The Moda Center, Lloyd Center, and Portland’s Generational Need to Think Big

At a time when we need big, catalytic ideas and initiatives that reflect broad, long-term thinking, it seems our civic dialogue is increasingly consumed by political theater, performance, and agreements coming from the fringes, rather than the prioritization of policy and plans that can actually solve our problems.

‘Prosperity Council’ wish list for Gov. Tina Kotek: lower taxes, less regulation, more land – OPB

“People love Oregon; they do not love what’s going on in Oregon,” said Renée James, a tech executive who co-chaired the Prosperity Council alongside Curtis Robinhold, executive director of the Port of Portland. “We’re just not competitive. That’s not even a judgment – it’s just fact.”

Nearly every proposed Oregon initiative won’t make it onto the November ballot • Oregon Capital Chronicle

Initiative Petition 28, an effort led by Portland-based vegan advocates to ban harming or killing all animals with almost no exceptions, had submitted 138,300 signatures as of Wednesday to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office. That’s 20,000 signatures more than what they need to qualify for the ballot. The secretary of state still needs to verify those signatures before the petition can secure a spot on the ballot.

Moneyball for Physical AI – by Animesh Garg

This essay builds a framework for the marginal utility of data, and uses it to discuss value accrual in Physical AI. We take the perspective of the scaling laws that guide how loss behaves with data, and the unit economics that govern what a dollar of data is worth. Together they give an approximate marginal utility per dollar, the on-base percentage of physical AI.

Crunchbase Data: Q2 Brought The Most Billion-Dollar Startup Exits Since 2021

Overall, we’re still well behind the prior high in terms of the number of big exits, as you can see charted below. The IPO and SPAC boom of five years ago will be hard to match for exit count.

The Bifurcation of Capital is Inevitable – by Kyle Harrison

Gin rummy is the perfect metaphor, because it names the thing most investors can’t help themselves but get focused on; selling as often as buying. Just one example from this past week was Mohnish Pabrai, a self-described “clone“ of Warren Buffett, explaining why he put 77% of his portfolio into Micron in 2023 and then sold all of it just six months later, before Micron’s stock went up 15x…

What If There Is No Moat Yet? | Tomasz Tunguz

Lagging moats are earned through years of execution. Economies of scale, brand, channel relationships, embedded workflows. They cannot be drawn on a competitive landscape matrix because they are not built yet.

How I Build Software in June 2026

Some things are quicker, but some things still take too long. Oddly, the complexity and limits of LLMs make building software both easier and harder.

Weekly Review: The Hard Half – by Sam Keen – Altered Craft

A pattern runs through this issue: the model is no longer the whole job. The work has moved to the system around it, the loop you engineer, the harness that runs it, the sandbox that contains it, and the provider and version-control layers that support it. The news side counts the cost of all that, from liquid-cooled data centers to the token bills arriving as the subsidies end.

Tweens Curated the Latest Portland Art Museum Show

The show came out of a collaboration between PAM and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art, an education-focused museum inside King Elementary in Northeast Portland. Founded in 2014 by Portland State University professors and artists Lisa Jarrett and Harrell Fletcher, the program gives kids hands-on experience working as curators, preparators, artists, gallerists, writers and docents.

Celebrate People like Om Malik and Susan Wojcicki When They’re Alive. That’s the Best Chance We Have To Make Tech Good Again. – Hunter Walk – Medium

See how people can be wildly successful but also kind, giving, approachable?

Intel’s Chip Business Shows Signs of Life After Years of Struggle – The New York Times

It is the centerpiece of President Trump’s drive to make more chips in the United States, but the company still has a long way to go before it can be called a complete turnaround.

An “infovore” shares his chats – by ChatGPT Pro Community

“The world is so interesting and so rich and so open-ended that the more you learn, the more you want to keep on going,” he adds. That curiosity shows up in almost everything he does: he reads two to three books a day, writes daily, has documented thousands of restaurants he’s visited since 2006, and has traveled to roughly 105 countries, including 33 trips to Mexico, seven to Brazil, and time living in Europe and New Zealand.

Zane Sparling, reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive, dies of cancer at 33 – oregonlive.com

“He was the kind of reporter every newsroom needs. Someone who knows where to go, who to find, what to ask and can quickly write stories that stand out,” Gunderson said. “With Zane, though, the stories were about a half-tick more entertaining than your average senior reporter, and no matter the day he’d already had, he’d happily jump on a late-breaking assignment.”

Token Tightening

Just a few months ago, heavily subsidized AI plans and a manic push by corporations to get their employees familiar with the technology led to aggressive tokenmaxxing, or measuring AI adoption by how many tokens employees use. That era appears to be over.

Oregon’s minimum wage rises Wednesday, but the pay hike reaches a smaller share of the workforce – oregonlive.com

Minimum-wage workers get a pay bump Wednesday, with wages rising 50 cents an hour across Oregon to keep pace with inflation. While welcome news for employees earning the minimum wage, the impact is likely to be muted given the small share of workers on that end of the wage spectrum.

“Burtual” Reality: AI in healthcare, round two

We brought back the panel from our AI + Healthcare event for round two. No live audience, no time limit, just Megan and Nicole finally asking the questions we didn’t get to. Janet Johnson (AI Governance Group), Dr. Arpi Chalian, and Burt Rosen joined us again.

Kotek says she supports Prosperity Council economic recommendations – Portland Business Journal

She suggested she would reverse a policy change she signed into law this spring and would instead reinstate a tax exclusion for gains made on the sale of qualified small business stocks. Kotek has said she signed Senate Bill 1507, which disconnected the Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) provision from the federal tax code, to soften the blow from the Trump Administration’s 2025 tax cuts.

Everyone’s talking about AI and like it or not, it’s now a part of our every day lives. There are plenty of seminars and workshops on how to use AI in your small business, but they lack an understanding of your business’s unique value proposition – Authenticity. This Shop Talk is designed to be an open discussion with your peers on the benefits and downsides and how to best engage with AI. We will have small business champion and AI subject matter expert, Isaiah Steinfeld of Neue Alchemy to listen and answer any questions. This is also a great opportunity to connect, collaborate and network with peers.

The event takes place Thursday, July 16, 2026, at 9:00AM. Register on Eventbrite.

Agility Robotics IPO: What it means for Pittsburgh

The robotics firm, which has a local office on Lawrenceville’s Robotics Row, announced this week it’s merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI, a special-purpose acquisition company built specifically to take startups like Agility public. The transaction, which values Agility at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value, is expected to close later this year. Once the paperwork clears, the new joint company will go by Agility and trade under the ticker “AGLT.”

The AI Data-Center Boom Is Sparking a Third Wave of Inflation – WSJ

President Trump’s trade wars have waned. The price of gas is finally falling. But inflation has a new catalyst: America’s massive artificial-intelligence build-out is beginning to push up prices on everything from smartphones to electricity.

Kotek’s prosperity council pushes for lower taxes, fewer regulations • Oregon Capital Chronicle

The numbers Kotek’s prosperity council put forth in its 33-page report and shared in a council meeting Thursday afternoon paint a negative picture of Oregon’s economy: The state is second-to-last in the nation when it comes to increases in employment, 41% of Oregonians live either below the federal poverty level or are unable to afford basic needs, and the state’s unemployment rate is at 5.2%, a figure that has remained above the national average for months. The report comes as U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data identified Oregon as the only West Coast state to lose jobs overall since last year.

The state of the AI economy

Over the past 12 months, the AI ecosystem generated $110 billion in revenue when you remove double-counting. The growth rate is healthy. Annualizing the most recent month’s revenues indicates a $175 billion revenue run rate.

Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data

We introduce Autodata, a general method that enables AI agents to act as data scientists who build high quality training and evaluation data. We show how to train (meta-optimize) such a data scientist agent, so that it learns to create even stronger data. We describe the overall formulation, and a specific practical implementation, Agentic Self-Instruct. We conduct experiments on computer science research tasks, legal reasoning tasks and reasoning with mathematical objects, where we obtain improved results compared to classical synthetic dataset creation methods. Further, meta-optimizing the data scientist agent itself delivers an even larger performance uplift. Agentic data creation provides a way to convert increased inference compute into higher quality model training. Overall, we believe this direction has the potential to change the way we build AI data.

6 Startup Investors On What It Will Take To Fund More Black Founders

The venture model is built around risk-taking, he noted, but there’s a double standard for white and non-white entrepreneurs: “A Black founder’s first failure gets treated as confirmation,” he said. “A white founder’s first failure gets treated as experience.”

The age of the solopreneur

In 2023, roughly four million Americans earned their primary income as solopreneurs, generating over $100,000 in annual revenue. That figure has risen substantially from the mid two-million range of the early 2010s, a period when the infrastructure enabling solo business at scale—Stripe, Substack, Kajabi, and other platforms—was still small in scale and more limited in capabilities.

Fundraising Friction is Killing Your Round – Here’s How to Remove It – Tremendous

Make it as easy as possible for investors to learn about your company, get excited, and book a meeting. Those meetings turn into checks.

What being “inspiring” actually means

In other words, your argument has to actually make sense. If you passionately talk about an idea that doesn’t make sense, it won’t matter. No amount of great delivery can save you.

Prosperity Council’s Report Challenges Kotek to Signal That Oregon Is Open for Business — Oregon Journalism Project

The 15-member panel of business and labor leaders proposed four modest tax code changes, replacing the Climate Protection Program, and some less controversial reforms.

Om Malik, 1966-2026 – On my Om

We invite you to share your remembrances of Om in the comments below or by posting and tagging his accounts on X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, or LinkedIn.

Gov. Kotek’s prosperity council urges Oregon leaders to cut taxes, regulations to spur growth – oregonlive.com

The release of the council’s report now focuses the pressure on Kotek to decide which of the recommendations she will champion as she seeks reelection this fall. It also raises questions about whether she and top Democratic lawmakers are willing to support tax changes that will almost certainly be controversial.

From Great Individual Judgement to a Great Decision-Making Organization — Oregon Venture Fund

We recently had the opportunity to work with one of our portfolio companies, Source, on implementing a lightweight decision-making framework with their leadership team. The experience reinforced something we’ve observed across many of our investments: effective organizational decision-making is a distinct skill from personal judgment, and it requires intentional structure to develop.

We Almost Built the Wrong Tool for Our Sales Team

Five minutes before a meeting I’ll figure out what the person across the table actually cares about, what I should be careful not to bring up, and what I should lead with, and then I weave all of that into how I talk to them. Everyone who’s genuinely good at this does some private version of it in their head.

Start Your Startup | Upstart Collective

Serial entrepreneur Josh Carter helps founders cut through the noise by breaking down the startup journey into clear, actionable stages. Drawing from his experience building companies and working alongside hundreds of founders, he helps entrepreneurs understand the proper order of operations, from validating an idea and finding customers to building traction and preparing to scale.

More Oregon startup news

Oregon Prosperity Council pushes tax reform, regulation cuts – Portland Business Journal

Gov. Tina Kotek’s Prosperity Council on Thursday delivered its final recommendations for ways to boost Oregon’s economic competitiveness, with tax reform and cuts to regulations topping a lengthy list that drew on six months of meetings and listening sessions around the state.

New group aims to help people adapt to AI job losses | AP News

Among the companies serving as anchor partners with RAISE US are Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, the OpenAI Foundation and Bank of America. Other employers involved in the project include UPS, General Motors, Eli Lilly, Mastercard, chipmaker AMD, Cisco and IBM.

Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious – Jim Nielsen’s Blog

So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it.

Notes on Amazon v. Perplexity

One of the many sites of conflict over AI use on the Internet is about the use of “agentic” Web browsers: those that incorporate AI features where the user can give the AI instructions and then let it interact with the site independently. For example, you might ask your browser to book travel and it would then go to travel sites, look at the various flights, and eventually buy tickets.

Cursor Deal Puts US On Track For Record Startup M&A Year

The Cursor purchase represents the largest startup acquisition of all time, nearly double the size of the prior frontrunner, Google’s purchase of Wiz for $32 billion. After that, the next-biggest startup M&A deal was Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014.

Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal | TechCrunch

The transaction is expected to generate more than $620 million in proceeds, including about $200 million from a group of new and existing institutional investors, the company said.

What I’m Finding About LLM Code Style and Token Costs – Jim Montgomery jimmont.com

In trying to make progress on something I am finding myself reviewing my practice and looking at where that outrageous token usage is coming from. Every one of those is output tokens, the ones that cost several times more (3x to 5x!!!) than input tokens in API pricing. Patterns that are longer, more fragile, more insecure, and solving problems the platform already solved–often years ago.

What to know about Agility Robotics’ SPAC plans – Portland Business Journal

The company could mean big things for the state’s tech sector because it is an example of physical AI that applies advanced software in the physical world through robotics.

Why Pre-Seed Investing Has Never Been Harder | Charles Hudson, Precursor Ventures

Ten years and hundreds of Day 0 checks later, few investors have backed as many first-time founders, making him the perfect person to talk through the state of Pre-Seed investing today.

Oregon Entrepreneurs Network: July PubTalk

We’re teaming up with our friends Miller Nash for the July PubTalk on Wednesday, July 8th at 5:00 p.m. at their beautiful offices in downtown Portland.

The State of Play for Female VCs: A fireside chat with Paige Hendrix Buckner & Leslie Feinzaig · Zoom · Luma

​Join us for a candid fireside with Paige and Graham & Walker’s Leslie Feinzaig on the real state of play for female VCs in 2026. We’ll get into the numbers, the dynamics inside firms, the funding gaps that persist, and what actually moves the needle.

UpStart Collective is turning 4! · Luma

Join founders, investors, operators, community leaders, and friends as we raise a glass to four amazing years, celebrate the incredible companies being built here, and look ahead to what’s next for Portland’s startup community.

More Oregon startup news

A handful of local builders take the floor for short, hands-on demos of what they’re actually making (startups, apps, hardware, side projects, tools), and then we hang out and meet the people behind the work. No pitch, no hype reels, just real things and the people making them.

Doors open at 5:00PM for snacks and networking. From 5:30PM to 6:30PM, a handful of builders take roughly ten to fifteen minutes each to show what they’ve made. Then it’s open hangout and ad-hoc demos until 7:30PM. First one on the docket is host Sam demoing a low-cost, all-in-one microcontroller dev board with a color screen and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built in.

So go make something — then come show it.

The Cascadia Builders Club’s first demo night happens Tuesday, July 21, 2026, at North Bank Innovations, 18110 SE 34th St, suite 120, Vancouver, Washington (enter off 34th Street). Free. Register here.

More Oregon startup news