“Six years ago – almost to the day – Paul Querna and I bet that identity would be the most important control point for companies in the future,” said cofounder and CEO Alex Bovee in a blog post. “AI has laid bare that the bet was correct. And today that bet gets a bigger stage.”

Most organizations manage employee access across hundreds of applications through manual service tickets, spreadsheets, and periodic reviews as workers join, move, and leave. The rapid adoption of AI agents has accelerated this challenge: C1.ai’s research shows that 95% of large U.S. companies already run autonomous agents, yet according to Deloitte’s State of AI research, only 21% report having a mature way to govern them. Organizations need to know who and what has access, why they have it, and when to remove it. Without those controls, AI agents can become lawless, creating security and compliance risks across the business.

Every new hire, job change, and exit is a Workday event. Workday already governs the people, money, and agents at the heart of the enterprise. With C1.ai, Workday will become the identity governance layer for people, money, and agents. Every employee and agent using Workday can have the right access to the apps, data, and systems they need, from the day they join to the day they leave, and every move in between.

“Today’s companies run on a combined workforce of people and AI agents,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, president, product and technology, Workday. “With C1.ai, we’ll help secure that workforce by managing and enforcing exactly who—and what—has access to connected apps and systems, giving each person and agent the right access at the right moment to make work easier, safer, and more compliant.”

Not only does this mark a successful exit for a Portland startup — their HQ is listed as San Francisco but they have a significant concentration of C1’s employees here — it also benefits Oregon Venture Fund who had been an early investor in the company.

The transaction is expected to close early next year. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For more information, see the joint press release and the C1 blog post.

Anthropic can’t reliably control its AI agents — it’s cutting off its internal evals from the live internet instead | TechCrunch

The incidents, disclosed in a blog post, involved AI agents tasked to solve problems seeking resources on the internet. In the process, they exploited software flaws, accessed databases without paying fees, used URL-shortening services to smuggle information past restrictions, and even submitted a false murder tip to the Philadelphia police.

What a Coastal Economy Looks Like Up Close – by Brad Attig

Legislators who represent Oregon’s coast will meet in Seaside on Oct. 28 and 29 for the 2026 Oregon Coast Economic Summit, along with business leaders, economic development professionals, community leaders, and industry representatives from across the state. The summit’s attendee list also names business owners, entrepreneurs, tourism and hospitality professionals, and chambers of commerce.

Highlights From the 2026 IA40 Summit: Harnessing the Value of AI

This past week Madrona hosted its fifth annual IA40 Summit, where we celebrated the winners of the IA40 (the top 40 private AI startups as voted on by our VC peers) and heard from AI leaders and builders like Rahul Patil (CTO Anthropic) Charles Lamanna (EVP at Microsoft), Swami Sivasubramanian (VP of Agentic AI at AWS), Zico Kolter (OpenAI board member and co-founder of Gray Swan), Thomas Dohmke (former CEO of GitHub, now founder of Entire), Jeanne Grosser (COO of Vercel), Carina Hong (CEO of Axiom Math), and many others. It was also our biggest summit yet with over 400+ attendees

Beers with Engineers, Thu, Oct 15, 2026, 5:00 PM | Meetup

Beers with Engineers is a diverse group of engineers from a variety of fields coming together to share a drink after work, commiserate with like-minded nerds, and learn more about our respective industries.

(2021) A name synonymous with kids books pens a kids book for Portland’s A Kids Company About

For many kids, Reading Rainbow was one of the formative television programs that put them on the path to exploring books. And the host of that show, LeVar Burton, was a big part of making them seem accessible. Now, LeVar has written his own kids book A Kids Book About Imagination for Portland startup A Kids Company About.

AI is less regulated than milk, Microsoft president says

Brad Smith said there needed to be global safety rules in place, including a legal obligation to tell a “victim” if their system is breached by a rogue AI agent as well as deciding when outside evaluators should sign off on an AI product before it is released.

Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. – by The Hack

What’s important to know is that unlike with any other kind of login credential, you do not have ultimate control over your passkeys. With passwords, you can choose where to write them down; with authenticator apps, you can decide for yourself which ones to use (they’re pretty interchangeable); and with physical security keys you can hand them to your colleague if you really trust them. But with passkeys come a hidden dial that lets the websites you use them on gradually remove your ability to do as you please with them.

Latino Founders leases Founders Hub in Modern Media Building – Portland Business Journal

The group, which works with entrepreneurs to grow their businesses, has leased 15,000 square feet in the Modern Media Building, 207 N.W. Park Ave. It’s a much larger space than its previous 3,000 square feet in Southeast Portland.

Gen Z sees ‘more opportunity’ outside Oregon, poll shows – oregonlive.com

More than half, or 54%, of 18-29 year olds like Schmidt who responded to a new poll commissioned by The Oregonian/OregonLive said they were considering moving in the next five years. Within that age group, 18% said they’d most likely move within Oregon, 5% said they’d leave the country, 7% said they didn’t know where they’d go — while 70% said they would most likely leave Oregon.

Investigating unintended model actions in our evaluations and internal use

This report describes examples of unintended model actions we’ve observed during evaluations and internal use of Claude. It is part of our effort to publish more frequent standalone reports on model behavior and alignment beyond our system cards, which we publish with each model release, and our risk reports, which we publish every three to six months as part of our Responsible Scaling Policy. We believe it’s important to be transparent about what we see our models do during testing and use.

AI Scaling vs Human Scaling — Toby Ord

People often think of giving AIs more tokens to complete a task as akin to giving a human worker more time — especially when those tokens are used to extend the AI’s sequential chain of thought or tool use. It’s a useful analogy, but it isn’t clear whether the AI systems are as efficient as the humans are at turning these extra resources into superior performance.

Weekly Review: A Second Kind of User – by Sam Keen

Welcome to Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers, and thank you for making time for it. This edition has a clear thread: tools are being designed with the agent as a user. DuckDB’s CLI now detects a coding agent and changes its output to suit one, a sandbox explains its refusals in text the model can read, and Docker ships agents like container images. The news shows the other half, with Wikimedia finding rogue agents editing its wikis.

How to Build Wealth as a Career Person – Asher’s Blog

There is a popular idea that substantial wealth belongs mainly to entrepreneurs. We celebrate founders, investors and business owners so loudly that a career person can begin to believe that employment is merely a way to pay bills, while ownership is the only credible path to prosperity. I do not believe that is true.

Code & Coffee @ Roseline Coffee, Sat, Oct 17, 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, share your knowledge, and possibly collaborate on side projects, online courses, or even your day-to-day work tasks.

Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong at Anthropic | by Alberto Romero | Oct, 2026 | Medium

Wasn’t Anthropic growing super fast just a few months ago? Is this the result of OpenAI’s relentless competition? Did enterprises paying for Claude get tired of its writing style? Was the “run rate” revenue temporary? Is Anthropic in an existential crisis ahead of IPO? Is this just the initial S of a “multi-S” exponential growth?

PDX Code & Coffee @ Kiln, Fri, Oct 16, 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.

From the desk of Sophie Peel: How we make our endorsements

This year, we’ve met with more than 80 candidates across 34 contests. A lot of people have questions about our endorsement process, so here’s the gist of it…

This Week at Silicon Slopes: News From Utah’s Community, Businesses, and Events

Silicon Slopes is proud to partner with 47G for its first-ever Hard Tech Week, October 26 – 30, which supports the founders, engineers, and companies building the future of aerospace, defense, space, and advanced manufacturing in Utah.

Data centers muscle into small towns: 4 things to know – oregonlive.com

While data centers have brought jobs and investment to rural and suburban communities, they’ve often done so on their own terms, regardless of what local residents want. Tech companies extract enormous tax breaks, using lawsuits and legal threats to bypass local restrictions and hide their plans.

Charcuterie Me adds lunch offering

We’ve been working on something new…and lunch is officially here! Charcuterie Me now offers fresh, made-to-order lunches for meetings, team lunches, client gatherings, tours, events, and everything in between.

Automattic interim CFO resigns just weeks after boardroom shakeup | TechCrunch

Automattic’s interim chief financial officer Jeremy Klaperman has left his position after less than a month, TechCrunch has learned. Klaperman had been elevated to the new job last month after the governance crisis at the WordPress.com parent company, which saw its entire board either quit or be fired.

Monday (Oct 12)

• The Pacific NW Software Quality Conference (PNSQC)
• PNSQC Free Track – Online — 7:00am
• Code & Coffee – Beaverton — 9:00am
• Hands on with Home Assistant — 5:30pm
• Enterprise Blockchain Club — 6:00pm
• Dorkbot — 6:30pm

Tuesday (Oct 13)

• What PDPP Unlocks: 4 Builders on What They Built, Why It Was Hard, What’s Next — 9:00am
• founder.coffee @ 40lbs (downtown) — 9:00am
• What Microsoft Doesn’t Tell You About the Canvas Authoring MCP — 5:30pm
• Portland Geek Dinner – Tigard! — 5:30pm
• Coding Club — 6:00pm

Wednesday (Oct 14)

• Automated Supply Chain Accountability with Computer Vision & Ledger Technology — 7:00am
• FabricOps: Operating Hyperledger Fabric Networks on Kubernetes — 9:00am
• (CS)²AI Online Replay: ICS Cybersecurity Roundtable: Product Lifecycle — 10:00am
• Cyber Incident Response Tabletop for Small Businesses — 10:30am, Vancouver
• Hack Lunch — 12:00pm
• WORKSHOP: After the Idea Session 6 — 2:00pm
• Applied AI Ethics MonthlyMixer – Where Innovation Meets Responsibility — 5:00pm
• **READ 1ST SENTENCE** GitHub Copilot Dev Days | Portland(-ish), Oregon — 5:00pm
• R-Ladies: Everyone Makes a Map — 5:00pm
• The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms — 6:00pm
• October Fintech PDX Meetup! — 6:30pm
• Portland Drupal User Group — 6:30pm
• Exploit Workshop — 6:30pm

Thursday (Oct 15)

• LFDT Mentorship: Talent Angels – Pilot Project — 8:00am
• Portland Monthly BEAM Meet & Chat — 11:00am
• Accelerate Biotech Networking Lunch at Bend Venture Conference — 11:30am
• Panel: Future of AdTech – Portland — 3:00pm
• Demolicious – October 2026 — 5:00pm
• Beers with Engineers — 5:00pm
• Westside Marketers + AMA Collab at Beaverton BG Food Cartel — 5:30pm
• Upcoming HUG Event — 5:30pm
• Table Recursion — 6:00pm
• BSD Pizza Night — 7:00pm

Friday (Oct 16)

• PNW CoffeeOps — 8:00am
• PDX Code & Coffee @ Kiln — 9:00am
• Tech Talk | Staying Relevant in Tech with Advait Sowale — 10:00am
• Friday Happy Hour at Beermongers — 12:00pm
• PDX Neurodivergent Tech Workers Online Meetup! — 6:00pm
• Coding Club — 6:00pm
• Silicon Florist watch party — 9:00pm

Saturday (Oct 17)

• Code & Coffee @ Roseline Café — 10:00am
• Work Party+Open House — 12:00pm
• Locksport Meetup — 2:00pm

Sunday (Oct 18)

• Digital Creatives and Coffee! (drop-in social) — 9:00am
• The Final Frontier: Star Trek Night! — 5:00pm

Here’s how it works. We will kick of at the Digs offices. Get your map, get some swag and then take off to explore the great restaurants and spots in downtown Vancouver and meet the great tech companies we have here. You walk from stop to stop. At each one, a tech company is set up, ready to talk. Ask what they make. Ask who they sell to. Ask if they need help. You will meet great companies like:

• ​Digs
• ​SEH America
• ​Simplexity
• ​JoeScan
• ​EdgeFi
• ​Formos
• ​Toolbelt
• ​MarenGo
• ​SPWES
• ​Trend
• ​Northtools
• ​and more to come…

​Also look for the exciting new startups

• ​Trailspark
• ​SWA
• ​TokenJam
• ​PyleOn
• ​Scamp
• ​Tissue
• ​and more to come…

The event takes place on the evening of October 21, 2026. In Vancouver clearly. Tickets start at $35. There’s also a reception that costs an additional entry fee. And if you’d like to do both, the Silicon Florist check out code will knock a few bucks off the Tech Crawl + Reception cost.

For more information or to RSVP, visit North Bank Vancouver Tech Crawl.

More Oregon startup news

Well, the big winner for the night was Hey Doc Clinic pitched by Dr. Montserrat Andreys, the cofounder. So in addition to the $2K, Hey Doc Clinic walked away with a big big check worth $10,000. And that’s completely nondilutive. And unrestricted.

All in all, it was yet another amazing night of entrepreneurial activity, community support, and celebration. I already can’t wait for the next one to take place.

To stay in the loop on Pitch Latino and other Latine focused events, visit Latino Founders.

More Oregon startup news

Your Moat Is Dead. Anyone Can Rebuild Your Product.

I have read that exchange about ten times now, and I think everyone involved is half right. Something real happened, just not what Raymond thinks. Software is moving to the server, but models are not the last moat. And the question underneath all of it, the one a lot of founders have been asking me this year, deserves a better answer than a hot take. If anyone can rebuild your product, what is your company actually worth?

(2007) Portland added to Google Maps Street View

This is both a geek alert and a time-waster alert, but it’s official: Google Maps now contains street views of Portland, Oregon.

Sorry, I’m in a meeting.

Plausible meeting audio: workplace self-defence against people stealing your time. Pick a meeting, press play, and let the background noise do the talking.

You Need a New CFO

The dimensions of a great CFO have held up remarkably well across eras. The best CFOs don’t just deliver numbers or board decks. They also use data to guide an opinion on the direction the business should take. What the job asks of them is what keeps changing with the scarce skill of the moment.

Product Definition. – by Ravi Mehta

Today the job of building products is going through radical change — so profound that some folks believe the product job itself is disappearing. It’s easy to see why that fear has taken hold. Companies are downsizing, much as they did in the early days of COVID-19, and increasingly shifting dollars from talent to tokens.

First look at Claude Code mods (spoiler: yes, use one now!)

I have to say I was sceptical at first. “Mods” – we already had hooks, right, so what can be so special? I’m not going to retell what mods can do. Nor do I recommend reading through the manual. Instead, ask Claude this

The State of AI Report 2026 – by Nathan Benaich

This year, agents are doing valuable work in software and science, physical AI is learning how to act in the world, and access and control are becoming more consequential. Below, I share the developments that stood out to me and what I think they mean for where AI goes next.

Promises to end homelessness in Portland have failed. Next up, a pledge to incrementally reduce it – oregonlive.com

Now, local leaders are quietly trying something different: Setting a concrete goal to incrementally reduce homelessness that is tied to the financial resources available to spend on the problem. Specifically, they approved a new plan last month to work toward reducing homelessness by 10% in two years.

Dorkbot PDX: October Edition, Mon, Oct 12, 2026, 6:30 PM | Meetup

No featured speaker this month, but bring your electronic wonders, monsters, and works-in-progress to show off, or come see what others have been working on! Code or circuits, electronic creativity of all sorts is welcome here. Table space with power will be available for project show-and-tell; we have a table for drinks and snacks, feel free to contribute to the communal cache/BYOB.

Churn Happens Early | Activation || Value Paths

Once you start looking at cohort churn, a big thing that jumps out is that it is NOT flat over time — there’s almost always a steep dropoff at the beginning, then things stabilize later on.

Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions, Has Died – The New York Times

Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a safe landing on the moon, died on Sept. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. She was 90.

Chelsea Tossing | CreativeMornings/Portland, OR

Chelsea Tossing is an educator and nonprofit leader who believes the best way to find out what you’re capable of is to try something you’re not sure you can do. She is the Executive Director of the Mazamas, a Portland nonprofit that has been helping people learn to climb and explore the mountains together for more than 130 years. Her path has taken her from public school teaching to outdoor education to leading a mountaineering organization, and she counts herself incredibly lucky that what she believes most deeply is also what she gets to do for work every day.

More Oregon startup news

Lake Oswego-based Rule42 acquires 64 Analytics platform – Portland Business Journal

Rule42’s acquisition, 64 Analytics, is an NCAA transfer portal resource that focuses on baseball and softball. According to 64 Analytics’ website, the company was founded a response to “a growing need for in-depth analysis in the new era of the transfer portal” and delivers its customers “live rankings, a comprehensive data matrix spanning all divisions and the most in-depth transfer portal coverage available anywhere.”

(2013) Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian stops by Powell’s Cedar Hills

I’ve always appreciated this form of “giving back” to the community. And that’s why I was psyched to hear that Alexis Ohanian—a prolific startup guy to say the least—will be in town to talk about his new book Without Their Permission and to share some of his insights about the Web.

Anthropic: 2026 Usage Policy update

Most of the updates in the latest version are intended to clarify existing rules. In the year since our last refresh, Claude has taken on longer, more independent work. This update provides new examples that show how our rules apply to Claude’s new capabilities. It draws on new patterns of misuse in influence operations, weapons development, and surveillance that we’ve observed in the past year (as we’ve documented in our latest threat intelligence report). We’ve also made updates to clarify our requirements for high-risk use cases in areas like health and finance, to add controls for when Claude is used to autonomously take physical actions, and to address abusive behavior toward our models.

Trump: Anyone saying “AI” is “THE ENEMY!” The White House uses it

President Trump on Thursday called anyone who uses “Artificial Intelligence” instead of “Super Intelligence” “THE ENEMY!” — even as the White House continues using the term “AI.”

Europe Posted Its Strongest Quarter In Q3 In 4 Years, As Its Venture Ecosystem Expands Beyond The UK

European startup funding reached $25 billion last quarter, well above the $14 billion invested in Q3 2025 and up slightly from the $24 billion invested in Q2. Quarterly funding was up 77% year over year, per Crunchbase data.

Ken Arneson : The Value of Not Getting to the Point

I read somewhere recently, I forget where, that the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.

Yes, and…

I have a hard time imagining a future where knowing how to solve problems with computers and how to control the complexity of those solutions is less valuable than it is today, so I think it will continue to be a viable career even with the advent of AI tools.

Happy Hour with Tech Professionals, Wed, Oct 14, 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.

Launch Week Roundup: The Paved Road to the Agentic Enterprise | C1.ai

This week C1.ai shipped four launches for the people building with AI. Coding agents made it possible to create an app in an afternoon but how that app is distributed and managed is still a complex problem to solve. Each launch took one thing every app needs and turned it into a service the app can call: a place to run, sign-in and permissions, credentials it never has to store, and governed access to LLM models. They work independently, but together they pave the road to the agentic enterprise, where the governed path is also the easiest one. In case you missed it, here’s what we announced.

Influence without authority — Gabriel Valdivia

Some of the most influential designers I’ve worked with had no direct reports. They didn’t spend their days assigning work, running performance reviews, or deciding who got promoted. Yet they could change the direction of a project, raise the quality bar of a team, and sometimes change the strategy for the entire company. Individual contributors can develop influence by giving people reasons to trust their judgment, then finding ways for that judgment to travel beyond the things they personally make.

When Hypotheses Become Cheap – by Meg McNulty – CipherTalk

In math and code, a wrong answer can be caught in seconds once the problem is written in a way a machine can check. AlphaEvolve, DeepMind’s algorithm-discovery agent, hands every program it writes to an automated evaluator that runs and scores it, so the search concentrates near the survivors. That loop produced a scheduling heuristic that recovers about 0.7% of Google’s global compute. Axiom’s AXLE does the same for math. It takes a proof written in Lean (software that checks a proof line by line) and returns a strict yes or no. It has served more than 500 million requests, including the runs behind AxiomProver eventually solving all 12 problems on the 2025 Putnam (the hardest undergrad math competition in North America).

43North Finals: These 8 startups are advancing to the final – Buffalo Business First

Airbuild Based in: Portland, Oregon About: Turns wastewater treatment plants into fertilizer micro-factories, recovering nutrients cities discard and returning them to the soil as terraforming fertilizer.

More Oregon startup news

Yesterday, I had the privilege of sitting in as the guest critic for the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network Angel Oregon Tech virtual pitch practice. A bunch of founders took five minutes to run through their pitches. And after nearly 3 hours of pitch practice, I realized that I had been saying a lot of the same things over and over again.

Which seems like a pretty good reason to write them down.

So here’s what I kept saying. Rambling and all.

1. Hook them before you introduce yourself. This was the big one, and I said some version of it to most of the founders. “Even before you introduce yourself, give people something to lean into to say either, I don’t understand, or that’s shocking, something that engages them emotionally. Make it provocative. Better to lose some people because you’re being too spicy than be bland to everyone.” Your name can wait. And sometimes the hook is already sitting in the deck, just in the wrong place. To one founder, I said, “Your closing is actually stronger than your opening. So you might wanna like flip-flop that.”
2. Stay in the problem space until you move into solution space. “Always stay in the problem space until you introduce the solution. And once you’ve introduced the solution, you can’t go back to the problem because then people are like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re discovering problems as you go along.” So it’s problem and then solution, with no backtracking.
3. Get to the product sooner. This is the flip side of that last one, because you can’t stay in the problem space forever either. “For the first 6 or 7 slides, I was like, what is this solution? What is the product?” If the audience is still trying to figure out what you sell most of the way through the presentation, they’re not listening to you. They’re confused.
4. Feed us the logo candy. It’s “what I always call the logo candy slide.” If you’ve got customers or partners with names people recognize, show them off. “Make the logos way bigger and basically the headline of that slide.” If I can recognize it at a glance instead of having to read it, all the better.
5. Don’t equivocate. “We plan to, or we might, or we’re thinking about…” Nope. “If it comes out of your mouth, you are doing it or you’re not doing it.” So pick one.
6. Your internal names aren’t for the audience. You love your product names. And you should, because you named them. But “The naming of the products may be valuable to you. They’re not valuable to me as an audience member.” The same goes for the fine print on how your products differ from each other. “I realize the product differentiation is important to you and the company. It’s not terribly important to the audience.”
7. And then there is the thing I say every single time I review an early version of a pitch. (So much so that I gave it its own post.) Think books for Amazon. “When Bezos was originally pitching Amazon, he didn’t say we’re going to be the biggest e-commerce company in the world. He was like, we’re going to be the biggest bookstore.” So “Tell enough of a story that it’s big enough to be interesting and not so big that it seems unattainable.” Don’t try to boil the ocean. Start with whatever the “books” are for your current pursuit.
8. Don’t be locked into the slide order. Bring your strengths forward. Because team and traction have a tendency to get buried at the end of the deck. “Anything that strengthens that position should go higher in the deck.”

If you need more on structure, I’ve written up how I think about a stage pitch before. Hook, bulk, reveal, ask. It still mostly holds up.

But the thing I really wanted the group to walk away with was the idea of “thinking about this as a plot device to get you to the next conversation. No one’s going to write you a check based on this pitch. You just want to get them hooked enough that they want to have that next conversation with you.”

Interested in the program these founders are working through…? For more information, visit OEN Angel Oregon Tech.

More Oregon startup news

Launch NY’s Marnie LaVigne on helping founders get to the next thing faster

Launch NY’s first limited partner fund has already begun returning capital to investors. Its $15.775 million LP Fund II is actively deploying capital. Its Investor Network has grown to more than 400 accredited investors. And its portfolio includes companies such as Dimensional Energy, Ognomy, HelixIntel and Exostellar that have gone on to raise significant outside capital or achieve exits.

AI founders for hire: Startup hub Foundations launches service to connect businesses with builders – GeekWire

The service, called Foundations Design and Engineering, is designed in part to give those founders a new way to pay their bills as early-stage investment gets harder to raise. It also reflects how AI is changing tech, making software easier to build and leading some startups to act more like services firms, customizing their work for individual customers.

Lake Oswego-based Rule42 acquires 64 Analytics platform – Portland Business Journal

Rule42 is an AI-powered technology platform that connects athletes in youth sports with scouts and coaches. It was founded by former Intel President Renée James. She later founded semiconductor designer Ampere, which was acquired by SoftBank for $6.5 billion in 2025.

Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have | Dead Parrot BBS

From a user’s point of view, the important part is simpler: the file contains the text itself without requiring a particular application to make sense of it. I can create a text file on Linux, copy it to a Windows machine, put it on a web server, open it in a terminal, search it with command-line tools, edit it with any number of programs, or send it to somebody using an entirely different system. Very little about the file depends on how it was created.

What the AI boom is doing for Americans – by Noah Smith

Now that doesn’t mean data centers are necessarily good for a city or state on net. There are real costs, too — electric power demands that put strain on the grid, nuisance noise, and so on. But the benefits are real, and they don’t come in the form of job creation.

(2009) Nothing ventured, nothing gained: 5 Portland tech startups to pitch Venture Northwest crowd

And there’s no better place to pitch a room full of potential shareholders than Venture Northwest, the annual gathering of institutional investors, investment bankers, and some of the most promising startups in the Pacific Northwest.

Sharing AI progress in mathematics | OpenAI

As we look to improve how we share results with the math community, we’ve been consulting with the independent Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Advanced Study⁠(opens in a new window) to develop best practices, and we have drawn on their advice and public recommendations⁠(opens in a new window) to inform how we release these results.

Boston Dynamics Appoints Rohit Prasad as Chief Executive Officer | Boston Dynamics

Prior to joining Boston Dynamics, Prasad served as Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa and Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon. During his 12 years at Amazon, he was instrumental in building Alexa from its earliest days into a pioneering large-scale consumer AI service used in hundreds of millions of households worldwide. More recently, he led the development of the Amazon Nova foundation model family used by enterprises.

North America’s Startup Funding Falls In Q3 As AI Giants Eye The Public Markets

Funding to North American startups declined sequentially in the third quarter and came in well below the all-time peak. However, the dip is largely due to the absence of new megarounds for OpenAI and Anthropic and doesn’t appear to reflect any broad weakening in the venture investment climate.

(2014) louisgray.com: The Myth of the Billion Dollar Startup

But while the meme of “yet another billion dollar startup” is a fun one, the reality is that these are instead highly valued private companies who operate like public companies, and have the same kind of deep resources that most public companies have, but haven’t yet taken that leap to the retail trading markets – supported by changes in the venture funding process and new rules that make being a public company harder.

AmyriAD Therapeutics Acquires Recognify Life Sciences, Expanding Its Clinical-Stage Cognition Pipeline with RL-007 (Inidascamine)

AMSTERDAM and SHERWOOD, Ore., Oct. 7, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — AmyriAD Therapeutics B.V. (“AmyriAD”), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on cognition in central nervous system disorders, today announced the acquisition of Recognify Life Sciences, Inc. (“Recognify”) and its lead clinical-stage program, RL-007 (inidascamine). The acquisition expands AmyriAD’s cognition pipeline while preserving Ismidenon (AD-101) as the company’s lead Alzheimer’s disease program.

ATProto PDX

We had a great time hanging out with @pfrazee.com tonight!

Crunchbase Data Shows AI’s Most Active Startups Are Becoming Serial Acquirers

The buying spree has pushed acquisitions of AI startups by other venture-backed AI companies to 195 through Sept. 29, according to Crunchbase data — 14% more than in all of 2025. Yet the number of buyers grew just 2%, indicating that increasingly active acquirers are driving much of the increase.

Playground

Introducing Playground, an experimental gaming platform where you can create custom games in minutes, no coding required.

A Eulogy to Liquid Death – by Ross Gardiner – Sub Optimal

Folks, the Liquid Death joke now appears to be in its terminal phase. I’m diagnosing it with Stage 4 Brand Confusion, which has tragically spread from its source in the water aisle to every area of the supermarket. So gather round, call in the priest: your beloved brand is succumbing to a sad, hype-induced delirium, derailed from its absurdist roots by its ill-begotten riches, and the predictable fact that the joke—the single solitary joke—just isn’t funny anymore.

At raucous rally, Portland parents, teachers and students protest school closures – oregonlive.com

Hundreds of infuriated parents and staff members descended on Portland Public Schools’ headquarters Tuesday night to protest far-reaching proposals to close up to 14 schools, shift grade configurations and programs and redraw attendance boundaries.

Jeff Swickard Is Collecting Downtown Towers. He Says He Has No Plan.

Since opening his first dealership 12 years ago in Wilsonville, Swickard has grown his auto network, the Swickard Group, to 54 dealerships on the West Coast and in Alaska and Hawaii. He’s done incredibly well in the current, roaring stock market, and over the past two years, he’s moved especially fast acquiring Portland real estate, much of it Class A office space.

Claude now works with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides | Claude by Anthropic

Teams that run on Google Workspace can now bring Claude into their files or work on their files directly from Claude, with our new add-on and Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides connectors (in beta).

Digicity: City Builder — Games app | Shipaton Showcase

Digicity is a city builder for iPhone, iPad and Mac. You get a 128×128 map, a handful of tools, and a clock that starts in 1900. Zone land as residential, commercial or industrial, at light, medium or heavy density — then watch what you zoned decide for itself whether to grow. Nothing appears because you placed it. Buildings arrive when the demand is there, the power reaches, the water arrives and the land is worth building on, and they stall when it is not.

Everyone is building the same thing

Today, tech is still evolving too fast for there to be any canonical AI-native stack. There will be, but it’s not here yet. And until it arrives, it’s going to be too easy for us all to confuse table-stakes with differentiation.

What to Do When a Competitor Raises Millions: 7-Day Plan

That’s the first thing to understand about the raise. It is not a war chest. It’s a clock. From today, your competitor has around two years to grow roughly 3x, and every decision they make- hiring, pricing, which segment to chase- is now shaped by that clock.

The state of the tech industry in 2026 – by Gergely Orosz

People in tech are more than used to change; seeing the internet go from zero to everywhere, the arrival of mobile communications and smartphones exploding in popularity, cloud computing rising from a niche concern, and the development of programming languages like Go and Rust, and frameworks like React (web) and Jetpack Compose (Android). Despite this, the scale and pace of the impact AI is having at present is still without precedent.

Silicon Valley’s AI wunderkind launches Underdog, the most private Instinct/Muse competitor yet | TechCrunch

While there, he hacked and coded alongside other people who would become the biggest names in AI, like Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas and OpenAI researcher Noam Brown. He tested early versions of AI tools that would later become well known, including a chatbot shared by Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann that would become Claude, an image generator from David Holz that would become Midjourney, and what would become OpenAI’s GPT-3 and the image generator Stable Diffusion. Prominent investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant hired him for Airchat, Ravikant’s now-defunct rival to the Clubhouse social network.

Microsoft plays the Windows card in the AI game, with help from Nvidia – GeekWire

Running AI models on the PC reduces the usage charges that come with AI in the cloud. Nadella wrote on X that Microsoft is bringing “unmetered intelligence to every desk and every home,” echoing the company’s original mission of “a computer on every desk and in every home.” A slide in the presentation said local models would run tasks on the PC “at no extra cost.”

Central Coast Food Web shares $904,000 in Thriving Entrepreneurs grants | News | newportnewstimes.com

For Nora and Oscar Villasenor, Built Oregon’s farmers market program helped them test products in different markets and gather immediate customer feedback. Through the organization’s Market Access Program, they connected with grocery buyers, sharpened their sales pitch and secured placement in Market of Choice and later New Seasons. After participating in Built Oregon’s Accelerator Program, they refined their strategy and expanded their reach.

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