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…?

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Unemployed Tech Worker Potluck, Fri, Oct 2, 2026, 4:00 PM | Meetup

Enjoy an end-of-summer potluck picnic with your fellow tech workers in Noble Woods Park. Bring something for yourself and something to share.

(2014) How accessible is startup funding in Oregon? University of Oregon releases Oregon Capital Scan: A Line is Drawn

Over the past few years, the chorus of Portland tech startups bemoaning a lack of access to capital has receded a bit. Because some of the problem that plagued startups of previous generations has been resolved with local funding resources. And a great deal more has been resolved by companies finding capital outside of the state. But what is the availability of capital in Oregon, these days? Is it improving? The Oregon Capital Scan aims to answer that question.

Governor Newsom signs most comprehensive data center laws in the nation, providing communities more control on water, electricity, and land use | Governor of California

As Donald Trump dismisses Americans’ concerns about the growing emergence of data centers in their communities, California is enacting new laws to increase transparency and prevent working families from shouldering the costs. The laws give communities more information about energy, water, workforce, and land use for proposed data centers so they can better weigh the economic costs and benefits of such projects.

Attention is all you have

The internet wasn’t always like that. Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.

Portland’s Best Old Flames

Although Rachelle Menashe only began tailoring devotional candles for PDX punk icons six years ago, as part of the memorial for beloved Satyricon presence Bruno Berger, her first experiences with prayer candles burn bright in childhood memories. Menashe, who once owned the influential ’90s venue Suburbia and played in the legendary garage trio Frances Farmer Gals, was never particularly religious.

The current balance of power in open models

I was recently invited to brief a group of Congressional members and staff on the state of open-weight models in the lens of U.S.-China competition. I’m sharing my prepared remarks as a state of the union on open models that is accessible to a broader audience.

AI Comes for the If Statement | Tomasz Tunguz

The newest wave of AI is a robust if-then decider. Jev & SemIf answer questions like these in hundreds of milliseconds at a 99% reduction in cost compared to traditional AI. They simplify the existing models by running the attention math once & then determining the probability of each allowed answer, based on a few tokens of output.

Agility Robotics: Inside the First US Humanoid Company to Go Public

The key question for the business will be about the Digit v5 launch and whether their RaaS offering takes off over the next year with real deployments that start to scale.

October: Co-Work with OEN

Oregon Entrepreneurs Network is partnering with our friends at White Summers, Human Interest, and WeWork to host Co-Work with OEN on Wednesday, October 7th from 9:00 am – 4:00 pm at WeWork in NE Portland.

A goose that lays golden eggs is going to cost you more than pennies

Looking at everything they want, which includes developing a self-guided curriculum on how to develop a social enterprise for practitioners who, by definition, are not yet very savvy when it comes to running their core offerings as actual social businesses; consultations with numerous stakeholders; and preparing a comprehensive literature review, a realistic estimate is 30 days of work.

A small but growing number of founders are betting on bringing people together offline | TechCrunch

The timing isn’t accidental. In June of last year, the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection formally classified loneliness as a defining global health challenge, estimating that one in six people worldwide are affected and linking the condition to roughly 870,000 deaths a year.

1803 Fund shows progress rebuilding Black Portland neighborhood – Portland Business Journal

1803 Fund has spent the last few years acquiring property in Northeast Portland, much of which was previously home to Black Portlanders who were displaced when more than 500 homes were bulldozed in the lower Albina Neighborhood in the name of urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s.

Wikipedia has long been the product of humans—but now, Selena Deckelmann is navigating a world in which AI is reshaping how the platform’s content is created and consumed. As chief product and technology officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts and operates Wikipedia, Deckelmann has worked to shore up defenses against AI crawlers that can overwhelm its infrastructure. By spring 2026, Wikimedia systems were blocking or throttling roughly 30% of automated crawler requests totaling billions of hits per day, according to the foundation. (The organization hasn’t completely shut out AI and tech companies, however; there is also Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial API product with a limited free tier that allows large-scale data access.)

Deckelmann is also changing the editing experience for volunteers in an effort to confront growing quantities of AI slop, including a new system that advises contributors on their sourcing—whether text is copied wholesale from an LLM—and cautions against overly promotional language. In a 2026 trial, new editors offered the “Revise Tone” structured task instead of the standard “Copyedit” task completed 38.7% more tasks without reducing edit quality, according to the organization.

For more on Selena and others who received recognition, visit 2026 TIME Executives of the Year: Tech and Data.

Just got some really positive feedback.

What I was told, quote unquote, is, “This felt like I was connecting with community.”

I have been running this experiment on Friday nights. It’s like a livestream, but it’s not really a livestream. It’s just a bunch of us hanging out and chat, so I’m going to ask you one big favor if I could. This Friday night at 9 PM Pacific time.

Please show up if you can spend like 30 minutes on a Friday evening. Not on camera. Sitting in chat and seeing what the experience is like for you.

I would really love to hear your feedback.

To RSVP and get a reminder, register at Silicon Florist watch party.

What’s the Oregon Growth Board, you ask…?

The Oregon Growth Board (“OGB”) is an innovative initiative that invests state lottery profits to drive economic growth, support underrepresented communities, and enhance educational programs across Oregon. This comprehensive program, designed to attract investors and empower entrepreneurs, attempts to achieve multiple goals through its private market portfolios, the Oregon Growth Account and Oregon Growth Fund…

And apparently, they’ve got a spot open for you since two members are timing out in December and another is timing out in April 2027.

Sound interesting…? Here are more details.

For more information, visit the Oregon Growth Board.

Agility has some very interesting pieces: some early but real deployments, customers who pay for pilots, a factory and in-house actuators and a manufacturing facility. But what the filing clearly shows how early things are. It made barely $2M in revenue at very negative gross margins with most of the customers being investors in the business.

The key question for the business will be about the Digit v5 launch and whether their RaaS offering takes off over the next year with real deployments that start to scale.

To read the entire teardown, visit “Agility Robotics: Inside the First US Humanoid Company to Go Public.”

Origin Story — Oregon Venture Fund

Today, OVF has invested $170M in 77 regional startups that have grown to over $4 billion in value and created 5,500 jobs. We’ve worked hard to invest in, and profit alongside, intrepid, big-thinking entrepreneurs, resulting in a 21% avg net annualized rate of return and a 2.8X average net cash-on-cash return for our investors, who now include our region’s largest foundations and universities and most successful business and tech leaders.

(2017) No more (startup) tears: Johnson & Johnson acquires Portland startup Sightbox

I’ve been talking to a lot of people lately about broadening the spectrum of Silicon Florist coverage. To cover more than just tech. Because there is all kinds of interesting stuff going on around here. And some recent news seemed like the perfect excuse to start doing that. You see, Portland Seed Fund and Starve Ups alum Sightbox has been acquired by Johnson & Johnson.

Frontier Overhangs – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

There has been, over the last week, what I think is a healthy debate about the philosophy and psychology that undergirds the views of meaningful segments of the AI community, particularly those obsessed with doomsday scenarios. It is, in the end, difficult to reason with a philosophy that grants equivalent moral weight to not just all beings — human or not — who exist today, but who may ever exist in the future; this tilts the scales in such an absurd fashion towards safetyism that innovation is impossible and freedom is intolerable.

What Sun got wrong | The Observation Deck

Every Sun employee will have their own perspective on what Sun got wrong, and I talked about my own view in a Hacker News comment in 2011. I stand by that analysis, but another 15 years on (!), I would probably distill things even further: Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business.

Pluralistic: The Claude Delusion (21 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

To “converse” with an AI is to carry on a dialog with a fictional character, who is no more real than the imaginary people in a novel. Indeed, the chatbot is less real than the character, because the character is the product of another mind, while the chatbot’s words are the product of complex mathematical operations conducted over a massive database of all the words humans have uttered, arranged by their frequency in relation to one another. When that math makes something beautiful or striking, it’s like a sunset: no matter how striking it is, it’s empty.

Why MCP Was Always a Bad Idea

Recently I went to an all-day event centered around the latest and greatest in the MCP world. While all of the presenters were awesome and seemed to be passionate about the work they were doing, I’m honestly tired of MCP. It’s a horrible protocol built for a time when LLMs weren’t that smart, and we’ve outgrown it.

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek unveils policy proposals for a second term – OPB

Kotek’s reelection platform, which she’s dubbed Building Oregon’s Future Together, contains its share of references to Trump. But it also offers the most insight to date on Kotek’s top priorities if she wins a four-year term voters have seen.

A musing on retail vacancies and business grants in Portland, OR

I am not anti-entrepreneurship. I think cities should promote it. I just don’t believe that, in Portland’s current economic climate, anyone new to brick and mortar should take on a risk like opening an unproven storefront in a run-down neighborhood or a building that needs extensive work. Established brick-and-mortar, sure. And struggling businesses that are currently open need our help to remain open.

Former Seattle City Council president launches AI-powered site to track and report on City Hall – GeekWire

CivicTide, which Nelson launched Monday at civictide.org, tracks and reports on Seattle City Council legislation from introduction to final vote. Policy briefs — such as this one on Councilmember Dan Strauss’ plan to create RV parking permits for people living in vehicles — summarize what a bill would do, explain the stakes, and juxtapose the “spin” from backers against the site’s analysis.

The Preference Cascade Is Only Getting Started

Translated to percentages, this implies a mean chance of AI destroying humanity of around 30%-33%, which Andrew Curran estimates is up ~15% from previous results, with a median expectation on the order of 10%, with only a small partisan split.

Weekly Review: System One – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft

Thank you for making Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers part of your Monday. The standout this week is Jev, a “System One” model that spent two years in stealth. Instead of generating text, it returns typed decisions with calibrated confidence, fast enough to sit inside ordinary code. Many AI calls need a quick judgment, not an essay. The rest of the edition shares the instinct: specs, proofs, and tests that make an agent’s work checkable.

Charts of the Week: So Many Apps, So Little Time

In other words, yes, the data suggests that App-Slop is the story, for now. AI has led to a lot more apps, but they are not successful apps, in any meaningful sense

6-7 loops we use every day to make PostHog self-driving

As part of the self-driving team at PostHog, my job is to build the loops that let you skip the third bit if you want to. Here are 6-7 loops we use on self-driving to, well, build self-driving.

There’s no point at which turning your brain off will work

As LLMs have gotten better, I’ve seen more of this. Sometimes, people will try to get the LLM to write some code for them and basically just assume that it works3. Sometimes there’s a human in the loop and, if the thing doesn’t work, they’ll ask the LLM to figure out the problem and solve it. Niklas Gruhn calls some variants of doing this being a meat proxy.

Where Agents Actually Pay Off: Four tests for finding the AI use cases hiding in your business · Luma

Join Firsthand’s applied AI lead, Chen Chen, for a practical session on finding the agent projects actually worth building in your business. Everyone is being told to put AI agents to work. Almost nobody can tell you where to point one, and that’s not a technology problem. You’ll learn four tests you can run on your own operation to find where an agent would genuinely earn its keep, and where it wouldn’t.

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.

Oregon data centers use almost 25% of the state’s power | Mashable

In the first study of its kind since the AI-driven data center discourse began, researchers in Oregon have released a new report detailing the size of the data center industry in the state. In doing so, the researchers have also uncovered just how much energy data centers use up in the state.

Monday (Sep 21)

• 3rd-Monday Techno Action Social! — 7:15pm

Tuesday (Sep 22)

• How To Improve The Quality Of Your Project With AI Powered Tools — 9:00am
• Virtual Lunch & Learn: The Scientist-CEO Communication Trap — 12:00pm
• Writer’s Workshop – Borrowed Truth: Writing From Real Life Without Writing Your Diary — 12:00pm
• Harvest Abundance: Connect with Nonprofit Professionals — 5:30pm
• Portland Geek Dinner – Hillsboro! — 5:30pm
• Where Agents Actually Pay Off: Four tests for finding the AI use cases hiding in your business — 6:00pm
• Coding Club — 6:00pm
• Snap SPECS PDX Meetup — 7:00pm

Wednesday (Sep 23)

• Who’s Watching the Agents? Open Verification Standards for AI — 8:00am
• NEDME (NW Electronics Design & Manufacturing Expo) — 8:00am
• (CS)²AI Online Symposium: Level Zero Visions & Reflections — 10:00am
• BrowserStack Meetup Portland: AI for Flawless Requirements in QA — 10:30am
• SIM/TAO Cybersecurity Leadership Forum: AI & Cybersecurity — 5:00pm
• 2026 Sept Portland AI Engineers Meetup — 5:00pm
• Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting with Fabric Plan — 5:30pm
• AWS User Group Tech Talk – Cyber Resilience — 5:30pm
• Hot Topics, Cool Heads Workshop — 5:30pm, Vancouver
• Project Work Session — 5:45pm
• Spooky drink and draw — 6:00pm
• PDXOSGeo September Meetup – Gamifying GIS: From OpenStreetMap to Steam — 6:30pm
• The Last Dive: Portland Premiere — 7:00pm

Thursday (Sep 24)

• Customer Experience Roundtable — 4:00pm
• AIDataTech Connect: Global Virtual Networking Event for AI, Data & Tech Pros — 5:00pm
• Mac’s List: Getting Unstuck, The Tools You Need to Accelerate Your Career — 5:30pm
• Vantechy Happy Hour /Birthday Party — 5:30pm, Vancouver
• Social Beer: Sept Gathering — 6:00pm
• Digital Creatives “Drink-N-Draw” at Rose City Book Pub! — 6:30pm
• PDX DevOps — 6:30pm

Friday (Sep 25)

• PNW CoffeeOps — 8:00am
• The NextNW Open Golf Tournament: 2026 — 10:00am
• Built Festival 2026 — 10:00am
• Write the Docs PDX – Casual Meetup — 12:00pm
• Friday Happy Hour at Beermongers — 12:00pm
• Tech Talk | How to Stay on Top of the Ever Changing World of Development — 1:00pm
• Harvest Moon Celebration at Asia America — 4:45pm
• Coding Club — 6:00pm
• Silicon Florist watch party — 9:00pm

Saturday (Sep 26)

• Beginner Friendly App Building for Innovators — 1:00pm, Vancouver

Sunday (Sep 27)

• Digital Creatives and Coffee! (drop-in social) — 9:00am

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• Startup Operations & Systems Builder at Experitas Inc.
• Marketing Manager at Spoken
• QA and Technical Support at Spoken

Hiring and sad that you’re not part of this list…? Turn that frown upside down. It’s super easy to prove how witty, intelligent, insightful, and community oriented your company is by posting those job openings to the Silicon Florist job board. Or don’t. I mean, if you don’t need super talented people who are smart enough to read this publication. Or if you don’t want really, really awesome candidates where you’d be like “We could choose any of these people and we would be exponentially better overnight.” That’s your choice. Because that could happen. It’s only been confirmed by scientists that Silicon Florist readers are among the upper echelon of the most skilled, talented, and creative people on earth. I’m serious. Look it up. And then post your job. Because the awesome people are waiting. For you. Maybe.