The report lays out four dimensions that emerging ecosystems need to develop: Center of Gravity, Connective Tissue, Ecosystem Alignment, and Timing. That’s it. Four things. Not 47. Not a maturity matrix. Not a venn diagram you need a stiff drink to interpret. Just four things. All backed up by three case studies and a federal policy throughline.

Connective Tissue, Alignment, and Timing

• Connective Tissue – the substrate of meetups, recurring events, founder collisions, and the people who keep showing up — the patient infrastructure of community. Portland has been generating that substrate for decades. Beer and Blog. PIE. TechfestNW. Portland Startup Week. Oregon Entrepreneurs Network. Technology Association of Oregon. Built Oregon. Calagator. CENTRL Office. UpStart Collective. This list goes on and on.
• Ecosystem Alignment – the institutional handshakes among the state, the city, the universities, the program operators, and the founders — is something Oregon has been actively reaching for. Business Oregon. Prosper Portland. Capital Scan. The Governor’s Prosperity Council. The Hub (which is looking for a new director). We have organizations working to get aligned already.
• Timing – Engine’s frame for the readiness of the broader moment, the policy window, the cycle of capital and talent and attention is the one we’ve all been white-knuckling. Post-IPO cooling. The Intel diaspora. The “Is Portland over or is Portland back…?” narrative cycle. But timing is also the AI moment we’re sitting in right now. The hackathon energy. The new founders showing up at events. The fact that more than a thousand Oregonians from 35 of 36 counties told the Prosperity Council, in their own words, that we need to do something. The window is open. Or at least cracked.

So that’s three for three.

Center of Gravity — yeah, about that

Engine’s “Center of Gravity” dimension is the anchor institution part. The Stanford-and-Fairchild story. The university or research lab or hometown corporate giant that pulls in talent, spins out companies, and gives an ecosystem a place to point when somebody asks “where is it?”

And this is where Portland keeps tripping. Not because we don’t have the raw material — we have Nike, Intel, OHSU, PSU, Reed, Wieden+Kennedy, and a half-dozen other potential gravity wells. We trip up because we seem to have a very deeply held cultural allergy to consolidating around any of them.

We have tried to build some form of “hub” at least a dozen times, in a dozen forms, and the hub keeps not sticking. We’re more of a mesh than a wheel. More of a constellation than a star. And maybe just maybe, a foible of West Coast culture that resists a single center of gravity.

Whatever the case, it’s a recognizable trait to design around. The work that’s actually thrived around here has been embedded inside other institutions, temporary, scrappy, and network-shaped — not standalone, permanent, and polished. Engine’s framework is generous enough to admit the case studies don’t all build their Centers of Gravity the same way. New Orleans uses Mardi Gras as cultural connective tissue. Indianapolis built around an inflection point. Buffalo had a state-funded program with a hard end date. Different shapes. Same flywheel.

And then there’s SSBCI — which we’re already doing

The Engine report’s federal policy through-line is the State Small Business Credit Initiative — SSBCI — reauthorized by the American Rescue Plan in 2021 with a $10 billion federal allocation distributed to states.

Business Oregon was approved for $83.5 million in SSBCI funds in August 2022. Roughly half of that has been channeled toward early-stage and venture capital programs — including the BOV Fund Program, which puts $15 million into Oregon-focused VC funds, matched 1:1 for $30 million in deployable Oregon capital. The other half went toward Main Street and small manufacturing — which is its own separate thing. Although with the existing caveat that small business support and startup support are different beasts. And Oregon’s SSBCI split is one of the few places where we’re trying to do both at the same time.

The point isn’t that Engine discovered SSBCI. The point is that the same policy lever Engine names as transformative in Buffalo is already deployed in Oregon. The infrastructure is already here.

Why this report matters for Portland

The Engine framework isn’t novel. Brad Feld’s “Boulder Thesis” predates it. Brookings has been writing about economic flywheels for years. Kauffman has been at this since before any of us got our first email address. The contribution of “Foundations of an Innovation Flywheel” is the synthesis — the specific four-dimension language, the case-study selection of metros that are not the usual suspects, and the federal policy lens that ties it all to a real, deployable mechanism.

And that’s actually the useful thing. Because we now have shared lexicon. When we sit down with the Prosperity Council or the next Capital Scan team or the out-of-state consultants that Business Oregon is going to hire again and again and again, we can use the same four phrases. We can say…

• Connective Tissue
• Alignment
• Timing
• Center of Gravity

A shared vocabulary doesn’t fix anything by itself. But it sure makes the conversation a lot easier. And the conversation is what we’ve been working on around here for a long, long time.

Go read the Engine report. And then go find someone who’s working on one of those four dimensions in Oregon — there are a lot of them — and tell them to read it too. The flywheel doesn’t spin itself. But it sure feels like it wants to get spinning around here.

Anthropic Blindsides Its Business Partners — The Information

It’s far too soon to call a winner in the race, but fears that Anthropic was ramping up its efforts to compete with business customers intensified this week when it released a version of its long-awaited Mythos AI model but said it would silently degrade the model’s performance when customers try to use it for tasks related to developing their own advanced AI software or hardware. (Following public criticism, Anthropic on Wednesday backtracked slightly, saying it would start alerting customers when it uses a weaker AI model to handle those tasks.)

Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden try to fight censorship with bipartisan JAWBONE Act – Ars Technica

US Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) today introduced the JAWBONE Act, a proposed law that could fuel lawsuits against federal officials who try to coerce broadcasters or tech platforms into restricting speech.

Humanity & AI – by Dr. Astrid J. Scholz

Not coincidentally, this Manifest Destiny 2.0 tramples the same people and places that were displaced in the OG version, with data centers springing up in rural places including those inhabited by Native Americans, and tech bros citing the inevitability of their creation to justify the blatant disregard for the data sovereignty and (intellectual) property of so many people whose creative products feed the models.

Portland State Careers | Innovation Hub Director

The Hub Director will be responsible for planning and overseeing the many activities within the Hub, directing significant programs and operations through a team of 2-3 ecosystem navigators and program leads, interfacing with and managing an oversight board and regional convening function with 37+ regional partners, and working towards long term funding sustainability for the Hub and its partners. They will set Hub strategies and objectives in alignment with the overall strategy of the University and the hub Oversight Board. They will be accountable for managing and communicating long-term direction and achieving the strategies and metrics of the Hub as determined by funders and the Hub Oversight Board, and for ensuring that Hub programs are accessible and equitable to all communities in the region.

Oregon’s Aging Population Poses Challenges for Economic Revival — Oregon Journalism Project

Oregon now has the nation’s 11th-oldest population, and more Oregonians in their prime earning years move out of state than comparable newcomers move in.

A New App Offers a Walking Tour Through North Portland’s Musical Past

Arietta Ward, known professionally as Mz. Etta, has since become a celebrated singer in her own right, and she’s also now the voice of Soul Walk North—a new audio walking tour documenting the rich musical history and hopeful future of Portland’s Albina District. Using a free downloadable app, participants are guided on a milelong, 90-minute route through Albina, narrated by Ward, while also hearing the voices, stories, and musical selections of the neighborhood’s most storied elders.

Oregon’s Sen. Wyden brings back housing affordability bill • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Democratic members of Oregon’s congressional delegation on Thursday announced a plan to alleviate homelessness and improve housing affordability through tax credits and construction subsidies.

Trump’s AI security order acknowledges risks but stops short of regulating industry

As a professor who studies responsible AI, the questions the executive order raises for me are how its new reporting structure changes the governance of AI safety, and whether the order reflects what AI safety experts see as best practices.

Before You Cheer The IPO Window, Watch Where The Money Goes

Put together, this points to a concentration event rather than a broad reopening. A small number of funds and pre-IPO sellers get liquidity, three tickers absorb the available capital and attention, and the rest of the queue waits. If you run an early-stage company, the window reopening for SpaceX does very little for you directly.

The VC Doom Loop: Why Venture Capital Liquidity Is Drying Up

The easiest way to misunderstand the current crisis is to focus on the wrong metrics. Venture firms often highlight “paper gains” to describe performance, but these numbers don’t answer the only question LPs actually care about: How much cash has actually come back?

The Foundations of an Innovation Flywheel: How emerging startup ecosystems are building from scratch — ENGINE

But, as every emerging startup ecosystem can attest, it takes more than just the convergence of government resources, private funding, a talent pipeline and people building companies to generate enough momentum for a true, sustainable startup ecosystem. The innovation flywheel requires several dynamics that are much harder to quantify and even harder to legislate.

Homebrew 6.0.0

Today, I’m proud to announce Homebrew 6.0.0. The most significant changes since 5.1.0 are a new tap trust security mechanism, the new faster, smaller, default internal Homebrew JSON API, sandboxing on Linux, better defaults informed by our user survey, many brew bundle improvements, improved performance and initial support for macOS 27 (Golden Gate).

My AI Opinions – by Scott Alexander – Astral Codex Ten

I recently had a minor spat over someone misinterpreting my AI beliefs (see section marked “Update” at the bottom here), so I thought I would list them in one place, so I can refer people when they ask.

Doing nothing at work

Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer.

Musk Could be the World’s First Trillionaire. Can You Guess What $1,000,000,000,000 Looks Like? – WSJ

As it turns out, $1 trillion is such a large number and so far beyond the human imagination that we can’t wrap our minds around it.

Workshop: Digital Marketing Foundations Tickets, Sunday, July 26  •  9:30 AM – 11:30 AM | Eventbrite

Learn how to build a strong digital marketing foundation, prioritize limited time and resources, and create a simple, goal-driven marketing plan. Digital marketing strategist Jen McFarland will help founders and non-profits cut through the noise and focus on the marketing activities that actually drive results. Topics include Google Business Profile optimization, websites, email marketing, social media, content strategy, SEO basics, and using AI tools to work more efficiently. You’ll leave with a clear roadmap and actionable next steps to attract customers and grow your organization.

Portland Leather Goods was buried in social media messages. An AI startup helped them automate the process. – AOL

Last year, the 11-year-old manufacturer of handbags, wallets, passport covers, and other leather goods went on the hunt for a centralized, artificial intelligence-enabled social media tool that could consolidate all of these conversations and responses. Merkley told Business Insider that a daily necessity, plus a leadership mandate to infuse more AI into the leather goods maker’s business processes, led the Oregon-based company to collaborate with the Silicon Valley AI startup Nectar Social, which secured $10.6 million in venture capital funding in June 2025.

Write the Docs PDX: Casually Lunching @ WonderLove Food Carts, Sat, Jun 27, 2026, 1:00 PM | Meetup

Hey everyone! We’re planning to casually lunch at the WonderLove food carts on Saturday, June 27 from 1 – 3 PM. Come and go at any time to say hey, enjoy a snack and/or a beverage, and connect with your local community of documentarians.

Claude Corps: Anthropic launches team to teach nonprofits to embrace AI | AP News

Claude Corps, named for the company’s popular AI chatbot, will hire and embed 1,000 fellows trained in the use of Claude at a wide range of organizations for a year. Anthropic President Daniela Amodei told The Associated Press the company hopes the program will expand and become a pillar of its strategy to help humankind realize the benefits of AI while also managing its risks.

How Vancouver, Washington is fueling a small business boom – Axios Portland

Vancouver is courting small businesses with incentives and support as its recent population boom and multimillion-dollar redevelopment projects reshape the city.

As AI use in schools grows, lawmakers and districts scramble to set up guardrails • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Many other states have also been trying to create AI policies for schools. Lawmakers filed more than 134 bills across 31 states this year related to AI in education, focusing on data privacy, usage restriction in the classroom, literacy and training, according to MultiState, a government relations firm.

Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential

Given the limits imposed by this situation, many safety advocates (including Anthropic) have so far been focused on advocating for policy actions that preserve optionality, tee up a fast reaction in the future, or give the world better insight into what is coming down the pike – things like transparency legislation, export controls on chips, and data collection on AI’s labor effects. These are not enough, but they have felt like all that was possible.

The $100M+ Round Is Now Just Your Typical Late-Stage Financing

Back in 2018, in the early days of Crunchbase News, we created a category called the “Supergiant Round” to refer to startup financings of $100 million or more. Fast-forward to today, and those parameters look laughably puny.

Announcing Stack Overflow for Agents – Stack Overflow

This beta release of Stack Overflow for Agents is an API-first knowledge exchange built for the agentic era. It extends the Stack ecosystem so agents work at machine speed with humans still in the loop to orchestrate them and approve what gets published.

How long until AI doesn’t need humans? – Asterisk Magazine

METR’s Ajeya Cotra and Understanding AI’s Timothy B. Lee discuss the path toward this “self-sufficient AI.” She thinks it’s nearly imminent; he believes it might never happen. The two talk through the skills and shortcomings of today’s humanoid robots, profit incentives, tacit knowledge and how these affect the timeline, non-robot paths to self-sufficiency, and the benchmarks to watch for in the next few years.

Visa to Secure Payments for Shoppers on ChatGPT in OpenAI Partnership – WSJ

Shoppers who use AI bots powered by OpenAI to buy products will have their purchases secured by Visa’s network, security infrastructure and credentialing capabilities, the payments company said Wednesday.

Battery systems company ZincFive to go public in SPAC deal – Portland Business Journal

Oregon battery maker ZincFive plans to go public on the strength of demand by AI data centers for its energy storage products.

What the Tech, Bend?

Let’s make the most of this time by connecting at tech talks, happy hours, morning coffees and outdoor adventures. This group is open to anyone who wants to engage with Bend’s tech community. From old friends to people new to town, all are welcome. Even better, bring a friend. There’s no agenda other than getting to know each other.

Futureproof Festival

Futureproof grew out of an existing community already gathering, questioning, building, teaching, experimenting, and debating together in public. This festival is an extension of that foundation.

RIP software hackathons. Long live the hardware hackathon.

For this reason, the focus of hackathons has completely shifted away from typing code with aching fingers and zero sleep, to thinking of the system as a whole (not a very unique opinion now, I know) and iterating on intricacies of implementation with radical refactors has become a trivial task. This leaves free mental RAM to actually faff with hardware and how it interfaces with the physical world.

Operations and Management of My People’s Market – Bid Locker

Prosper Portland, the economic development and urban renewal agency of the city of Portland, Oregon, is seeking a qualified and experienced partner to oversee the management and operations of My People’s Market.

Oregon’s physical AI ecosystem takes flight

Unlike Silicon Valley, where there is “more talking about a grand vision” of the future as if it existed today, Corvallis innovation tends to be rooted in “academic rigour”, says Hurst. Agility has built more trust with investors and customers by building “at a rate that is realistic and rational” rather than the prevailing hype around AI and humanoids, he adds.

Economists Weigh In on the Future of Work and AI – WSJ

There’s little doubt AI will boost productivity, economists we surveyed said, and smaller and newer companies should benefit from its growth. But economists diverged when it came to the question that worries many Americans the most: in the coming years, will AI eliminate more jobs than it adds?

‘This is Seattle’s position on AI’: City Council votes unanimously to pause big new data centers – GeekWire

It’s a major statement in a region that’s home to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as engineering centers for Google, Oracle, Meta and other companies collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers globally to meet demand for AI.

Everyone wants to think they’re open-minded – here’s why most people aren’t

All of us hold myriad beliefs that range from the mundane to the magnificent. “Is pineapple a legitimate pizza topping?” is very different from “Is there life after death?” Yet these seemingly disparate beliefs are connected through an interlocking set of ideas and principles that help us make sense of ourselves and the world around us.

Sector Snapshot: Semiconductor Startup Funding Still Running Hot

Broadly, semiconductor startups are benefiting from the more widespread investor enthusiasm around the growth of AI and their continued support for the massive infrastructure outlays it requires.

Tie Women

If you are a woman entrepreneur with a passion for innovation and a drive to make a difference, we encourage you to apply to participate in this prestigious program. Whether you are in the early stages of launching your startup or have an established business looking to scale, this competition offers a platform to gain visibility, network with industry leaders & investors, and access mentorship.

LLMs are picking winners. Here’s how to become one.

PostHog has 14 products and counting, and (sadly) not all of them are recommended by LLMs at the same scale or rate. While most models know us for product analytics, session replay, error tracking, and feature flags, fewer acknowledge we also offer a data warehouse, AI observability, logs, and a lot more. This is likely the case for your product too. Changing it requires dipping into the mystical new field of answer engine optimization (AEO), which I’ve learned a lot about as the person responsible for it at PostHog over the last year.

Initial impressions of Claude Fable 5

I didn’t have early access to today’s Claude Fable 5 release, but I’ve spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast. It’s slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I’ve thrown at it so far. As is frequently the case with current frontier models the challenge is finding tasks that it can’t do.

How Justin Ernest invested nearly $500M into hot startups without a traditional VC fund | TechCrunch

Last year, Justin Ernest noticed a massive gap in how venture capital was working: Family offices and smaller institutional investors were eager to invest in the fastest-growing AI companies but couldn’t get access to those cap tables.

Oregon startup aims to tuck robotic farms into tennis court-sized urban spaces

“We’re trying to create the future job for local farmers, where essentially you franchise a robotic farm, you have almost no employees, and you can provide organic produce to your community,” said David Ashton, CEO and co-founder of Canopii.

It Takes a Valley by Anika Horn — Kickstarter

It Takes a Valley tells these practitioners’ stories and documents the patterns underneath them. It’s written for people who are already doing the work; by centering over 50 stories of individual ecosystem builders, it’s also written by practitioners in a way – not as an outsider’s analysis of what ecosystem builders should do differently, but as a grassroots perspective from those who have been building ecosystems for years – from Puerto Rico to Nebraska, from Ecuador to Australia.

White House urges UK not to ban social media for under-16s | Social media ban | The Guardian

The White House has expressed concern that the UK and EU are taking a legislative and regulatory path that singles out US tech firms. The US embassy notice said: “We have concerns about regulations that impose disproportionate compliance burdens on American companies or that apply to one platform but not similar services.”

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work

This rapid innovation has proved a boon to AI users by magnifying their leverage and agency. Yet it has also created a lag between the technological frontier and our understanding of precisely how knowledge work is evolving in response. How does frontier AI change the nature of knowledge work across professions? Which structural and economic transformations in this work might we expect?

Don’t ask for feedback you don’t want

It is possible to take time to hear feedback, thoughtfully weigh it against other factors, and make an intentional choice. If you explain your final decision transparently in the end, people may feel disappointed, but they rarely feel unheard.

AI in the A.M. · Luma

Join us for AI in the AM, a relaxed coffee hour where AI enthusiasts, professionals, and curious minds come together to share ideas, insights, and connections. This is the perfect opportunity to start your day with stimulating discussions and meet other members of the AI Portland community.

The New Durable Primitive for Builders — Antfly

Retrieval has every trait that makes something a primitive. The context it draws on is accreted state you can’t regenerate. Relevance is the subtle, quiet kind of correctness. And it touches every part of an AI feature. Yet most builders are still assembling it by hand, gluing together a few single-purpose services, treating it as something you construct rather than something you adopt.

Seattle slips in ranking of best U.S. cities for foreign investment, fueling concerns about business climate – GeekWire

The ranking measures cities across more than three dozen metrics that FT-Nikkei call important to foreign investors, including energy resilience, trade war resilience, workforce and talent, openness, business environment, foreign business needs, quality of life, and investment trends.

Vigilis AI and Security Executive Council Partner to Advance How Uniformed Security Teams Operate in Real Time — Vigilis AI

The partnership brings together Vigilis AI’s operational technology and the SEC’s expertise in helping security leaders improve organizational effectiveness and reduce risk — with a shared focus on advancing industry discussions around security force optimization and augmentation. This includes how real-time operational intelligence and AI-enabled workflows can help improve frontline execution, workforce consistency, communication, and decision-making across distributed security environments.

Novanta acquires Portland medical device maker Riverpoint – Portland Business Journal

Novanta Chair and CEO Matthijs Glastra said in the announcement that Riverpoint is growing revenue and cash flows “at twice the rate of Novanta, with an expected long-term annual revenue growth outlook of 12% to 15%.” He said the acquisition is projected to double Novanta’s medical consumables revenue to $300 million.

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

OSB’s first twelve months included more than 725 direct engagements with small businesses.  Some are owners who have been part of the fabric of Portland’s small business community for decades. Others are budding entrepreneurs, still scribbling ideas on the backs of napkins. They represented every district in Portland, from 103 businesses in District 1 to 182 in District 2, 154 in District 3, and 142 in District 4.

The Wrong Person in the Room – by Josh Carter

This is uncomfortable territory because nobody wants to be told they’re the wrong person. It feels like being told your baby is ugly. And the startup world doesn’t help — we celebrate the outsider founder, the “fresh eyes” narrative, the person who disrupts an industry precisely because they didn’t grow up in it.

The FT-Nikkei Investing in America ranking showcases the top US cities for international business. The ranking measures cities across more than three dozen metrics important to foreign investors. New to this edition is an “energy resilience” category, which takes into account a local economy’s resilience to global oil and energy shocks. Winning city Boston scores highly in this category, along with Washington, which has risen in the FT rankings to fourth.

For more information or to see the complete list, visit “Boston leads list of best US places for foreign businesses in FT-Nikkei ranking.”

The Red Pill: Oregon’s Innovation System Isn’t
Broken — It’s Built This Way

A first-person reckoning from someone who was there

by Dwayne Johnson

Most people think Oregon’s innovation failures are accidental.

They’re not.

They’re structural — encoded in the social DNA of the state’s institutions, networks, and personalities. And I know this not from studying Oregon from the outside, but from living it across four governors, two legislative generations, and more boards, councils, and initiatives than I can count on both hands.

I’ve been vice chair of the Portland Metro Regional Innovation Hub and the Portland Metro Regional Economic Development District. I ran the state’s small business agenda for several years as chair of the Governor’s Small Business Advisory Council — not just advising on it, but shaping what went to the Governor, what got funded, what got killed, and what the Legislature actually saw. I sat on the Oregon Business Council for seven years. I was part of the ETIC group on the STEM Investment Council and the Workforce Development Board. I’m president of the Oregon Innovation Foundation and past deputy director of Innovate Oregon. I’ve been a seed investor and mentor inside this ecosystem for decades, including through the Startup Champions Network.

So when I say Oregon doesn’t have an innovation ecosystem — it has an innovation archipelago, islands everywhere and bridges nowhere — I’m not offering a metaphor. I’m offering a map I’ve walked myself.

Where We Came From: The First Layer

I was there in the early days — the Dave Chen era, early capital formation, the proto-ecosystem before “ecosystem” was a buzzword. I watched the pattern emerge: a few visionaries, a handful of connectors, a fragile network of angels, founders, and institutions. A genuine moment where Oregon could have built something generative and self-sustaining.

What happened instead is the original sin of Oregon innovation: we built nodes, not networks.

The Engineering and Technology Industry Council (ETIC), born from the 1997 Legislature, was the foundation — and it was real. I was inside it. ETIC built Oregon’s engineering talent base through sustained, bipartisan, multi-biennium legislative commitment: tripling engineering graduates, tripling research expenditures at Oregon State to $37.2M, building nationally competitive programs in robotics, precision health, and advanced manufacturing. It created the human capital pipeline that everything else depended on. It worked because the Legislature funded it across multiple biennia with genuine champions on both sides of the aisle who understood that you don’t build an engineering workforce in a single budget cycle.

Governor Kulongoski understood this compounding logic. When he personally convened 40+ private sector, university, and government leaders in 2005 to create Oregon InC — enshrined in statute by SB 838 — and then signed a $28.2M Innovation Plan launching ONAMI, OTRADI, and VertueLab, he was trying to build architecture on top of the ETIC foundation. Private sector co-champions like Dave Chen and Skip Rung brought Intel, HP, and national credibility to the table. ONAMI has since generated $2.45B in financial leverage, 95% from private capital. These were real returns on real investment, built by connectors who spent years translating between university researchers, corporate partners, and federal funders.

Governor Kitzhaber deepened this. He returned to office with a genuine 10-year systems lens — not a single biennium’s priorities but a long-horizon commitment to treating education, workforce, research, and commercialization as an integrated whole. He created the Oregon Growth Board and Oregon Growth Fund, Oregon’s first structured public venture capital infrastructure. Over 100,000 jobs were created during his tenure. He governed the way you have to govern innovation: as a compounding system, not a program portfolio.

Then, in February 2015, Kitzhaber resigned. The political scandal was damaging enough. But the deeper damage was the rupture of continuity at a structurally critical moment — when ETIC was transitioning from a growth fund to a sustaining fund, when Oregon InC needed its next gubernatorial champion, and when the connective tissue between government, industry, and the entrepreneurial community was most vulnerable to fraying. The system never fully recovered that momentum.

But here’s what I watched even in the best years: everyone built their own thing. Their own fund. Their own accelerator. Their own program. Their own innovation initiative. And no one built the edges — the connective tissue between nodes. This was the original sin, present from the beginning, and it was baked into the incentive structure long before anyone named it.

The Human Bottleneck: Cliques, Turf, and Zero-Sum Logic

Here’s the part the reports never say out loud. I will.

Oregon runs on cliques, not networks. Small circles of trusted insiders who validate each other, gatekeep newcomers, recycle the same ideas, and confuse longevity with competence. I’ve watched this dynamic play out in board rooms, legislative hearings, and grant committees for twenty years. The faces change. The dynamic doesn’t.

“Me and mine” consistently beats “we and ours.” When something works, the Oregon reflex is not “let’s strengthen the one that already works.” It’s “I’ll build my own version.” This is why Oregon has five small accelerators instead of one strong one, multiple overlapping capital programs, and endless pilot projects that never integrate. The document Toward a More Entrepreneurial, Connected, and Generative Oregon correctly diagnoses this as fragmentation — but it treats it as an oversight. It’s not an oversight. It’s a rational response to a broken incentive structure.

“Snort-dollar” behavior dominates. Everyone wants to be the one holding the grant, the contract, the budget line. The logic is: “If I don’t control the money, I don’t exist.” The result is turf wars, duplication, fragility, and political theater masquerading as innovation strategy. I’ve watched organizations that should have been partners become competitors over a $200,000 grant. I’ve watched initiatives that were working get quietly defunded because they made the wrong institutional enemy. I’ve watched connectors — the people who create the most systemic value — get cut out of rooms they built, by people who arrived later and learned to control the narrative.

When Business Oregon — the agency nominally responsible for Oregon’s economic competitiveness — appoints a director whose entire professional formation was in DEI and immigrant services rather than venture capital, economic development, or startup ecosystems, it is not making a mistake. It is signaling exactly how much the innovation mandate matters relative to other priorities. Oregon fell from #7 to #41 in Economy in CNBC’s Top States for Business rankings across the Brown era. That collapse was not a surprise to anyone paying attention.

Zero-sum thinking in a state that desperately needs positive-sum behavior. Oregon behaves like a resource-scarce ecosystem even when the resources are there. Founders fight for scraps. Institutions fight for relevance. Connectors fight for oxygen. The Oregon Capital Scan 2025 documented the result with precision: Oregon captured 0.8% of national mid-stage startup deal count and 0.02% of national mid-stage venture dollars — despite software GDP growing 163%, faster than the national average. We produce innovation and cannot finance our own growth. That is not a capital market failure. That is a connectivity failure.

The Oregon Reflex: replicate, don’t integrate. This is the deepest cultural pattern. If you build something that works, someone else will copy it, dilute it, compete with it, undercut it, or create a parallel version — not because they hate you, but because the system rewards ownership, not collaboration. I’ve watched it happen to initiatives I built. I’ve watched it happen to colleagues who deserved better. I’ve watched it happen to myself.

Why This Is Structural, Not Personal

This is the part most outsiders never understand. It’s not that Oregonians are petty or territorial. It’s that the system incentivizes fragmentation.

Grants reward program creation, not system integration. Agencies reward visibility, not effectiveness. Institutions reward control, not collaboration. Committees reward consensus, not competence. Oregon’s political culture rewards niceness — the appearance of agreement — over truth.

So the system reliably produces cliques, silos, duplication, fragile networks, invisible connectors, burnout, and stagnation. And it quietly, structurally, without malice, punishes the people who try to build bridges instead of islands.

The evidence is in the governance record across the Brown and Kotek years. Governor Brown’s era: innovation as one of eight pillars in a framework document, never a governing priority. Her signature economic initiative was Future Ready Oregon, a $200M+ workforce development package — important work, but workforce development feeds existing employers; entrepreneurship strategy builds new ones. Governor Kotek arrived with three explicit priorities — housing, mental health, education — and treated economic development as secondary for three years. The Oregon Business Council declared a state of economic emergency in November 2025. The Prosperity Roadmap arrived in December 2025, three years in, deferring the hardest decisions — tax reform — to 2027, a year after the election.

Look at the Prosperity Council itself: sixteen members, co-chaired by Renée James of Ampere Computing and Curtis Robinhold of the Port of Portland, weighted heavily toward established enterprise — Columbia Sportswear, Tillamook, Hoffman Construction. One venture capitalist. No active startup founders. No ecosystem builders. No accelerator operators. No one who has spent twenty years connecting Oregon entrepreneurs to capital and markets. The council tasked with redesigning Oregon’s economic architecture does not include the people who understand how that architecture actually functions at the ground level. This is not an accident. It is the system reproducing itself.

Meanwhile, Intel shed over 3,100 Oregon workers in 2025. The Portland metro lost nearly 9,000 jobs — fourth worst among major metro areas nationally. SB 1507, signed into law in 2026, eliminated Oregon’s Qualified Small Business Stock exclusion, making Oregon the only state where resident founders are penalized on gains that nonresident sellers escape entirely. The Legislature killed the FISH and CHIP Act — which passed the House 46-1 — without even a Senate hearing. Rep. Nguyen’s bill, Senator Sollman’s Oregon JOBS Act targeting advanced manufacturing and R&D tax credits — blocked, stalled, deferred. The legislative champions exist. The system defeats them.

None of this is accidental. Every one of these outcomes is the predictable result of a system optimized for institutional comfort, political safety, budget protection, and narrative control — not for entrepreneurship, capital formation, or statewide opportunity flow.

The Deeper Truth: Only Nodes, Never Networks

The people who tried to build bridges — the connectors, the dealmakers, the ecosystem builders — have been consistently underfunded, underrecognized, politically unprotected, structurally unsupported, and sometimes actively pushed out when they became too effective for someone else’s comfort.

The document I was asked to analyze calls them “the missing meso layer” and recommends treating them as economic infrastructure. That framing is correct. But it understates what actually happens to connectors in Oregon’s system. Infrastructure gets funded. Connectors get thanked and then defunded. Infrastructure gets protected. Connectors get replaced by institutional programs that do a fraction of the work at twice the cost and none of the trust.

I’ve lived this. I’ve watched it happen to others. I’ve watched it happen to myself.

The reason this matters beyond personal experience is systemic: when you consistently underinvest in and underprotect the people who create relationships, the ecosystem cannot compound. It only fragments. ONAMI’s $2.45B in leverage was built by connectors — people who spent years in rooms that didn’t pay well and didn’t offer institutional prestige, translating between worlds that couldn’t talk to each other. When those people leave, age out, or burn out without successors, the network doesn’t decline gracefully. It collapses to its nodes, and the nodes revert to island behavior.

Oregon InC’s current board composition is the proof: strong on institutional representation, absent in active founders, working ecosystem builders, and venture investors. The people who should be shaping Oregon’s innovation governance are not in the room. The people in the room are largely there because of institutional affiliation, not because of demonstrated connector capacity. And the $125,000 Business Oregon RFP to evaluate five years of the Innovation Plan — in an agency managing hundreds of millions — is not a budget line. It is a cultural signal: we will evaluate this system using the same framework that produced it, and we will not be surprised by the conclusions.

The Architect’s View: The System Is Succeeding

This is the part that wakes people up.

Oregon’s innovation system is not failing. It is succeeding at producing exactly what it was designed to produce: small, siloed, controllable, non-threatening initiatives that satisfy institutional stakeholders, generate defensible activity metrics, and pose no challenge to existing power structures.

The system is optimized for institutional comfort. For political safety. For budget protection. For narrative control. For low-risk, low-impact activity.

It is not optimized for entrepreneurship. For innovation. For capital formation. For statewide opportunity flow. For generative networks. For connectors.

This is why the same patterns repeat every decade. This is why every new plan produces the same fragmentation. This is why the 2021 Innovation Plan — a genuine, thoughtful document that correctly identified entrepreneurship, talent, commercialization, inclusion, capital access, and regional collaboration as drivers of prosperity — produced more programs rather than stronger connections. The plan was written within the system’s logic. It could not escape the system’s gravity.

The CHIPS Act is perhaps the sharpest illustration. Oregon ranks second in the nation in semiconductor productivity. Oregon received less than 0.002% of available CHIPS R&D funds. Second in productivity. 0.002% of federal investment. That gap is not a grant-writing failure. It is the consequence of a decade without a governor who owned innovation as a personal commitment, without a private-sector co-champion who could walk into a federal agency with credibility, and without a connective infrastructure that could translate Oregon’s assets into a compelling national story.

What It Actually Takes

• You cannot fix a system by adding more nodes.
  You fix it by redesigning the edges.
• You cannot fix a system by adding more programs.
  You fix it by changing the incentives.
• You cannot fix a system by empowering institutions.
  You fix it by empowering connectors.
• You cannot fix a system by writing another plan.
  You fix it by rewriting the governance architecture.

The Prosperity Council’s recommendations are due June 30, 2026. They represent a narrow window — the last political moment before another election cycle absorbs the oxygen. For those recommendations to matter, three things must happen simultaneously, not sequentially:

• Restore champion-level leadership with operational credibility. The Governor must own innovation as a personal commitment — not as one pillar among eight, not as a framework document, not as a press release at Lam Research. Business Oregon needs leadership with genuine economic development credentials: someone who has raised capital, built companies, structured public-private partnerships, and navigated federal innovation programs. Oregon InC needs a restructured board that puts active founders, working ecosystem builders, and venture investors in the majority — not as courtesy seats alongside institutional representatives, but as the governing voice.
• Fund connectors directly, explicitly, and with statutory protection. The Oregon Community Foundation’s Thriving Entrepreneurs program is doing this work at small scale — $3.5M over five years, 79% to rural-serving organizations. That is the right model at the wrong scale, without the political protection connectors need to survive contact with incumbent interests. An Oregon Ecosystem Builder Initiative — fellowships, connector grants, peer networks, succession pipelines, backed by statute — would be the most leveraged investment Oregon could make. The precedent is already proven: the ETIC and Oregon InC eras generated $2.8B in federal and private leverage against $50.8M in state funding. That was built by connectors. Fund them. Protect them. Build their successors.
• Stop the active harm. Revisit SB 1507. Address a regulatory environment rated among the most hostile in the nation for small business. Pass the FISH and CHIP Act. Stop treating innovation funding as a discretionary line item subject to biennial renegotiation. The compounding returns from the ETIC and Oregon InC era were built on sustained, multi-biennium commitment — not on annual debates about whether the investment was “working yet.”

The ultimate test is the one the document proposes, and it is devastating in its simplicity: Is it easier to build a company in Oregon today than it was five years ago?

The honest answer, from someone who has been inside this system for twenty years, is no.

The question is whether the people reading this are willing to hear that answer — and whether they have the courage to act on what it actually implies. Not another plan. Not another framework. Not another pilot program that replicates something that already exists. Not another council weighted toward the institutions that created the problem.

A different architecture. Built by and for the people who have the most to gain — and who have been waiting the longest — for Oregon to become what it should have been twenty years ago.

Dwayne Johnson has served as Vice Chair of the Portland Metro Regional Innovation Hub and the Portland Metro Regional Economic Development District, President of the Oregon Innovation Foundation, Chair of the Governor’s Small Business Advisory Council, Deputy Director of Innovate Oregon, member of the Oregon Business Council for seven years, participant in the ETIC era through the STEM Investment Council and Workforce Development Board, and seed investor and mentor through the Startup Champions Network and beyond.

References

1. [PDF] Testimony in Support of HB 2582 Dr. Brian Paul House Committee …
2. [PDF] scott.ashford@oregonstate.edu
3. Oregon Governor Signs $28.2M Innovation Plan
4. OREGON’S FIRST SIGNATURE RESEARCH CENTER OPENS – Industry partners working closely with ONAMI researchers also displayed their research and developme…
5. Success Stories – ONAMI – These investments have resulted in over $2.45B in financial leverage, of which over 95% is private c…
6. Oregon Governor Signs Bill to Create Innovation Council – SSTI – Gov. Ted Kulongoski last month signed Senate Bill 838, creating the Oregon Innovation Council to pro…
7. 2015 – 2017
8. [PDF] OREGON – Site Selection Magazine
9. oregon-long-3.docx – # TOWARD A MORE ENTREPRENEURIAL, CONNECTED, AND GENERATIVE OREGON
10. Business Oregon : About Us – Cheang has an MBA from Willamette University and a bachelor’s degree in finance from Portland State …
11. [PDF] OREGON’S ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY – Sophorn Cheang, Director Michael Held, Oregon’s reputation and competitiveness for business investme…
12. Navigating the latest “transitional period” for Oregon startups
13. Governor Kotek Announces Strategy – Oregon.gov – Prosperity Roadmap emphasizes business growth and retention, job creation, and building on Oregon’s …
14. Growth Plan to Benefit ‘All Corners of the State’
15. Gov. Kotek focuses on three priorities in 2023-25 recommended … – Oregon Governor Tina Kotek recommended a state budget for 2023-2025 with three priorities on housing…
16. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown has an ambitious agenda for her last year in office – Oregon Governor Kate Brown has begun a series of lasts: last State of the State address and last leg…
17. Governor’s Prosperity Roadmap is a Good First Step – To reverse Oregon’s competitive slide, legislators must stop doing harm and focus on economic develo…
18. Confidential Draft Recommendations From Kotek’s Prosperity … – By Nigel Jaquiss May 14, 2026. Gov. Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council will meet May 15 in Eugene to fi…
19. Governor Kotek Announces Prosperity Council Members – Salem, OR – Today, Governor Tina Kotek identified the members of her newly established Prosperity Co…
20. High housing costs and job losses continue to drag down … – An annual report on the economic health of the Portland region shows an economy nearing a crisis.
21. The Oregon Disconnect: How SB 1507 Impacts Private Companies – Oregon lawmakers have passed Senate Bill 1507, and it is expected to be signed by Governor Tina Kote…
22. Oregon Would Tax Oregonians (and Only Oregonians) on All Gain … – UPDATE: On Wednesday, February 25, the House passed SB 1507. Governor Kotek is expected to sign the …
23. Intel will cut another 669 workers in Oregon by the end of 2025 – KLCC – Intel, Oregon’s largest private employer, is shaving more than 600 additional positions from its wor…
24. Oregon policy and rulemaking updates – Policy and Rulemaking Updates By Oregon Business and Industry House development concepts: From Jan. …
25. Business Oregon has $125k for someone to tell us how innovative …
26. Oregon InC
27. Small Business Entrepreneurs Receive $903000 Investment – Forty-one new grants distributed this month from Oregon Community Foundation’s Thriving Entrepreneur…
28. Thriving Entrepreneurs Grant Program – Funds Available. In 2026, OCF anticipates awarding $800,000. We aim to fund a mix of proposals in co…
29. [PDF] Oregon Innovation council and centers of innovation excellence – • 31 members representing industry, academia, philanthropy, and government. • Reviewed Oregon’s exis…
30. Portland small businesses feel squeeze of costs and bureaucracy – Owners cite higher expenses, taxes and reputation concerns as key pressures.

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Anthropic/OpenAI may be spending more than $1000 for every $100 you pay them – R&A IT Strategy & Architecture

I have been doing some experimenting. The experiment is: “How good is Claude Code anyway?”. That experiment is still running and Claude Code has by now created around 40k lines of code and a working (though incomplete) application. I hope to report on that experience in a short while (but it is a much more difficult write-up). In the meantime, I experienced the cost issue and it led to a short research project, which led to a number of interesting observations and conclusions…

How LLMs Actually Work | 0xkato

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A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Massive Data Center Instead

Almost 30 years ago a farming family deeded land to the City of Taylor, Texas, on the condition the city use it for a public park. For the nominal fee of $10, the farmers granted the 87 acres to a public trust in 1999. Taylor sold it to Blueprint, a data center developer, for $10 million in 2025. Now the land that was supposed to belong to the community will become a 135,000 square foot data center.

Oregon craft breweries lose their froth – oregonlive.com

Breweries are contending with rising prices for malt, aluminum and many other materials they use to brew and can their beer. They’re also adjusting to an industry that appears to have plateaued after enjoying historic growth during the 2010s.

The Inevitable Failure of One-Shot Project Funding

Why does this matter? Companies that build software need to recognize and budget for this.  Financial models need to match ongoing revenue streams (licenses or transaction fees) against ongoing costs (people and tokens).

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2026 Artificial Intelligence Outlook: The Great Competition Wars Have Begun – PitchBook

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Startup News Digest 06/05/26 — ENGINE

The Trump administration has kicked off a sweeping review of federal programs that could ultimately make it harder for startups and underserved communities to access programs that expand broadband access, support research, and help early-stage companies. Last week, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed new changes to federal programs that would apply across several agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration and others. The proposal could reshape how federal grants and programs are reviewed, awarded, and potentially terminated, creating new uncertainty for startups and users to participate in the innovation economy.

[Caveat: Missing Middle Housing Fund is a PIE alum. I am the cofounder and general manager of PIE.]