Little Tech Association works to make it easier to start, build, and grow in the digital economy — expanding access to capital and customers, freeing talent to move where their best ideas are, and right-sizing rules so small teams aren’t crushed by compliance costs built for giants. We champion open systems, open standards, and open infrastructure, so the tools people rely on work together and no gatekeeper decides who gets a shot. When markets stay open and competitive, the best products win — on merit, not market power.

(I’d be lying if this didn’t make me a little nostalgic for a similar movement here locally. The one that formed the Portland Independent Chamber of Commerce which went on to become Better Portland.)

For more information, visit Little Tech “The actual voice of founders, start-ups, and digital innovators.”

Founder Foundations – Info Session | Metro Region Innovation Hub

Learn more about Founder Foundations, our new 6-week primer built for first-time, idea-stage founders in the Portland Metro Area. Designed for those ready to trade professional experience for entrepreneurship, the program will give you real insight into what it actually takes to build a company.

Exclusive: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang defends Chinese AI amid Kimi panic

The world’s top AI chipmaker says American companies should “absolutely” be allowed to use Chinese models — a direct challenge to Trump officials and the U.S. labs lobbying Washington to shut them out.

200 US utility firms join Trump electricity pledge as data center electricity use expected to quadruple by 2035 — but does the President’s pledge have the teeth to regulate electricity pricing? | TechRadar

In an attempt to quell the national dissatisfaction with AI and the data centers needed to support capacity, over 200 entities have joined President Trump’s pledge to not pass on rising electricity costs to consumers.

Never Enough | Dark Thoughts

Two recent stories about Silicon Valley are hard to read without wondering if everyone involved has lost their mind. Once a place that celebrated “the crazy ones, the misfits and rebels who saw things differently,” it now seems to have found a new kind of crazy that isn’t born of rebellion but fear of falling behind. Everyone is chasing the person ahead of them, with little time to remember where they meant to go.

(2014) Remembering Nike Chalkbot: Five years ago, a project for Tour de France had a lasting impact on the Portland startup scene

For those of you going “Chalk-what?” allow me to introduce you to Chalkbot, a Nike campaign for the Tour de France in 2009, brilliantly executed by a contingent of folks from Wieden+Kennedy’s Portland office, among others. Chalkbot was a robot. That could receive text messages—messages of inspiration—and then “paint” them in chalk along the route of the Tour de France.

Distilling The Moat

If the AI platforms cannot deter distillation by pricing, and can only hope to stay slightly ahead of the distillers and the open-weight models by an expensive arms race, their moat is extremely shallow. It doesn’t come close to justifying trillion-dollar IPOs, covering the country in data centers, or launching them into space.

Led By DeepSeek, 10 Frontier Labs Rush Onto The Crunchbase Unicorn Board In June

A total of 34 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in June, altogether adding more than $110 billion in value. Ten of those companies were AI labs, collectively valued at $65 billion.

2030-shaped software

Many of the conversations and decisions about what we’re building now are impacted by this. More and more, we’re aiming towards building “2030-shaped software.” This is a vague aspiration and “agent-first software” isn’t much better. But, while we can’t predict the future, we can share how we’re thinking about the problem.

What I’d Tell My Team About Competition – Stay SaaSy

If our market has any value at all, we’re going to have competitors. Many of them will be formidable, because the thermodynamics of capitalism dictate that competition always eventually appears. If it didn’t, it would mean that we were doing something useless.

Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program | OpenAI

We’re announcing the launch of our ChatGPT for small businesses program, an initiative to help small businesses be more productive and scale their businesses with ChatGPT.

The 7 Hires a Hardware Startup Needs to Get Right | Andreessen Horowitz

When deploying physical hardware or dealing with a diverse set of stakeholders, business models become uniquely unforgiving. In a way, this is a good definition for what an “American Dynamism” company actually is. As a result, hiring has higher stakes for engineering and non-engineering roles alike.

Make good introductions, build strong alliances, win. 

I like smart and interesting people who want to make the world a better place, and I like introducing those kinds of people to each other. The more of this kind of introduction I make, the more I build a network of this kind of people around me, and the more valuable the entire network becomes to each of its members.

A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team

Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World’s Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team. We talked about Claude Code, Claude Tag, Fable, coding agent security, evals, tool design, and how Anthropic use these tools themselves.

LLMs Are Surprisingly Bad Blog Authors

So let’s go back to the beginning: you have an idea, but writing is hard! Write anyways; write poorly. Use an LLM for research and feedback. Do not simply hand it your idea and expect it to generate something enjoyable or effective to read. And while you’re at it, lean into the imperfections, because even if they aren’t information-theoretical depictions of your ideas, they help make your writing interesting, unexpected, and yes, surprising. And that is what makes it fun to read.

The AI Bubble Is No Ordinary Bubble – The Atlantic

The value of AI-linked firms has climbed $27 trillion in the past three years—an astonishing amount, equivalent to 36 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock market today.

Three Words That It’s Time For Us To Leave Behind: Non-Technical, Unicorn, and Oversubscribed. | Hunter Walk

“Wired, Tired, Expired” was a fun feature of Wired Magazine back in the day. It would take a general concept and give you three variations – one that was ‘of the moment,’ one that was recently popular but long in the tooth, and one which needed to have a stake put through its heart.

Jury finds Nike discriminated against former employee due to her gender – OPB

One of Oregon’s most globally recognized companies spent years paying a former employee less and promoting her at a snail’s pace due, in part, to her sex. That’s the conclusion of a jury deliberating in a case brought by Heather Hender, an engineer who worked at Nike for five years.

In 2026–27, Lewis & Clark plans to begin with one student cohort and one client. The goal is to build strong protocols, develop a meaningful student experience, and ensure that the work is genuinely useful to the participating organization. Over time, the program is expected to grow, impacting potentially dozens of community clients and more than 100 students.

The clinic’s services may include performing security assessments, analyzing systems, and formulating mitigation strategies against threats and weaknesses. Just as important, students will learn how to communicate clearly with clients, write professional reports, explain risks without jargon, and help organizations prepare for possible threats.

For more information, read the press release from Lewis & Clark.

Now, technology is making all of that work easier. Thanks to Bend based Quilld.

Quilld is a self-directed exercise that helps you build and house your brand messaging and identity systems—your voice, your positioning, your look, and your point of view. That foundation lives in Quilld, where everyone on your team can find it, use it, and build on it. No digging through drives. No outdated exports. Just your brand, ready when you need it.

The result? A brand that stays consistent not because you remember to keep it that way, but because the thinking is always within reach.

Sound interesting…? You can start mucking around with it for free. For additional functionality, you’ll need to pay.

For more information, visit Quilld.

Via Product Hunt:

Lemonvite is digital invitations and RSVP tracking for a flat $5 per event. No ads on the invite, no coins, no subscription, no marketing emails to guests. Evite shows your guests banner ads. Paperless Post charges “coins” that turn a $5 card into a $20 checkout. I wanted neither, so I built this. Build an invite in a minute or upload your own, send by email or SMS, track RSVPs on one dashboard.

For more information or to try it yourself, visit Lemonvite.

For more, see LinkedIn.

Palo Alto Networks® (NASDAQ: PANW), the global cybersecurity leader, today announced its intent to acquire Embrace, a leading provider of user-focused observability, to add high-fidelity Real User Monitoring (RUM) capabilities to the Palo Alto Networks Observability platform. Palo Alto Networks
 is also introducing Synthetics, a new capability built with its world-class Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) team, for proactively validating application performance from anywhere. These new capabilities will extend Palo Alto Networks Observability to Digital Experience Monitoring. Customers will gain a complete, unified view, from end-user interactions and proactive app validation to backend software and infrastructure, all on the industry’s leading, innovative, cost-effective platform.

For more information, read the press release from Palo Alto Networks.

(2010) Jive Software lands an additional $30 million, bringing more Kleiner Perkins money to Portland

So when Jive announces that they’ve secured another $30 million in funding, I’m going to cover it. Because some of that cash is going to come through the Portland office. And because the investor—juggernaut Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers—just happens to be the firm that just dropped $5 million in Puppet Labs’ proverbial pockets.

Safety and alignment in an era of long-horizon models | OpenAI

During limited, monitored internal use, we observed unwanted behavior that our existing deployment evaluations had not captured. Because the deployment was limited and monitored, we were able to identify these problems, pause access, create new evaluations based on what we observed, strengthen the model and its safeguards, and then restore access under continued monitoring.

Big Tech AI Spree Revives Accounting Devices That Toppled Enron

Enron Corp. exploited US accounting rules to hide from investors and lenders hundreds of millions in debt it had bundled into off-balance sheet entities — obligations that contributed to one of the biggest corporate collapses in US history. Twenty-five years later, new risks have emerged as some of the world’s most valuable companies create similar financing vehicles that can mask how much debt they’re taking on, as the technology industry looks to spend more than $3 trillion to power artificial intelligence systems.

Intel to co-develop and manufacture Fortinet’s next-gen firewall ASIC on Intel 4 — node gets its first named external customer | Tom’s Hardware

Intel and Fortinet have announced a strategic collaboration to develop the Fortinet Security Processor 6 (SP6), the next generation of the custom silicon behind Fortinet’s FortiGate firewalls. Intel will contribute chip design, advanced packaging, and manufacturing to the SP6 program, making Fortinet the first cybersecurity vendor named as an Intel silicon customer.

Hackers are exploiting recently patched WordPress bugs, putting millions of websites at risk | TechCrunch

Hackers are breaking into websites that run vulnerable versions of the popular blogging software WordPress, according to several cybersecurity firms. One estimate puts the number of vulnerable WordPress websites at tens of millions as of Monday.

Why I Stopped “Creating Content” · Refactoring English

When I talked about my personal blog, I just called it a blog. There was never a situation where “content” would have conveyed a richer meaning. My website visitors aren’t “traffic”; they’re readers. They don’t “generate engagement”; they send me comments or questions. When I started writing my book, I never called it an “info product.” It’s a book, and I’m its author.

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop

“The world’s best AI training data is sitting on a shelf,” ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is “the world’s largest book database,” and that offers high-volume book acquisition services for AI companies, says on its site. “Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative.”

Intel layoffs shake Oregon’s economy amid federal shift – Axios Portland

If highly paid, highly skilled workers (who make an average annual income of $110,000) leave the Hillsboro and Aloha area for other jobs, Oregon’s economy and tax revenue could take a big hit.

Legally or not, the US government is controlling global access to the world’s most powerful AI

As a legal scholar who studies technology law and policy, I see two fundamental questions arising from this incident: Can the U.S. government act as a gatekeeper to AI models? And did it do so lawfully in this instance?

Why a sabbatical can change everything – by Lenny Rachitsky

Life makes it hard to get off the default path and back onto a road of your own design. Sometimes that looks like leaving your job, like I did. Other times, it means reconnecting to why you’re doing the work you’re already doing. Either way, in my experience and that of many friends, significant time away from your day-to-day is necessary for the mental, physical, or emotional shift that will reveal what’s next. What you need is what today’s guest author DJ DiDonna calls “Big Time Off.”

The Productivity-Experience Paradox – Annie Vella

Measuring productivity is tricky. For starters, as an industry, we can’t really agree on what it even means, let alone how to measure it well. DORA defined it as “the extent to which an individual feels effective and efficient in their work, creating value and achieving tasks.” in their 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps report, and that sounds about right to me.

Portland Python User Group July 2026

In this talk, we’ll look at building applications and data pipelines that operate on unstructured or multimodal data using the open-source Ray framework. Ray provides abstractions for running distributed, scalable, stateful code as well as higher-level constructs for orchestrating data pipelines where you can supply your own business logic.

Hanyang University graduate entrepreneurship school partners with Oregon Angel Partners to support startups’ U.S. expansion

Hanyang University’s Graduate School of Entrepreneurship said on Tuesday it signed a memorandum of understanding with U.S. investment firm Oregon Angel Partners on July 15 at the Hanyang Institute of Technology to support South Korean startups entering the U.S. market. The agreement was designed to expand a foundation for ongoing exchanges and cooperation between South Korean and U.S. startup ecosystems.

Oregon’s Fairchild Moment — Oregon Venture Fund

The Fairchild analogy isn’t perfect. Fairchild produced dozens of companies over several decades, and Oregon is still early in that journey. And Intel, fresh off a $5B investment and strategic partnership with Nvidia, appears alive and well, with its stock up 5X over the past year.

Community Calls With Marshall Kirkpatrick: How Hawkeye Curates Your Ecosystem Intelligence and Drafts Your Newsletter and Magazines · Zoom · Luma

Are you interested in community building, knowledge sharing, learning, communication, and relationship building?   If so, you may enjoy seeing the many capabilities of this new system. (And you can meet other people working in tech, sustainability, and other fields who are interested in looking at the world this way, too.)

AI Portland: Great crowd, great views, great coffee!

Huge thanks to Instrument for hosting us. The space speaks for itself: soaring ceilings, that sculptural ceiling installation, floor-to-ceiling views of the West Hills. Deadstock Coffee kept everyone caffeinated, and there were plenty of treats to go around.

Away Days Brewing’s Soccer Fest filled an old downtown bank – Portland Business Journal

Over the course of this year’s five-week World Cup, the team at Away Days Brewing estimates they have brought about 18,000 people into downtown Portland as part of their Soccer Fest event.

Oregon USA — Pacific Gateway for Aviation & Manufacturing

Oregon USA convenes decision-makers around Oregon’s aviation, UAS, advanced manufacturing, and investment opportunities — beginning with the Oregon–South Korea Aviation Delegation Visit in July 2026.

PKI Solutions moves to downtown Portland office – Portland Business Journal

“Moves like this bring more talent, innovation and community support to Portland’s urban core, and it’s great to see PKI Solutions contributing to the city’s economic vitality and future,” said Skip Newberry, Technology Association of Oregon president and CEO in a written statement.

Weird Networking PDX 2.0 · Luma

Networking is weird by nature, so why not lean into it? Join us for a silly, satisfying, and incredibly dope hangout at a fun venue near you. Anyone but soulless corporate shills are welcome.

Against Claudefishing – by Chris Best – The Substack Post

When content made by no one takes over parts of the internet that are supposed to be human, it pollutes the commons and makes it hard to discover and hear human voices. When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in. Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.