Here’s a roundup of interesting startup links I came across today:
TAO’s Skip Newberry on Oregon’s bright AI future – Portland Business Journal
Oregon is third in the world for IT transaction volume behind only Virginia and Beijing. Notably, Oregon is also home to 15% of the U.S. semiconductor workforce, and the vast majority of those jobs are in R&D. When it comes to the future of semiconductors, Oregon is responsible for designing and prototyping what’s next.
Washington’s ‘millionaires tax’ targets top earners with 9.9% tax
“This tax is just another brick in the wall of anti-entrepreneurialism from state and local legislators. The average Amazon employee probably won’t mind, but this stuff is devastating to company creation,” Kirby Winfield, founding general partner at Seattle venture capital firm Ascend, said via email.
Foureyes new Connect platform helps car dealerships use AI – Portland Business Journal
Ultimately the platform breaks down the silos of different data across websites, phone systems, inventory tools and customer relationship management programs. Doing so allows dealers to easily get the information they’re seeking, as opposed to having to search through separate reports.
Pick your agent: Use Claude and Codex on Agent HQ – The GitHub Blog
Claude by Anthropic and OpenAI Codex are now available in public preview on GitHub and VS Code with a Copilot Pro+ or Copilot Enterprise subscription. Here’s what you need to know and how to get started today.
What you need to know before starting a business
ARC PDX’s Barry Mangold spoke with attorney Lindy Laurence, with Rational Unicorn, who helps businesses get off the ground to find out what you should know before setting up shop.
Owning a $5M data center – comma.ai blog
If your business relies on compute, and you run that compute in the cloud, you are putting a lot of trust in your cloud provider. Cloud companies generally make onboarding very easy, and offboarding very difficult. If you are not vigilant you will sleepwalk into a situation of high cloud costs and no way out. If you want to control your own destiny, you must run your own compute.
AI is Killing B2B SaaS | N’s Blog
The new problem for B2B SaaS is that with AI, customers can get something working with vibe coding. There are tens of vibe coding “internal tool” services that promise to connect to every integration in the world to pump out CRUD and workflow apps.
Lessons of a First-Time Fund Manager – by Mario Gabriele
Though venture capital is awash in content, in my view, there’s too little introspective writing on the mental game of fund management. Below, you’ll find my attempt to distill the most important lessons I’ve learned so far.
Corporate profits, consumer spending reverse Oregon’s deficit but budget challenges remain • Oregon Capital Chronicle
Lawmakers meeting at the Capitol will have significantly more money to work with than expected state economists previously predicted
AddyOsmani.com – Agentic Engineering
The problem is that “vibe coding” has become a suitcase term. People now use it to describe everything from a weekend hack to a disciplined engineering workflow where AI agents handle implementation under human oversight. These are fundamentally different activities, and conflating them is causing real confusion – and real damage.
I miss thinking hard.
By “thinking hard,” I mean encountering a specific, difficult problem and spending multiple days just sitting with it to overcome it.
Trump Administration Illegally Seeks to Cancel Millions in Funding For Electric Vehicle Charging, Again | Sierra Club
We fought tooth and nail to reverse the administration’s unlawful freeze of the NEVI charging program—and we won. We’ll do the same for CFI.
Consumer Product People – Portland | Meetup
Building things people can actually hold is different, and we should talk about it. Consumer Product People is a home for product managers, designers, and makers who want thoughtful conversation, practical learning, and community around physical products.