Silicon Florist links arrangement for January 28, 2026

What's Next at Bluesky - Bluesky

Millions already use Bluesky, but there are far more out there who haven't joined yet, or tried it early on and didn't stick around. For most of them, the basics need to be solid before they'll stay. That means making it easier to post, easier to find great people to follow, and easier to discover content worth coming back for.

Governor’s goal of getting Oregon on CNBC’s Top 10 States for Business is misguided • Oregon Capital Chronicle

While state business rankings are good clickbait, their reflection of reality is highly questionable. Critics note that measuring a state’s “business climate” makes little sense, as there is a great deal of variability in how different industries and businesses fare within a state’s tax and regulatory system.

Management as AI superpower - by Ethan Mollick

It helped that they had some management and subject matter expertise because it turns out that the key to success was actually the last bit of the previous paragraph: telling the AI what you want. As AIs are increasingly capable of tasks that would take a human hours to do, and as evaluating those results becomes increasingly time consuming, the value of being good at delegation increases. But when should you delegate to AI?

Portland Invested Big in Emergency Shelter. How's It Going? — Shelterforce Shelterforce

Although Mayor Wilson has declared victory, more people in Portland are living unsheltered than before he came into office. Additionally, emergency shelters under the mayor’s plan only track percentage use rates. Even by this measure, many shelters are not close to being fully utilized, despite consistently high rates of homelessness.

Mozilla building an AI ‘rebel alliance’ to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

Surman is building what he’s described as “a rebel alliance of sorts,” using a phrase that’s long been part of Mozilla’s lexicon. In this case, the alliance is a loose network of tech startups, developers and public interest technologists committed to making AI more open and trustworthy and to checking the power of industry heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Amazon confirms 16,000 more corporate job cuts, bringing total to 30,000 since October – GeekWire

Amazon is laying off another 16,000 corporate employees globally, the company confirmed Wednesday morning, the second phase in a restructuring that now totals 30,000 positions — adding up to the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history.

Agent Native Architecture - by Sam Keen - Altered Craft

ANA represents an evolution beyond AI-enhanced and AI-first approaches, inverting the traditional relationship between schema and understanding: structured data becomes an output of reasoning, not an input required from users or hardcoded by developers. The paper defines the core requirements for ANA, including a determinism model that places orchestration in the agent while tools provide predictable operations.

Exclusive Data: Startups Are Learning What AI Profits Look Like

Gross margins for AI tools are rising, a new survey of 300 startups finds. But Google will be happier than Anthropic and OpenAI about which models they use.

Stop Coding and Start Planning

When vibe coding emerged, planning went out the window—at first. Why spend an hour planning when you could spend five minutes building the feature? I did it, too. “Make this feature work” was my entire instruction. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t.

Applied Intuition’s Path to Product-Market Fit — The $15B Founder’s Formula for a Winning Company

On paper, Younis believed he’d gathered all the right experiences to lead another successful company: engineering, finance, business school, product management, investing — even starting two companies. But in his view, training to become a well-rounded entrepreneur doesn’t begin and end with professional endeavors. He’s found exploring his personal curiosities to be just as important in shaping another important quality in founders: curiosity.

The New Rules for Fundraising in the AI Era

The problem isn’t that standards have dropped. It’s that growth patterns themselves have become far less clear. Companies can now spike to millions of users in weeks, then decline nearly as fast. Revenue can look spectacular on paper while masking fundamental weaknesses. Traditional benchmarks still get measured, but they’ve stopped being a complete marker of a startup’s growth and fundraising prospects.

The AI Mirror Effect: Why Your AI Evaluations Need Domain Experts | Goodeye Labs

Anthropic's latest Economic Index reported a nearly perfect correlation between how sophisticated your prompt is and how sophisticated Claude's response is. They buried this finding in text. We visualized it across 222 geographies.

From Oregon to the Global Stage: Two Founders Compete Internationally — TiE Oregon

When two founders from Oregon traveled to India to compete in a global startup competition, it followed success much closer to home. Both Melanie Jenkinson and Joshua Vanderpool had first emerged as winners through the TiE Oregon programs, TiE Women and TiE U, earning the opportunity to represent the region on an international stage.

Why We Invested: AiStrike — Oregon Venture Fund

We were introduced to AiStrike through another venture firm, and what immediately stood out was the credibility the team had earned with real buyers. CISOs told us the product felt grounded in operational reality - not theoretical or flashy but built by people who truly understand the day-to-day pressure of running security at scale. That credibility translated into early traction. In under a year, the company fully bootstrapped signed customers ranging from government agencies to small and global enterprises.

An 'extinction-level event' for startups: Seattle tech leaders fight new state tax proposal – GeekWire

It would mean startup founders or early employees who take stock instead of a bigger salary, and investors who back early-stage companies, would owe new taxes potentially totaling tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars when a company is acquired or goes public.