Labor Day Weekend 2026: Eats, Drinks, and Happenings in Portland – Bridgetown Bites

This year, Labor Day falls on Monday, September 7, and with the adjoining Saturday and Sunday, September 5 and 6 it makes for a nice long weekend.

(2021) New leadership at the oldest startup accelerator in Portland

There have been any number of accelerators supporting Portland startups throughout the years. But no shared office space accelerator has been at it as long as the Portland State Business Accelerator. And today, that accelerator — which was founded in 2004 — announced new leadership. Arsh Haque has taken over as the PSBA’s newest director.

Read Tim Cook’s full memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO – 9to5Mac

In the memo sent to employees this morning and obtained by 9to5Mac, Cook reflects on his time at Apple and thanks employees for all of their work. He also says he takes “enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable” as John Ternus.

Agency and Agents – by Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing

AI does many things, but a thing it is very good at is coding. So one of the first risks that might come from very smart AIs has to do with their coding abilities, since if you can write good code, you can also write bad code that can hack or attack other systems. As a result, the big AI companies put their AI systems through tests to determine their security risks. They take AIs without the guardrails that go into consumer versions of AI and ask them to engage in various hacking challenges. In order to make sure that there is no danger to the public, each AI instance, each individual agent, is kept in a separate space, called a “sandbox,” with no access to the internet or to each other.

Sector Snapshot: Proptech Funding Holds Up, But Investors Are Placing Different Bets

But startup investors haven’t abandoned the sector, either, Crunchbase data shows. Instead, they’re being more selective about their bets and putting more money into companies using AI and other technology to make construction, property operations and real estate transactions faster and less expensive.

The Future Tech Role Is the Product Architect – akashyap.ai

TL;DR: Coding is moving from humans to agents. As agents get better at implementing, testing, and reviewing software, the human role moves toward deciding what should be built, defining how the system should work, and verifying the result. The person who owns all three is the product architect.

Invisible Companies: Why Overlooked Businesses Win- Colossus

Invisible companies persist for a different reason: the missing information is itself invisible. Would-be competitors do not know that they do not know, so they don’t think to search. And the invisible companies have no reason to tell them. No one searches, so no one competes; no one competes, so the profits persist. The reward for being overlooked is, paradoxically, the opportunity for supranormal profits.

AI and Employment: So Far, So Good – Marginal REVOLUTION

Among those using generative AI, 85% of firms cited writing or editing documents and email as the biggest uses, half cite searching for information, 45% summarizing documents, and 13% coding. Sixty-four percent of adopters say they changed nothing about the business in order to use AI, 15% trained existing staff, another 15% built new workflows, and just over one percent hired anyone with AI skills.

NSF grant to fund PSU research commercialization programs – Portland Business Journal

“We have built an array of economic-development infrastructure in Propel PSU, and we know PSU has a research portfolio that is ready to translate,” said Joseph Janda, assistant vice president for innovation and principal investigator on the award, in a written statement. “This award lets us connect that infrastructure to PSU projects deliberately and with depth, so that more PSU discoveries become products, licenses, startups and industry partnerships that benefit Portland and the state.”

AI Builder Series: AI Without the Hype — September 5, 2026 | STEAM Circuit

Led by Scott Hanselman, this session is practical, grounded, and interactive. Together, participants will explore how to use AI tools in ways that actually save time, reduce repetitive work, and support creativity. The goal is not to chase buzzwords or speculate about AGI. It is to understand what is useful now, what is overhyped, and how to make informed decisions about the tools showing up on our laptops, phones, and in our work.

Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1

We’re introducing Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1. They’re the world’s most advanced models for coding and knowledge work—and their research capabilities offer an early glimpse of how AI models will contribute to scientific progress.

Shopify Connect Link: Simplify Shopify Onboarding for Your Customers

nstead of requesting Shopify credentials or creating a Warehance user account, your team can generate a secure, client-specific connection link and send it directly to the customer. The customer simply opens the link, confirms the organization requesting access, enters their Shopify store URL, and authorizes the connection through Shopify’s standard approval flow. No Warehance login is required, and Shopify credentials never need to be shared.

Redshifted | Vibes DIY Blog

That is exactly what AI acceleration is doing to people. The most accelerated among us haven’t left; they’re right there on the payroll, in the group chat, at the meetup. They still emit — more than ever, actually. But their working notes are prompts, their essays are systems, their conversation partners are agents, and the trail they leave is stretched so far out of the human-readable spectrum that from behind, it reads as silence. We talk about these people the way you’d talk about the raptured. He used to write. She used to teach. They used to be here. They are still here. We just can’t see their light.

Here’s what you read the most in August 2026.

1. For transparency, here is what I told the Teconomy team assessing Oregon’s 10-Year Innovation Plan
2. Inc. features the 10 fastest growing Portland companies
3. Panthalassa rides the AI wave to a purported $2B valuation
4. Last year as a teenager: Silicon Florist is now 19 years old
5. Portland Startup Week is no more
6. Insitu gets acquired… again
7. TIME ranks OSU Advantage Accelerator among best startup accelerators in the US
8. Bluesky feed & AT Proto startup Graze acquired by Flipboard
9. Oregon UAS Accelerator welcomes 17 startups to its Fall 2026 cohort
10. No rest for the OEN crew: Angel Oregon opens up all three flavors for new startups

Honorable mentions

• Highlight or maybe lowlight: Josh Carter on Portland’s startup problems
• Rose City til batteries die: Rose City Robotics lands Lithium-Ion recycling prize
• Oregon electeds at the Federal level carve out ~$6M to support startups
• Portland has definitely slipped among tech communities — but at least we’re still registering
• Digs raises $25.3M through strategic partnership
• QSBS: The plot thickens

And her timing couldn’t be better. Given that Portland State University, the fiscal sponsor of the Hub, has just secured a $6 million grant to help with innovation and commercialization.

According to PSU Assistant Vice President of Innovation, Joe Janda:

Kelly’s career has a clear through line. She has repeatedly built functions and programs that didn’t yet exist, and brought coherence to complex, multi-stakeholder efforts. As Development Director at Blanchet House of Hospitality, she built a development program from the ground up and grew revenue 25% year-over-year for five consecutive years. At Umpqua Bank, she unified community reinvestment, philanthropy, ESG, and DEI strategies into a coordinated enterprise-wide effort and launched catalytic ESG programming across the bank portfolio. At Core Education, she built the organization’s first enterprise-wide impact management & measurement function across a portfolio of 70+ contracted entities, and she has since advised healthcare systems, nonprofits, and financial institutions on governance and ecosystem development through her consulting practice, ClimbSmart Strategies.

Kelly describes her work as:

My work sits at the intersection of strategy, execution, and impact. I partner with executives and boards to design operating models, governance structures and performance systems that strengthen accountability, improve decision making, and support long term, responsible growth. Rooted in purpose driven and stakeholder centered work, I help leaders connect business performance with real outcomes for people, communities, and the enterprise. I am quite effective in high stakes, ambiguous environments where clarity, alignment, and strong systems turn good ideas into lasting change.

But she’s also a founder, having started a company called Entrellis designed to map “the full family system and gives her the structure to move through it; the right conversations, at the right time, with the clarity that lets families and the professionals around them actually do their best work.”

I’m sure quite a few folks will be writing about this. And I’d expect there to be a statement from the Hub at some point. But I had a break between meetings so I wanted to get the news out there.

More soon.

From Building $18 Million Startup as a BYU Student to a GP in a VC: Adam Shaw’s Founders & Funders Bet – TechBuzz News

That instinct — find the margin, build the relationship, bet on yourself — has carried Shaw from Woodland, Washington, a small town an hour’s drive from Portland, through a medical-supply company he scaled as a college student from zero to $18 million during the pandemic, a management-consulting stint that helped restructure procurement for a group of major REITs, and now into the role of co-founder and partner at Founders & Funders, the Utah-born venture and events company he now runs alongside Jeff Erickson.

How the AI Investment Craze Is Keeping the Global Economy Afloat – WSJ

ING estimates the AI frenzy accounts for around a third of the U.S. economy’s recent growth, as the data-center build-out sucks in semiconductors, electronics, cables, metals and machinery from around the world.

State of the Map 2026 – OpenStreetMap conference – Po Ve Sham – Muki Haklay’s personal blog

Overall, it’s interesting to see the evolution and response to the changing internet and commercial environment over a period of 20 years, and how the increase in data coverage and quantity is opening up applications. For a project that is managed in a chaotic do-ochracy way, with all the problems and challenges that this creates, it is very impressive. It is slowly (very very slowly) maturing into an organisation with some staff (well 1.something now), and a turnover of the foundation of about €1m. In comparison, the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA), which is doing far less than OSM and started in 2013, is already on €1.5m with about 20 members of staff. It might be that the AI age will force such changes.

(2012) Just what the doctor ordered: Electronic healthcare startup Kryptiq gets snapped up by Surescripts

When Surescripts pumped a strategic investment into Hillsboro-based healthcare startup Kryptiq, it seemed as if the writing was already on the wall—if the companies worked well together.

Data centers emerge as new flashpoint between Kotek, Drazan in Oregon governor’s race  • Oregon Capital Chronicle

But a new fissure between the candidates is emerging over data centers, and the growing public backlash over the server farms in Oregon and nationwide. A late July poll by the Portland-based firm DHM Research found that 71% of Oregonians have a negative view of data centers, which have found a comfortable market in Oregon with the state’s lack of sales tax, generous property tax breaks for industrial development and relatively low electricity rates.

The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations

Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself, and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigation’s scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didn’t look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and it’s kinda hard to parse the storyline.

Weekly Review: Who Holds the Keys – by Sam Keen

Happy Monday, and thank you for making Altered Craft’s weekly AI review for developers part of your routine. One question threads this edition: who holds the keys to your stack? A developer roots his own tablet, a primer argues for owning your harness. Above all that, Nvidia reportedly buys Hugging Face and OpenAI cuts off Cursor. Control you build, and control that shifts over your head.

Product-Market Fit Has Always Been a Treadmill, But it Just Got WAY Faster

But the reality is that PMF has always been a treadmill. You’ve always had to consistently earn it. It isn’t an off switch, and nobody actually building a company would describe it as static. It just feels like it’s a treadmill now because you can really feel its movement. It was always moving, but just at a much slower pace.

One year as a solopreneur

In hindsight, betting on myself was the best decision I’ve ever made. Today I’m sharing a candid look at how it’s going – with real numbers – and my advice for anyone interested in stepping off the corporate treadmill.

What I learned about founder-market fit

Experience is obviously an advantage, and the data backs it up. Founders with three or more years of experience in the industry they’re entering are roughly twice as likely to build a top 0.1% company. Among those fastest-growing ventures, the mean founder age is 45, and founders in their early twenties have the worst odds of any age group. I started SessionStack at 22 with about two years as a software engineer, so I was on the wrong end of both.

Full breakdown: OpenClaw 2.0 vs. Grok Bot and ChatGPT Work

Peter Steinberger’s OpenClaw released version 2.0 on August 30th with many of the capabilities that define Grok Bot and ChatGPT Work: persistent agents, shared sessions, computer access, recurring jobs and handoffs. The more consequential difference is what OpenClaw still refuses to bundle.

The Big One is Coming

I want to be careful here because “AI is going to cause a huge cyberattack” is exactly the kind of clickbait I’d normally roll my eyes at. I read incident reports for a living, and I have a low tolerance for hype. So understand that I’m not writing this from a place of doom. I’m writing it because I read one specific document last week and my jaw was on the floor by page ten.

a16z creates a $1.1B ‘Machine Age’ fund to ‘accelerate the physical buildout of AI’ | TechCrunch

The fund will focus on hardware, bucking the firm’s typical focus on the scaling power of software. In a post on the venture capital firm’s website, a16z says the fund will focus on investing in the infrastructure that powers AI — a swath that includes everything from computer chips and memory to data centers and robots.

Introducing the 2026 Intelligent Applications 40

These shifts are what Madrona’s 6th annual Intelligent Applications 40 list, released today, captures. We see it as the year of “Harnessing the Value of AI,” and this theme runs through the 5th annual IA40 Summit, where a number of this year’s winners will take the stage. Nearly every category and cohort includes at least one company applying AI agents to a specific job to be done: IT service management with Serval, customer service with Sierra, marketing operations with Gradial, lead generation/sales with Clay, legal work with Legora, healthcare with OpenEvidence.

Defense embedded systems maker Sightline Intelligence doubles HQ – Portland Business Journal

Sightline, which has its roots in unmanned aerial vehicle maker Insitu, makes software to analyze video and sensor data collected by drones. The processing, which uses artificial intelligence, is done as the information is collected for real-time awareness. Its customers are in military and law enforcement.

The AI Industry Gets Paid to Waste Your Money

In a paper we co-authored with researchers at Villanova and Portland State, “Leveraging wSSAS Towards Text Categorization Using LLMs,” we found that irrelevant information in the input damages performance because it “forces the model to attend to inconsequential patterns.” We filtered the raw data into signal-dense summaries before the model saw them, cutting 20 to 25 percent of the input as noise, and measured sharper results on the smaller input, with one accuracy index more than doubling. Less input, better output. My co-founder Nitin Mayande wrote a plain-English walkthrough of why models get confused by noisy text and how the filtering works, if you want the approach without the math.

Monday, Aug 31

• PDX Code & Coffee — Beaverton @ Fly Chai — 9:00am, Beaverton

Tuesday, Sep 1

• Bridgespace Coworking X ATPROTO PDX — Open Coworking — 10:00am
• The $100K Hiding in Your Payroll: AI Agents for Founders — 10:00am
• CORAL Chats: Community Organization Roundtable — Ask A Lawyer — 12:00pm
• Better Futures Club — 1:30pm
• Portland Geek Dinner — Beaverton (PADNUG) — 5:30pm, Beaverton

Wednesday, Sep 2

• Mingling for Data Professionals and Enthusiasts (PyData PDX) — 5:15pm
• Portland Microsoft User Groups Networking — 5:30pm

Thursday, Sep 3

• UpStart Collective is turning 4! — 3:00pm
• Vancouver Veteran Meetup (Veterans in Technology) — 6:00pm, Vancouver
• Digital Creatives “Drink-N-Draw” at Rose City Book Pub — 6:30pm

Friday, Sep 4

• PNW CoffeeOps (Portland DevOps Groundup) — 8:00am
• Thinking Local: District 3 Coffee w/ City Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane — 9:00am
• Friday Happy Hour at Beermongers (Code Freeze Fridays) — 12:00pm
• Silicon Florist weekly watch party — 9:00pm

Saturday, Sep 5

• Code & Coffee with Mentorship Saturdays @ Roseline Coffee — 10:00am
• Westside Marketers Hike + Coffee — 10:00am, Beaverton
• AI Builder Series: AI Without the Hype — 12:00pm

AI Builder Series: AI Without the Hype — September 5, 2026

Led by Scott Hanselman, this session is practical, grounded, and interactive. Together, participants will explore how to use AI tools in ways that actually save time, reduce repetitive work, and support creativity. The goal is not to chase buzzwords or speculate about AGI. It is to understand what is useful now, what is overhyped, and how to make informed decisions about the tools showing up on our laptops, phones, and in our work.

Startup Spotlight: Skyfarer connects pilots with flight training, aviation services and airplanes in one place – GeekWire

Nick Tsang, founder and CEO of Skyfarer, wants to help fix this problem. He sees general aviation as a multibillion-dollar market that’s fragmented at every stage, without the unified online tools other industries take for granted.

Writing with AI – by O’Reilly and Tim O’Reilly

If AI is a medium, it will take time for its possibilities to unfold, discovery on discovery. In Western painting, think of the progression from the flat, stylized religious art of the Middle Ages to the luminous colors of Giotto, the explosion of technique and realism in the Renaissance, and the many stages since. Greatness in the medium has many faces, not one. Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo are all names to conjure with, but so are the very different visions expressed centuries later by Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, O’Keefe, Kahlo, Frankenthaler, Haring, Banksy.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft warn of growing AI cyberattacks

OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and more than 100 other companies warned Thursday that the organizations now only have months to prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks.

Will the AI boom continue? Forecasting the trajectory of the AI industry

These growth curves are extremely steep and—if they continue—OpenAI and Anthropic are set to become two of the largest companies on the planet in terms of revenue within just a few years. That is a big if.

AI and the city – by Marisa Rama – Stripe Economics

We find smaller metro areas like Hinesville, Georgia (population 90,000), Cheyenne, Wyoming (100,000), and Fayetteville, North Carolina (390,000) among the densest hubs for new business formation. Meanwhile, major metro areas that one would expect to be at the core of this surge in new businesses—like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco—are seeing below-average business formation relative to their sizes.

Sector Snapshot: Space Tech Startup Funding Orbits New Highs 

So far this year, a record $20.3 billion in global seed- through growth-stage funding has gone to companies in space- and satellite-related sectors, per Crunchbase data. That’s already by far the highest annual tally on record, and we’ve still got four months left in 2026.

On why you should invest in the most expensive YC startups | by Jared Heyman | Aug, 2026 | Medium

Today we’ll dive into whether the most expensive YC startups in each batch are worth the premium.

(2017) Remembering Sam Blackman

Sam Blackman was going to be the mayor of Portland. He might have even been governor of Oregon. And potentially a senator. But I was always convinced that he was going to be the mayor. He never told me that he wanted to be. I just knew that someday, he would be.

Why Great Advisors Give Terrible Startup Advice — Feel the Boot

I’m an angel investor and president of an angel group, and I mostly work with pre-seed startups looking for angel investment. That’s the bias I come from, and most of my videos are aimed at that kind of company. Plenty of what I say applies to any early-stage business, but it’s always that model I have in mind while I’m talking.

Listening to the Market – Omniscient Digital

Personally, I’ve been able to calibrate my market point of view (which is strong) with the “digital watercooler” (conversations happening on LinkedIn, podcasts, and panels), and how that affects the pain points, questions, and needs customers have. I have been able to detect meaningful changes in the market’s understanding of AEO in nearly real time based on the questions and tone of my discovery calls and our client calls.

Audit your Agent files – by Addy Osmani – Elevate

TL;DR: Your coding agent’s configuration has a half-life. Models improve, harnesses add capabilities, codebases change, and the instructions we wrote for an older version stay behind. Recent research finds inconsistent value from personalized skills. I now run Claude’s /doctor every few weeks, review memory separately, and ask each instruction to earn its place again.

Small Models Have Arrived

I think demand for “frontier-level” models is going to keep compounding. Especially for fields that require novel breakthroughs or discovery (engineering, hard science, model training). But I also think the demand for “fast/cheap/good-enough” models is just about to take off.

OpenAI Is the Sole Investor in Its Latest Venture Fund – WSJ

OpenAI is launching a second startup fund—this time pulling from its own balance sheet.

Korea Investment AC Opens Defense Startup Base in Oregon

The base was created as a follow-up to a memorandum of understanding signed in July between Korea Investment AC and the Oregon UAS Accelerator. The aim is to ease the time and cost burdens and information barriers that startups face from a lack of local footing when entering the U.S. market, allowing them to focus on proof-of-concept testing and building local networks.

#StartupsEverywhere: Indianapolis, Ind. — ENGINE

The STTR program has been absolutely vital for us. It would have been impossible for us to raise the funds we needed for a clinical trial for what was functionally, at the time,  a video game. Our pilot study looked encouraging, but the sample size was only 21, investing in a technology that early would have been illogical to a private investor. The money we got from our STTR grant at the NSF helped us crest this valley of death between knowing we had something valuable and being able to demonstrate that to investors with reliable, statistically significant data.

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