX: Making the Portland tech scene stronger

We’ve been lucky enough to develop a tightly knit community with the “Web oriented” folks here in town—those startups that focus on Web technologies, Twitter types, bloggers—all of us brought together by a common interest in technology and the potential it holds for Portland.

Reddit is turning user conversations into AI-powered product reviews | TechCrunch

To use the feature, Reddit users can search for a product or category in the app’s search bar or click on a highlighted product name they see in someone’s comment. From there, the user is taken to a screen where important conversations are summarized under a “what people are saying” heading. This will also include a visual breakdown that shows how many of those comments are positive, negative, or mixed, and what sort of things people said they liked or disliked about the item.

Every Democratic Governor in the U.S. Outperformed Kamala Harris—Except One – Oregon Journalism Project

In last week’s national blue wave, every other Democratic governor running for reelection won their races with larger percentages of the vote in their state than Harris captured in 2024. Not so in Oregon. Kotek has 53.3%, 2 percentage points below Harris’ 55.3% result.

Oregon was once a Republican stronghold. This politician started shifting the balance in 1954 – OPB

After the U.S. Civil War, Oregon Republicans successfully linked themselves to the party’s broader Union patriotism and economic development policies, while Democrats struggled to overcome associations with the defeated Confederacy. Beginning in 1880, Republicans began a long period of dominating Oregon’s state legislature. One near-forgotten politician changed that balance of power.

State of the tech job market: late 2026

This analysis is based on two proprietary datasets that I love working with: TrueUp, which powers Lenny’s Jobs and tracks global job openings at tech companies (over 9,000 companies). The second dataset comes from Live Data Technologies, which tracks job changes (hires, departures, and promotions) for 124 million professionals, and their hiring numbers below are specifically for the U.S. Looking at these together, we can triangulate common trends, and the differences between the datasets are themselves revealing. Thank you, Amit Taylor and Alex Hamilton, for sharing this amazing data with us.

Portland’s budget crunch collides with worker demands as strike begins – oregonlive.com

The action by City of Portland Professional Workers Union — or CPPW — marks the culmination of nearly a year of unsuccessful negotiations primarily over wage and cost-of-living increases, including an 11th-hour mediation session Sunday.

Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Wyden says he’ll use most powerful Senate committee to undo Republican cuts • Oregon Capital Chronicle

When the new Congress begins in January, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, will ascend for the second time in a decade to chair of the Senate Finance Committee, the powerful committee tasked with tax, trade, revenue and healthcare policy.

The Most Surprising Question VCs Like Asking Founders | by Aaron Dinin, PhD | Nov, 2026 | Entrepreneurship Handbook

Having personally pitched hundreds of Venture Capitalists during my 15-ish year startup career, I figured I could roughly guess his response. Surely he was going to say something about a startup’s market or its competition or its customer acquisition strategy. But none of those are what he said.

The Thing I Talk To Most

Every founder I know has tried an AI co-founder by now. Most of them do a lot. They write the strategy doc. They make the deck. They summarize your calendar, draft the hiring plan, and hand you a competitive landscape with nice boxes. It feels like help. It’s mostly motion.

How Product Hunt almost died

I’ve always described entrepreneurship as a series of high highs and low lows. It’s a sine wave. The highs are incredible. The lows are devastating. Entrepreneur or not, we all face difficulties in life, professionally and personally, but there’s a uniqueness to being a founder that’s difficult to internalize until you’ve been there… especially when your company’s about to die.

Anthropic Prepares to Push Ahead With IPO Despite Market Jitters – WSJ

Anthropic executives have been huddling with bankers from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in recent days to discuss where to set the valuation range. Should the company set its sights too high, investor demand could suffer and shares could drop, while settling on too low of a range could open the company and its bankers up to criticism that they left money on the table.

The future of software – by Thomas Wolf – Thomwolf

And personalization is just one prompt and a couple million tokens away, so there is absolutely no reason anymore to wait for someone else to add this feature you want. Everyone becomes their own product manager. Want a search box, an API bridge, a custom button? It’s a couple of minutes away, mostly executed in the background of your daily life. Soon we’ll want to personalize everything.

Aaron Swartz at 40

On what would have been Aaron Swartz’s 40th birthday, we gathered to watch The Internet’s Own Boy and to hear from people who knew and worked with him. Most of them sent something in the weeks before, written or recorded for the room. We ran out of time for some of it. All of it is here, in the order it was meant to be heard.

California voters reject wealth tax on billionaires | AP News

California voters have rejected a first-in-the-nation tax on the net worth of billionaires following a contentious ballot fight that generated huge spending by some prominent tech leaders eager to stop their taxes from going up.

SXSW Pitch applications due Nov 13, 2026

SXSW Pitch is a featured startup showcase event with an “open call” for startups applying. By applying to SXSW Pitch, you agree to pay the application fee so that we can process your entry as a potential finalist. Please be aware that we do not refund application fees, including if you have not been selected as a finalist.

Startup Coffee Meetups | Collaborative EDO Events

Startup Coffee is your monthly stop for conversation, collaboration, and caffeine. Held the second Thursday of every month at 9 a.m. at LCC Downtown Campus, this recurring meetup brings together innovators and community members. No agenda, no pressure, just meaningful connections in Oregon’s startup scene.