Orphaned Startups: The Saddest Crisis in Venture Capital That Nobody’s Solving | by DC | Medium

Judie Alvarez recently posted something on LinkedIn that stopped me mid-scroll. She highlighted a growing phenomenon called “Orphaned Startups” — companies stuck between Seed and Series A with nowhere to go. Great products. €500K to €1M in revenue. Founders who still have some passion left, but are watching it drain away week by week.

The Trump Administration Is at War With Itself Over AI Regulation | WIRED

Donald Trump killed an executive order to regulate AI. Now, administration officials and AI executives are trying to figure out if there’s anything left to piece back together.

Code.org rebrands as CodeAI, solidifying its shift to AI education – GeekWire

Founded in 2013 by twin brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi, Code.org’s mission has always been to expand computer science education to K-12 students. Backed by nearly $60 million in funding from Microsoft, Amazon, Google and The Ballmer Group, the platform today counts 150 million students and 3 million teachers, with 232 million projects created by students around the world.

Oregon Entrepreneurs Network June PubTalk

Our June PubTalk on Wednesday, June 10th, hosted by Willamette University MBA, brings together founders, educators, and industry leaders to share practical perspectives on building with AI. The conversation will explore common challenges such as reducing bias, protecting user data, setting clear accountability, and making thoughtful choices without slowing momentum.

The Four Stages of AI Adoption — And What Separates the Companies That Get It Right | C1

Every organization is on an AI adoption curve right now. Not hypothetically, not in a planning phase — right now. Employees are using AI tools to draft emails, summarize documents, generate code, and automate workflows. Some of this is sanctioned. A lot of it isn’t.

M/I Homes deploys Prophetic AI for land acquisition – Portland Business Journal

M/I Homes (NYSE: MHO), a nationwide homebuilding firm, has fully deployed Prophetic’s technology at a time when homebuilders across the country want to quickly build more housing but face challenges in selecting and acquiring the right parcels of land for development.

PDX Code & Coffee @ DeadStock Beaverton, Mon, Jun 8, 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.

The Smörgåsbord Standard: Sweden Startups and Why the Rest of the World Should Be Taking Notes

Sweden is a country of 10 million people that has produced the three-point seatbelt, dynamite, Bluetooth, the implantable pacemaker, Skype, Spotify, Minecraft, and Klarna. That is not a list of coincidences; that is a pattern, and patterns have causes. If you want to understand what a genuinely productive startup ecosystem looks like at a structural level (one that generates real value and not just pitch competitions), Sweden startups are worth studying carefully.

devopsdays Portland, OR 2026

Devopsdays is coming to Portland!

He shared the news with the community via email:

Dear Friends of the Metro Region Innovation Hub,

After much reflection, I have decided to step down as Executive Director of the Metro Region Innovation Hub on June 17.

Over the past 20 months, it has been an incredible privilege to help build the Hub alongside so many dedicated entrepreneurs, partners, investors, mentors, and community leaders. Together, we have laid a strong foundation for an organization that exists to connect and support Oregon’s innovators, and I am deeply proud of what we have accomplished.

This decision was not an easy one. As my family grows and my community commitments evolve, I have decided to focus more of my time on serving the American Muslim community (given all that’s happening locally and globally) and supporting my wife’s career. While I am leaving this role, I remain committed to Oregon’s innovation ecosystem and believe I can continue to contribute in meaningful ways to Oregon’s innovation plan from outside the Hub.

I have tremendous confidence in the future of the Metro Region Innovation Hub. The organization is stronger than ever, and I am excited to see its next phase of growth and impact under new leadership.

Thank you to everyone who has supported the Hub, partnered with us, attended events, mentored founders, and helped build a more connected entrepreneurial ecosystem. The relationships I’ve built through this work will remain among the most rewarding of my career.

I look forward to continuing to support Oregon’s entrepreneurs and innovation community in the years ahead.

With gratitude,

Asad

No word on the leadership of the organization at the moment. But I’ll definitely keep you posted.

For more, visit the Portland Metro Region Innovation Hub.

What the Oregon Community Can Do to Support Startups

But the longer we talked, the more the conversation tilted toward the other side of the ledger. Because for all its rough edges, Oregon has one of the most generous, show-up-for-each-other startup communities I’ve ever been part of. People answer the cold email. They make the intro. They drive across the mountains for a panel on a weeknight. That’s not nothing. That’s actually rare.

AGI Needs Formal Reasoning. Carina Hong is Building it at Axiom.

In this conversation with Matt McIlwain, Carina explains her central thesis: that math and code are the two pillars of the digital world, and that any AI infrastructure missing a formal verification layer is structurally incomplete. She walks through the history of verified AI research at Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Meta, and explains why each effort stalled just as commercial pressure mounted. She describes what makes hardware and software verification the natural first commercial market, and what Axiom discovered when they tested their prover against circuits that industry-standard formal checkers could not verify.

Intel details long-awaited Crescent Island AI GPU at Computex, boasts up to 480 GB of LPDDR5X to combat memory shortages — company shares more details of its Xe3P inference accelerator at Computex | Tom’s Hardware

The Crescent Island GPU will be built on Intel’s Xe3P GPU architecture. Intel says this architecture is “built for agentic AI,” and it supports a broad range of potential data types, from FP4 for high-performance AI inference all the way up to FP64, potentially for scientific computing applications. Intel isn’t providing any raw throughput specs at this stage of Crescent Island’s development, so we can’t make any guesses about its compute performance.

Season 2 Finale: The Rebuttal – by Mike Schmidt

City Councilor Angelita Morillo — First term District 3 representative and proud DSA member, comes into studio to respond. She doesn’t just push back on the argument. She makes her case, point by point, with data, personal experience, and insight into the day to day of actually doing the work.

America Has a Pangram Problem – The Atlantic

Yet an AI detector that is mostly reliable might in some ways be more dangerous than a broken one. While Pangram is accumulating the power to end reputations and careers, the tool does make mistakes, perhaps to a greater extent than is currently understood. In turn, AI accusations could very quickly spiral into a witch hunt.

No Raise, No Promotion: 1 in 4 White-Collar Workers Are Stalling Out – WSJ

No promotion. No notable raises. Not yet 40. You aren’t alone.

‘Light rail to nowhere’? Surging costs undercut I-5 bridge transit plan • Oregon Capital Chronicle

“There is no money to build light rail in the existing funding. That is the budget reality,” Aho said. “As we made clear at the press conference with the mayor, we will continue to fight for more funding. We appreciate the partnership of the mayor and the city.”

How I Raised $14M For My Startup When I Stopped Pitching And Started Speaking

Every meaningful check in our $14 million round came from a personal encounter. A talk I gave. A dinner I attended. A conference I almost didn’t go to. If there’s a single lesson I’d want every first-time founder to take from my fundraising experience, it’s this: stop optimizing your outreach and start engineering the rooms you’re in.

What’s in Enterprise IT/VC #500

Measuring tokens consumed is measuring effort, not output, and it’s the same mistake enterprises made a decade ago measuring lines of code or hours logged. You get what you measure, and if you measure tokens, you’ll get engineers finding creative ways to burn them.

Your Customers’ AI Agents Are Coming for Your Data. Are You Ready? – Fintech Takes

The differentiation will come from the data that empowers those models. Data determines the quality of the experiences you can build on top of them, the accuracy of the answers they can give, and the breadth of what they can act on.

Weekly Review: The Cost of Capable – by Sam Keen

Last week we marked the capability threshold; this week the questions turn economic. Simon Willison calls April 2026 the moment coding agents found product-market fit, even as open and specialized models put a ceiling under frontier pricing. The tutorials and tools cover building, securing, and harnessing agents, while the editorials weigh what capability now costs and what judgment stays yours.

Backpressure is all you need

In this post, I’ll cover a third, not-so-obvious approach: building ways for the agent to validate more of its own work before a human has to step in. The goal to make longer unattended sessions safe enough to be useful without fully removing the human from the loop. It should also reduce the number of low-quality PRs your teammates have to review for details the agent should have caught itself.

Things I Think I Think… The New Internet Era

Before I continue on, I’d like to point out that this is not the first time the industry has responded to a new technology by seeking to create a top-level C-suite role for it and then turning to that individual and saying, “Go on! Make it happen!” At the turn of the previous century, the world saw the emergence of the Chief Electricity Officer, a role designed to bring the company in line with the burgeoning field of “electricity”.

Mentorship Saturdays @ Roseline Coffee & Online, Sat, Jun 6, 2026, 10:00 AM | Meetup

Roseline 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, ask for advice or even work on your resume. You will likely find us on the couches Still uncertain? Let’s chat on Discord!

Oregon Disconnects — The Real Cost of Oregon’s Data Center Boom

For every claim made by the data center industry, there’s a community bearing a real cost. Here’s what the industry-funded studies leave out.

Ice cream chain Salt & Straw explores sale, sources say | Reuters

Ice cream chain Salt & Straw, known for its quirky, small-batch flavors such as salty donut guava and cheese, is ​exploring a sale that could value the company at over $200 ​million, according to three people familiar with the matter.

A rational conversation on where AI is actually going | Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans on why AI is a 1997 internet moment, what everyone gets wrong about job loss, and where the real value may accrue

$1B ocean data center powered by waves wins backing from Peter Thiel

Imagine a steel tower nearly as tall as Big Ben, floating silently in the open Pacific, running AI at full speed without burning a single drop of fossil fuel. That is not a concept sketch. That is what Oregon-based startup Panthalassa is building right now, and it just secured $140 million in Series B funding led by Peter Thiel, valuing the company at close to $1 billion. The ocean, once a barrier, is now a power source.

Some thoughts on Nectome’s long-term stability

We’ve taken care to operate within a convenient and sensible legal jurisdiction. This is why we’re based in Oregon, even though I anticipate many of our early clients will be from California. Oregon’s medical aid-in-dying (MAiD) law is the oldest in the US and enjoys a strong local base of support.

Dorkbot PDX: June Edition, Mon, Jun 8, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup

Most of Dorkbot is a freewheeling hangout, but each month we feature a short talk about a cool project or teaching some esoteric wizardry. This month, Helen Leigh will share some of the musical instruments she’s made over the years and share some of the technologies behind them. Helen’s projects include: spider harp, purring tentacle, golden disco ball theremin, robotic midi drum machine, and an embroidered kraakdoos.

Is this sustainable?

We don’t yet know what this means for engineering as a discipline, or for the people doing it. The honest version of what it feels like, from inside it, is paddling harder to stay ahead of an ever-increasing current. It works for now. It won’t last forever.

‘We are home today’: Grand Ronde breaks ground on tumwata village at Willamette Falls – oregonlive.com

The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde held a groundbreaking ceremony Thursday for the first phase of work at tumwata village, a massive, 23-acre project that will reshape the Oregon City side of Willamette Falls at the site of a former paper mill.

Your New Traditions as a Portland Fire Fan

“Portland has always been a basketball city,” writes general manager Vanja Černivec in a pamphlet for prospective season ticketholders. “Now, we’re a WNBA city again. And with your support, we’re going to build something powerful, inclusive and uniquely ours.”

How far behind are open models? — LessWrong

Open models, AI models where you can download the weights online, are generally not as capable as the best closed models (models only available through an API), but how large is the gap, and how does it change over time? We try to answer this question by using data from 17 selected benchmarks (8 private, 9 public, ~110 datapoints) measuring various capabilities. All the data and code needed to reproduce this can be found on github.

When ICE ramped up enforcement, US-born workers didn’t see any economic gains

We’re scholars of labor markets, immigration and public environmental policy who have examined how these economic trends can be traced to the mass deportation campaign of Trump’s second term. Notably, while areas with heavier ICE enforcement saw a drop in employment among immigrants, there was no increase in either employment or wages among U.S. citizens.

Dan Schade talks On, thriving in the apparel sector – Portland Business Journal

The Portland Business Journal sat down with Schade to discuss how he went from aspiring Silicon Valley entrepreneur to working for an apparel company, the city of Portland, the company’s growth and thriving amid a moment of global economic uncertainty.

They Saw Women Shut Out Of VC, So A PayPal Veteran And Former Navy Officer Built An Alternative

The platform, also called AQi, gives women-led businesses — those that are at least 50% women-owned — a way to raise capital through Regulation Crowdfunding, a securities framework aimed at opening up startup investing.

24 tips for giving S-tier demos – by Jina Yoon

A good demo can be the difference between a project shipping or shutting down, and a startup getting funded or going nowhere.

Introducing dynamic workflows | Claude

Today we’re introducing dynamic workflows in Claude Code, helping Claude take on the most challenging tasks end-to-end. Work you’d normally plan in quarters now finishes in days. Claude dynamically writes orchestration scripts that run tens to hundreds of parallel subagents in a single session, checking its work before anything reaches you.

The Fallacy of “Defensibility” – by George Matelich

The argument about moat and defensibility for 9.9 out of 10 early-stage startups is ridiculous because almost no company starts with a moat. Most great businesses grow into defensible positions.

How AWS used random graph theory to build more efficient data centers

How a Slack shout-out, a dusted-off academic theory, and a spaghetti monster led an AWS team to crack an elusive code—and deliver greater reliability and performance for customers.

On this day in Portland startup history: Taking our place among Startup Cities: Portland, Oregon

You know I’m a sucker for a good video. Especially when it’s on the Portland startup scene. And if you ignore the minor chunk that features my ugly mug, this is a pretty damn good take on what’s happening around here. Grab a cup of coffee and take a few minutes to enjoy Startup Cities: Portland, Oregon.

On this day in Portland startup community history: Jive Software unveils expansion plans (2008)

I mean, we all know that they’re moving into new offices in Portland, this summer, but now they’ve revealed that they’re planning to move into offices in Silicon Valley, London, and Zurich.

Last.fm is now independent

Your account, your listening history, and your data remain exactly where they are. The team building Last.fm is the same. The service continues as normal.

IBM and Red Hat Commit $5 Billion to Redefine the Future of Open Source in the AI Era

Project Lightwell will establish a trusted enterprise clearinghouse combined with a global force of engineers to identify and fix vulnerabilities at scale. The clearinghouse will serve as a security coordination layer, using advanced AI capabilities to validate and test fixes across an unprecedented volume of open source code. These capabilities will be offered through commercial subscriptions, allowing enterprises to integrate secure patches directly into their existing software supply chains with enterprise-grade validation and lifecycle management.

London topples Paris to regain European tech top spot – Tech.eu

The Dealroom Global Tech Ecosystem Index data also shows that Europe is home to more of the world’s highest-performing tech ecosystems relative to population size than North America and every other region in the world.

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

Why these sudden aggressive moves on pricing? Both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning to IPO, but I suspect there’s a more important factor here: I think they’ve finally found product-market fit, with the coding/general-purpose agent products embodied by Claude Code/Cowork and Codex.

Crunchbase Data: Venture Dollars For Black Startup Founders Stay Scarce Despite AI Funding Boom

Only around $942 million — or just 0.32% of total U.S. venture funding — went to startups with a Black founder or co-founder last year, per Crunchbase data. That’s one of the lowest shares in years, and down more than two-thirds from just three years prior.

Beyond the Prompt: Claude Code | Arpan Patel

Once you stop thinking of Claude Code as a prompt-and-wait chatbot and start treating it as an autonomous agent that needs guardrails, your workflow shifts.

Fast is better than slow

A lot of people push back on this because it sounds like hustle culture. But there are lots of ways to move faster that don’t involve working long hours. Jamie Brandon has written a pair of excellent posts on this: Speed matters and Moving faster. You should go and read those if you haven’t already.

Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis | TechCrunch

There is a certain wildness in the tech industry these days that both mimics previous eras of large changes, like cloud computing (runaway costs in the early days), and is like nothing we’ve ever seen before (record revenues accompanied by mass layoffs).

Why Google’s AI can’t spell Google (or anything else) | TechCrunch

These AI models — which can code an app in seconds, or solve problems that have stumped mathematicians for decades — are about as good as a kindergartener at spelling.

Jun 13th – Annual Pre-Father’s Day Artisan Market – STEELPORT Knife Co.

STEELPORT Knife Co., located at 3602 NE Sandy Blvd., is hosting the 6th Annual Pre-Father’s Day Artisan Market on Saturday, June 13th, from 1-4 pm. It’s an ideal opportunity to find the perfect gift for Dad.

Tuesday Town Hall – Level Up Through Community, Tue, Jun 2, 2026, 10:30 AM | Meetup

For the last 17 months at NedSpace, this weekly ritual has been helping Portland entrepreneurs, freelancers, and builders connect authentically.

The accelerator is designed for founders, co-founders, and technical leaders building uncrewed aerial, ground, or maritime systems, along with enabling autonomy, AI-enabled platforms, sensing technologies, communications, payload, and mission software solutions. The program is best suited for startups at the prototype, MVP, or early validation stage, generally around TRL 3 or above, with a clear commercial, public-sector, homeland security, or defense use case.

The Fall 2026 cohort is intended for a broad range of innovators, not only defense-focused companies. Oregon-based startups are prioritized, but the program also welcomes domestic and international companies interested in soft-landing, testing, and scaling in Oregon.

Completing the program comes with a $5,000 non-dilutive subgrant and eligibility for a performance-aligned recognition pool with additional non-dilutive support. And — as ever — the real prize is access. To the Pendleton UAS Range. To mentorship. To testing and validation pathways you simply can’t get anywhere else. The cohort wraps with a UAS Innovation Showcase in front of investors and subject-matter experts.

Applications are due July 19, 2026. Acceptance notifications go out July 31, 2026. The program runs from August 26, 2026.

For more information or to apply, visit the Oregon UAS Accelerator.

Revenge of The Business Idiot

Any executive-level fuckwit you’ve met in your life now has a seemingly-powerful tool that can burp up mimicry of open source software and, if you constantly prompt it, eventually get something half-functional onto some sort of web server.

Nat Parker launches CleanHaus for Airbnb management – Portland Business Journal

Nat Parker, who previously co-founded transit mobile ticketing startup GlobeSherpa, has a new startup called CleanHaus that has secured early investors and released the first version of its product.

Oregon UAS Accelerator Opens Applications for Fall 2026 Cohort – The Des Moines Register

The Fall 2026 cohort begins August 26, 2026, and combines virtual programming with in-person engagement in Pendleton. The application deadline is July 19, 2026, and acceptance notifications will be issued on July 31, 2026.

AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here’s Exactly How That Happened | WIRED

The definitive story of how Claude Code and OpenClaw kicked off computing’s biggest transformation possibly ever.

Claude Code’s creator on the end of the software engineer

I wanted to highlight a contrasting view — someone who believes that AI really is on its way toward eliminating certain jobs. Boris Cherny is the creator and head of Claude Code — the agentic coding tool that Anthropic released last year and is, by most measures, the fastest-growing AI coding tool in the world.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we’re close to AGI

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Google’s developer conference last week that humanity is standing in the “foothills of the singularity” — and that society has only a few years left to prepare for AGI.

I’m tired of talking to AI

I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

A portentous reunion | The Observation Deck

So paradoxically, this profoundly human, joyful moment was indisputably brought to us by the very thing that we are worried is going to strip us of our humanity.

How AI-pilled are you? — P9 AI Fluency Index

The index condenses learnings and benchmarks from some of the most forward-thinking companies like Ramp, Fin, Shopify, Zapier and Jobber, into six levels of AI fluency across six dimensions: Culture & Talent, Team Fluency by Function, Throughput, Tooling & Context, Product, and Governance.

Anthropic to introduce AI Fluency scorecard in Claude

Anthropic is testing an AI Fluency scorecard in Claude, letting users assess and track their AI skills directly within the app’s settings panel.

Privacy isn’t dead – it’s just that tech companies have made it inconvenient

In talking to my students as a business professor at Columbia University and giving public talks around the world over the past decade, I have come to realize that people often substitute the question of whether they care about their privacy with two simpler and misleading ones: Is sharing my data worth it? And am I worried about my data being out there?

In Charts: Seed Deals Keep Getting Bigger As Odds Of Reaching Series A Fall Dramatically

The economics of seed investing have changed dramatically since the AI boom began, a review of Crunchbase data shows. Seed rounds are larger than ever, with some startups now raising $8 million to $10 million deals once associated with later stages. But the path forward has also become tougher: startups are taking longer to reach Series A, and a shrinking share are making it there at all.

Case Study: The Evolution of a Pitch Deck

To show that evolution, below we’re sharing both the decks Concorda submitted when originally applying to speedrun and when presenting at Demo Day at the conclusion of the 12-week program. (Some numbers redacted for confidentiality.)

A Letter to Technical Founders Who Say “I Hate Sales” – Cynomi

If you’re the founder, and you’re still the one doing most of the selling because your revenue doesn’t yet support a full-time sales hire, I want to make a direct ask: delete the sentence “I hate sales” from your vocabulary. Also delete “I’m just not a salesperson.” Both sentences are lies, and both are actively sabotaging the business you’re trying to build.

How Sundar Pichai is reshaping Google and the internet for the AI era | The Verge

Today, I’m talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I/O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I/O, and it’s become one of my favorite Decoder traditions.

Email Is Harder Than You Think – by Charlie Gilkey

Most people treat email like it’s the easy part of the day. The filler between blocks of real work. The thing you’ll knock out when you have 10 minutes. That framing is costing you more than you think.

Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis | TechCrunch

“CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they’re sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI,” Levie wrote on X.

LLM Rank is a public, independent rankings site that measures which developer tool companies are most recommended by AI language models. When a developer asks an AI assistant “what’s the best transactional email service” or “which authentication provider should I use,” the AI’s response increasingly shapes which products get evaluated, adopted, and trusted.

We measure those patterns systematically. Each category is tested across multiple AI models with the kinds of questions developers actually ask. Companies are ranked by how often they appear (visibility) and how prominently they’re positioned (average rank). The result is a transparent, data-forward picture of AI-driven product discovery.

The methodology is what makes it interesting. LLM Rank tests dev-tool categories across multiple AI models with realistic developer questions, then ranks companies by visibility and positioning. Best of all…? It’s objective. Not pay to play.

If you build developer tools — or if you’re just curious how AI assistants are reshaping product discovery in your category — go poke around. The rankings update over time, the categories are still expanding, and the methodology page is worth a read on its own.

For more, visit LLM Rank.

Start Your Startup · Luma

​In this session, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and UpStart Collective co-founder Josh Carter breaks down how to treat your startup like a scientific experiment — form hypotheses, run tests, let the numbers tell you what to build next.

SeaPort Airlines sees 19% growth on Portland-Seattle route – Portland Business Journal

“The governor announces a prosperity council on a Monday, and on Tuesday, she’s signing legislation to delink Oregon from the federal tax code, eliminating bonus depreciation for capital expenditures for businesses like ours,” he said. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have both prosperity and a punitive business-regulatory environment.”

The Neocloud Boom

Even if you assume only ~20% is captured by Neoclouds, that’s over $2.5Tn of enterprise value created in the next 4.5 years. The numbers are so big, it can’t be served by only a few players.

An Incomplete List of Successful Anti-Data Center Legislation

Opposition to the massive data centers that power AI is bipartisan and growing across the country. From Maine to California, more states and local communities are passing moratoriums and bans on construction of the noisy, power and water hungry buildings. People are getting arrested for speaking too long at town halls, legislators are receiving death threats, and it’s clear that the fight against these computer warehouses will shape American politics for years to come.

Weekly Review: Past the Threshold – by Sam Keen

Simon Willison’s six-month recap names November 2025 as when coding agents crossed from often-work to mostly-work, and that shift is the spine of this edition. Tutorials cover what becomes load-bearing past the threshold: sensors, harness scaffolding, output formats, and rigorous evals. The tools track production-grade arrivals, and the editorials test popular claims with data, logic, and hard-won lessons from a year of cloud agents.

The AI Bifurcation of Tech by Neevash Ramdial

Strip away the agent framing for a second. What does a company need to do to be useful to an agent? Have a clean API. Have docs that explain it without marketing fluff. Be reliable. Be fast. Scale without falling over. Don’t hide behaviour behind cute abstractions.

Predicting AI job exposure — Benedict Evans

It would be really nice if we had some way to analyse which jobs, companies and industries were exposed to AI, and if we could assign scores, and build charts, and map that against the progress of large language models.

How VCs and founders use inflated ‘ARR’ to crown AI startups  | TechCrunch

Indeed, our sources, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that fudged ARR in public declarations is a common occurrence among startups, and how, in many cases, investors are aware of the exaggerations.

The AI bubble isn’t like the internet bubble | by Cory Doctorow | May, 2026 | Medium

In other words, the story of the web at work was the opposite of the story of AI at work. Today, you can’t turn around without reading a story about bosses who are threatening to fire workers if they don’t increase their AI usage

A Year of Engaging – The Office of Small Business’s First Year — Prosper Portland Office of Small Business

Small businesses aren’t statistics. They’re people betting on themselves, often carrying the weight and stress of a dream on their shoulders. OSB’s first year was an attempt to honor that — not with grand speeches, but with presence.

What anxiety is really trying to tell you

Anxiety is not a modern glitch. It is one of the most ancient behavioral responses in the animal kingdom, predating language, culture, and even the neocortex. You can see it as the oldest alarm system in the brain.

Canopii robotic urban farming greenhouse franchise

Canopii plans to kick off a WeFunder campaign this week to raise $1.5 million to build a commercial greenhouse in Portland and demonstrate its franchise model. The startup launched in 2021 and has received $3.6 million in funding, primarily through grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with investments from Elevate Capital, Onami and Vertue Labs.

Brex Automates Identity & Cuts OpEx with C1

Brex adopted C1 as a single platform to handle the full lifecycle of access requests, access reviews, and entitlement changes. For IT, this meant no longer spending hours each week manually processing requests or removing outdated permissions and that every access decision could be tied to clear policies, with elevated just-in-time access granted only when needed and automatically revoked afterward.