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Startups keep shaking things up: Robinhood dives into copy trading, founders roll out AI tools, and even skincare brands are rewriting the rules.
Microsoft is hedging its AI bets with Anthropic, while Amazon takes a swing at AR glasses. Finance, hardware, future-of-work—it’s all moving fast, and we’ve got the highlights.
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Six bullets of updates
📊 Robinhood rolls out copy trading as U.S. social investing surges, letting users follow top traders’ moves in real time .
🎓 Anchor’s founders launch an AI app that lets anyone build custom courses in minutes; no teaching background required.
📰 Publishers can track stories’ performance in real time and boost reach with Reddit Pro’s new analytics toolkit.
🧴 Men’s skincare gets its glow-up as one founder challenges stereotypes with an eight-figure brand built from dry skin.
🗝️ After leaving Mississippi, Bluesky will stay live in SD & WY under new age checks that it calls a fair compromise.
☁️ OpenAI will spend $300B on compute over five years in a historic cloud deal with Oracle.
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🤝 Microsoft Diversifies AI Partnerships With Anthropic Amid OpenAI Tensions
Microsoft is hedging its AI bets by shopping for models from Anthropic, OpenAI’s main competition. This shift hints at both a backup plan in case OpenAI ever gets a case of “startup-itis” and a not-so-subtle attempt to gain leverage in the AI arms race.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is busy building an exit strategy from Microsoft’s influence with its own infrastructure and rumored plans for a LinkedIn rival. If one partner sneezes, the other reaches for a raincoat, classic platform power games in the making.
The stakes? Whoever controls the next wave of AI platforms sets the rules, and cash flows, for the rest.
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Every SaaS Acronym Explained
In this video, we break down SaaS metrics from the very basics to the advanced cohort tables that can predict your company’s future. We cover everything from MRR, LTV, churn and retention, customer lifetime, CAC to LTV ratios, annual subscriptions, ARR, ARPU, and revenue churn—giving you the full toolkit to understand and manage your startup’s growth.
😎 More videos here 😎
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Keep This Stock Ticker on Your Watchlist
They’re a private company, but Pacaso just reserved the Nasdaq ticker “$PCSO.”
No surprise the same firms that backed Uber, eBay, and Venmo already invested in Pacaso. What is unique is Pacaso is giving the same opportunity to everyday investors. And 10,000+ people have already joined them.
Created a former Zillow exec who sold his first venture for $120M, Pacaso brings co-ownership to the $1.3T vacation home industry.
They’ve generated $1B+ worth of luxury home transactions across 2,000+ owners. That’s good for more than $110M in gross profit since inception, including 41% YoY growth last year alone.
And you can join them today for just $2.90/share. But don’t wait too long. Invest in Pacaso before the opportunity ends September 18.
Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.
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AI Pitch Deck Reviewer
Slidebean has been helping startups craft pitch decks for over 10 years. We recently built an AI Pitch Deck Review tool, that processes the text and visuals on your presentation, and provides actionable feedback on the story, potential missing items, and recommendations on how to improve each slide.
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🥽 Amazon Enters Augmented Reality Glasses Market to Challenge Meta
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
Amazon is suiting up for a fresh hardware brawl, plotting its own augmented-reality glasses offensive against Meta’s Ray-Bans.
With every tech giant chasing life-after-smartphone, smartglasses are the latest battleground for capturing consumer data; and maybe eyeballs, too. Amazon sees a window of opportunity, especially as competitors still can’t quite decide if wearable AR is the next iPhone or just a fancy Bluetooth headset.
If this experiment moves past the Alexa-on-your-face phase, it could change how we shop, work, and interact everywhere from Target aisles to remote work meetings. Hardware graveyards are littered with failed smartglasses, but whoever gets this right could own the future of “ambient” computing and collect the data to prove it.
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Startup Events and Deadlines
TODAY! Crash Course in Financial Modeling | 11 Sept | Webinar
New York Venture Summit | 9, 10 Sept | NYC
Techstars Foundercon 2025 | 15-17 Sept | USA, Colorado
Antler Canada | Deadline: Sept 29 | Canada
500 Startups Flagship Accelerator l Deadline: Oct 11 l USA
Mental Health Tech Summit 2025 l October 15 l NYC