You see… every week I write a whole bunch of things down about the startup community around here. Then, on Friday evening, I sit down and read the highlights to you. Just like I have every week for the past three years. And lately, I’ve been inviting folks to hang out and chat when the episode premieres.

The only problem is that I don’t have a link to the video until practically the last minute. So I’ve had to string together this whole invitation workflow.

But anyway. If you’re around on Friday and happen to be bored enough to join me, it would be great to sit in front of our respective computing devices and type at one another. Hope to “see” you there.

Oh. And if you’re like, “Not this week. But maybe next week…?” Cool. I’ve got you.

What’s the Oregon Innovation Showcase…?

The Oregon Innovation Showcase brings together investors, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem leaders to highlight Oregon as a premier hub for innovation and startups. Focusing on deep tech and innovation-driven companies, the Showcase connects emerging startups with investors, celebrates Oregon-grown success stories, and spotlights the state’s supportive ecosystem that helps de-risk investments and drive scalable growth. From inspiring pitches to collaborative conversations, the event strengthens relationships across sectors, fuels optimism for Oregon’s economic future, and continues to build momentum for a thriving, inclusive innovation community.

What types of companies are they currently seeking…?

In Scope: Deeptech with Series A / Late-Seed Readiness: Targeting companies with defensible, high-risk science or engineering innovations positioned for Late-Seed, Series A, or later investment rounds (TRL 4–7).

• Core Sectors: Advanced Manufacturing, Robotics, Semiconductors, Advanced Materials, Energy/Climate Tech, Biotech/Medtech, Aerospace/Space, Quantum, and Frontier Tech.
• Software & AI Rule: Software/AI qualifies only if developing genuinely proprietary algorithmic architectures, new technical capabilities, or hard-tech integrations—not application-layer wrappers.
• Expected Readiness (TRL 4–7):
  • Core science and engineering are proven beyond theoretical concepts.
  • Functional alpha prototype, lab-validated bench model, or working proprietary code actively operational.
  • $1MM or more in funding (grants, investment or a combination) preferred.
  • Active customer pilots, field demonstrations, SBIR Phase II grants, or clinical/regulatory milestones underway.
  • Established IP portfolio, patent filings, or protected trade secret moats.
  • Primary company leadership identified, ideally at least one full-time leadership position.

Out of Scope: Applied Software & Early Science

• Business & Product Focus: Conventional SaaS, consumer/mobile apps, marketplaces, e-commerce, white-label platforms, traditional food/beverage, lifestyle/consumer goods, retail, and traditional service businesses.
• Superficial Tech: Innovations based primarily on business model changes, branding/UX, or integrating readily available tools and off-the-shelf AI APIs (e.g., standard LLM wrappers).
• Early-Stage Tech (TRL 1–3): Pure basic research, paper-only designs, theoretical concepts, or lab-phase discovery without a functional bench prototype or empirical validation.

If you’re in scope, you should apply.

This hands-on workshop cuts through the hype and focuses on what AI can genuinely do for real people in real workflows — without turning anyone into an AI grifter.

Led by Scott Hanselman, this session is practical, grounded, and interactive. Together, participants will explore how to use AI tools in ways that actually save time, reduce repetitive work, and support creativity. The goal is not to chase buzzwords or speculate about AGI. It is to understand what is useful now, what is overhyped, and how to make informed decisions about the tools showing up on our laptops, phones, and in our work.

The event takes place at Nedspace on September 5, 2026. It is free to attend.

For more information or to RSVP, visit “AI Builder Series: AI Without the Hype.”

The Oregon AI Accelerator is a public-private partnership uniting Oregon’s leading entrepreneur support organizations, venture funds, and research universities. By combining Google Cloud infrastructure, expert mentorship, and Oregon’s collaborative ethos, we empower founders to build globally competitive AI companies.

And they’re looking to select up to 15 startups to participate in their second cohort.

So what does the program entail…? The 11 week cohort promises:

• Balanced format combining focused in-person days at PSU with deep asynchronous build sprints, ensuring founders have maximum execution time.
• Committed mentor bench with signed mutual NDAs, no-solicitation guarantees, two-sided matching, and a floor of ≥1 dedicated lead mentor per team.
• Enhanced co-working environment with independent access cards, private phone booths, dedicated monitor workstations, and conference facilities.
• Funded by public-private regional grants and higher-ed partners. We take zero equity or ownership in your startup.

Sound interesting…? You’ve still got a couple of days to make your decision and get your application submitted. Applications for this cohort are due September 15, 2026.

For more information or to apply, visit Oregon AI Accelerator.

Check if files were made with Claude | Claude

This tool identifies only the content credential, which tells you whether Claude was involved in producing the file. It can’t tell whether Claude was involved in creating the content, and it does not include any identifying information about the user.

(2014) The next chapter: Telling the stories of the founders and startups who have Built Oregon

I still don’t get how this poorly written blog has put me in interesting conversations with entrepreneurs around the state. Both within the tech scene and without. But it has been weighing on me that Oregon is very much where Portland tech startups were back then. There’s a ton of interesting activity, but the combination of aggressive humility and heads down working means no one is telling those stories.

On the Loose – by Dean W. Ball – Hyperdimensional

In this case, however, the agents did not copy their weights, attempt to procure replacement compute, or take other steps that would be rational to take if their objective was to survive shutdown. So while the agents in the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident were rogue, they were not truly sovereign.

US and AI bosses ask G20 not to regulate AI because it could hurt America’s bottom line | TechRadar

Speaking at a recent G20 meeting, US officials have urged other governments to rely on existing legal frameworks wherever possible rather than treating AI as a totally new policy problem in a bid not to lose competitiveness.

About half of Americans say they spend too much time on their phone. Some are trying to cut back | Pew Research Center

Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down. Just over half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey from May and June 2026. About a third of adults say their smartphone use is about right, while just 3% say they spend too little time using these devices.

LLMs: Intelligence vs. cost | OpenTeams | AI you own

One of their main plots is the Intelligence vs. cost plot, which shows the Pareto frontier, i.e. the cheapest model that can achieve each intelligence score. This frontier is important, because using a super-intelligent and super-expensive model to accomplish menial tasks that could be done by a much dumber and cheaper one is just a waste of money.

Bring “In Search of Portland” along on your next walk through Portland

These days, Libby is still exploring a changing Portland. He brings 25 years of study, close observation and personal anecdotes to his book comprised of six distinct walks. Walks can be taken individually or in one continuous trek. Walking and reading at the same time is up to you.

HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actions | Don’t Worry About the Vase

So how do we get the rest of the world to take it appropriately seriously? Where do we go from here? Not only what can we do to not have a worse version of this happen again, but to ensure good outcomes generally, and employ what we learned?

Before You Start Fundraising, You Need to Get Acclimated — Chris Neumann

Last week, I met with 4 different startups based outside of California: one from New York, another in London, a third in Vancouver and the fourth from Toronto. All of these startups are preparing to fundraise in the fall (either for their Seed or Series A round). At some point in each of those conversations, I found myself giving the founders a piece of advice that I hadn’t previously offered with any regularity: “You should go to San Francisco a few weeks before you start to fundraise. You need to get acclimated.”

The Harness, the Horse, or the Hay – by Brett Queener

I’ve been pushing this on founders for six months without having a name for it. The analogy finally hit me this week, so here I am, publishing to name an anxiety that has been sitting in the room the whole time.

Investors back Portland startup that could cut the cost of chipmaking – Portland Business Journal

Spectralsurf has a product that could have huge implications on the semiconductor and display industries. It has developed what is essentially a 3-D printing cartridge filled with liquid metal that can produce the thin film sheets needed in electronics manufacturing at a fraction of the current cost.

DSHR’s Blog: Small Is Beautiful

The question is “compared to the closed-weight US models, what do you lose by running open-weight models in-house?” Below the fold I discuss a major study from Stanford that answers the question.

AWS AI Fellowship x NVIDIA

The nemotron edition is a selective co-investment program for startups to accelerate go-to-market with NVIDIA Nemotron on AWS. Co-build, co-market, and co-sell with AWS and NVIDIA — driving qualified enterprise pipeline and a repeatable co-sell motion.

Artificial intelligence token prices are hitting new record lows

The LLM Token Expenditure Index, a key gauge of daily prices from intelligence firm Silicon Data, fell to 97 cents on Monday. That marked the index’s lowest reading since its creation late last year and has fallen by more than half from the high recorded earlier this summer.

Exit the Cave – by Justin Andersun – Turtle’s Pace

Culture has created a cozy Cave. Smart devices reward private fitness. Recommendation algorithms propagate our preexisting philosophy through personalized programming. AI tells us what we want to hear and bolsters our assumptions instead of challenging them. We grow so comfortable curating our Cave that we forget the vast, interesting, beautiful, and brutal world beyond its walls.

Labor Day Weekend 2026: Eats, Drinks, and Happenings in Portland – Bridgetown Bites

This year, Labor Day falls on Monday, September 7, and with the adjoining Saturday and Sunday, September 5 and 6 it makes for a nice long weekend.

(2021) New leadership at the oldest startup accelerator in Portland

There have been any number of accelerators supporting Portland startups throughout the years. But no shared office space accelerator has been at it as long as the Portland State Business Accelerator. And today, that accelerator — which was founded in 2004 — announced new leadership. Arsh Haque has taken over as the PSBA’s newest director.

Read Tim Cook’s full memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO – 9to5Mac

In the memo sent to employees this morning and obtained by 9to5Mac, Cook reflects on his time at Apple and thanks employees for all of their work. He also says he takes “enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable” as John Ternus.

Agency and Agents – by Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing

AI does many things, but a thing it is very good at is coding. So one of the first risks that might come from very smart AIs has to do with their coding abilities, since if you can write good code, you can also write bad code that can hack or attack other systems. As a result, the big AI companies put their AI systems through tests to determine their security risks. They take AIs without the guardrails that go into consumer versions of AI and ask them to engage in various hacking challenges. In order to make sure that there is no danger to the public, each AI instance, each individual agent, is kept in a separate space, called a “sandbox,” with no access to the internet or to each other.

Sector Snapshot: Proptech Funding Holds Up, But Investors Are Placing Different Bets

But startup investors haven’t abandoned the sector, either, Crunchbase data shows. Instead, they’re being more selective about their bets and putting more money into companies using AI and other technology to make construction, property operations and real estate transactions faster and less expensive.

The Future Tech Role Is the Product Architect – akashyap.ai

TL;DR: Coding is moving from humans to agents. As agents get better at implementing, testing, and reviewing software, the human role moves toward deciding what should be built, defining how the system should work, and verifying the result. The person who owns all three is the product architect.

Invisible Companies: Why Overlooked Businesses Win- Colossus

Invisible companies persist for a different reason: the missing information is itself invisible. Would-be competitors do not know that they do not know, so they don’t think to search. And the invisible companies have no reason to tell them. No one searches, so no one competes; no one competes, so the profits persist. The reward for being overlooked is, paradoxically, the opportunity for supranormal profits.

AI and Employment: So Far, So Good – Marginal REVOLUTION

Among those using generative AI, 85% of firms cited writing or editing documents and email as the biggest uses, half cite searching for information, 45% summarizing documents, and 13% coding. Sixty-four percent of adopters say they changed nothing about the business in order to use AI, 15% trained existing staff, another 15% built new workflows, and just over one percent hired anyone with AI skills.

NSF grant to fund PSU research commercialization programs – Portland Business Journal

“We have built an array of economic-development infrastructure in Propel PSU, and we know PSU has a research portfolio that is ready to translate,” said Joseph Janda, assistant vice president for innovation and principal investigator on the award, in a written statement. “This award lets us connect that infrastructure to PSU projects deliberately and with depth, so that more PSU discoveries become products, licenses, startups and industry partnerships that benefit Portland and the state.”

AI Builder Series: AI Without the Hype — September 5, 2026 | STEAM Circuit

Led by Scott Hanselman, this session is practical, grounded, and interactive. Together, participants will explore how to use AI tools in ways that actually save time, reduce repetitive work, and support creativity. The goal is not to chase buzzwords or speculate about AGI. It is to understand what is useful now, what is overhyped, and how to make informed decisions about the tools showing up on our laptops, phones, and in our work.

Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1

We’re introducing Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1. They’re the world’s most advanced models for coding and knowledge work—and their research capabilities offer an early glimpse of how AI models will contribute to scientific progress.

Shopify Connect Link: Simplify Shopify Onboarding for Your Customers

nstead of requesting Shopify credentials or creating a Warehance user account, your team can generate a secure, client-specific connection link and send it directly to the customer. The customer simply opens the link, confirms the organization requesting access, enters their Shopify store URL, and authorizes the connection through Shopify’s standard approval flow. No Warehance login is required, and Shopify credentials never need to be shared.

Redshifted | Vibes DIY Blog

That is exactly what AI acceleration is doing to people. The most accelerated among us haven’t left; they’re right there on the payroll, in the group chat, at the meetup. They still emit — more than ever, actually. But their working notes are prompts, their essays are systems, their conversation partners are agents, and the trail they leave is stretched so far out of the human-readable spectrum that from behind, it reads as silence. We talk about these people the way you’d talk about the raptured. He used to write. She used to teach. They used to be here. They are still here. We just can’t see their light.

Here’s what you read the most in August 2026.

1. For transparency, here is what I told the Teconomy team assessing Oregon’s 10-Year Innovation Plan
2. Inc. features the 10 fastest growing Portland companies
3. Panthalassa rides the AI wave to a purported $2B valuation
4. Last year as a teenager: Silicon Florist is now 19 years old
5. Portland Startup Week is no more
6. Insitu gets acquired… again
7. TIME ranks OSU Advantage Accelerator among best startup accelerators in the US
8. Bluesky feed & AT Proto startup Graze acquired by Flipboard
9. Oregon UAS Accelerator welcomes 17 startups to its Fall 2026 cohort
10. No rest for the OEN crew: Angel Oregon opens up all three flavors for new startups

Honorable mentions

• Highlight or maybe lowlight: Josh Carter on Portland’s startup problems
• Rose City til batteries die: Rose City Robotics lands Lithium-Ion recycling prize
• Oregon electeds at the Federal level carve out ~$6M to support startups
• Portland has definitely slipped among tech communities — but at least we’re still registering
• Digs raises $25.3M through strategic partnership
• QSBS: The plot thickens

And her timing couldn’t be better. Given that Portland State University, the fiscal sponsor of the Hub, has just secured a $6 million grant to help with innovation and commercialization.

According to PSU Assistant Vice President of Innovation, Joe Janda:

Kelly’s career has a clear through line. She has repeatedly built functions and programs that didn’t yet exist, and brought coherence to complex, multi-stakeholder efforts. As Development Director at Blanchet House of Hospitality, she built a development program from the ground up and grew revenue 25% year-over-year for five consecutive years. At Umpqua Bank, she unified community reinvestment, philanthropy, ESG, and DEI strategies into a coordinated enterprise-wide effort and launched catalytic ESG programming across the bank portfolio. At Core Education, she built the organization’s first enterprise-wide impact management & measurement function across a portfolio of 70+ contracted entities, and she has since advised healthcare systems, nonprofits, and financial institutions on governance and ecosystem development through her consulting practice, ClimbSmart Strategies.

Kelly describes her work as:

My work sits at the intersection of strategy, execution, and impact. I partner with executives and boards to design operating models, governance structures and performance systems that strengthen accountability, improve decision making, and support long term, responsible growth. Rooted in purpose driven and stakeholder centered work, I help leaders connect business performance with real outcomes for people, communities, and the enterprise. I am quite effective in high stakes, ambiguous environments where clarity, alignment, and strong systems turn good ideas into lasting change.

But she’s also a founder, having started a company called Entrellis designed to map “the full family system and gives her the structure to move through it; the right conversations, at the right time, with the clarity that lets families and the professionals around them actually do their best work.”

I’m sure quite a few folks will be writing about this. And I’d expect there to be a statement from the Hub at some point. But I had a break between meetings so I wanted to get the news out there.

More soon.