🤑 The AI Spending Boom

Spaces Are Going Fast — Register Now

Spots are running out for TechDay Climate Tech Founders Day on September 27 (next week)!

Why You Should Attend:

• Expert Funding Strategies: Hear from top climate investors about the funding environment and pack your playbook with up-to-date market insights

• Meet Industry Peers: Forge new connections in networking sessions

• Actionable Business Tactics: Get proven startup growth strategies from successful founders

Some of the leaders you can expect to hear from include…

• Sabira Alloo, Global Head of Private Equity Partnerships, Google

• Murat Aktihanoglu, Co-Founder, Managing Partner, Remarkable Ventures

• Matthew Hooper, Managing Partner, Kaplak Ventures

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You Won’t Want to Miss Out

Register for TechDay Climate Tech Founders Day today and help accelerate your growth in 2025 and beyond.

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🌟 Top News in Startupland 🌟 

Fei Fei Li’s Spatial AI Startup World Labs Raised $230 Million from a16z, New Enterprise Associates, and More

Fei-Fei Li has a new venture on her hands, and it is singing a new tune of $230 million raised. The startup, World Labs, was founded by Li and three colleagues Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall to improve how AI technology understands the 3D physical world.

Li is referred to as the “godmother of AI” for her profound role in the AI revolution and development of generative AI. Her earliest project ImageNet, a large-scale online image database that could recognize and render objects reliably in the physical world, laid the foundation for deep learning to take over.

Li’s latest venture World Labs builds upon her groundwork by training “large world models,” abbreviated as LWMs by the founders. LWMs are collections of data similar to LLMs, except instead of using language they operate off data trained to reason and imitate objects and places in the 3D world. Advanced LWMs would be revolutionary for AR/VR applications across various industries.

World Labs aims to use these LWMs, to speed track the spatial intelligence abilities of AI, “endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own,” according to its website. It also intends to decrease the number of hallucinations rendered by AI.

⚡️ Community Poll ⚡️

In last week’s poll, 97% of the TechDay community voted that cloud security software startup funding will boom as a result of recent data breaches and leaks.

Even More Headlines

🤖 ChatGPT’s o1 is here: a breakdown of OpenAI’s most advanced model yet and its supposedly unparalleled reasoning.

💰 Fearless Fund agrees to shut down its grant program for Black women business owners.

👨‍💻 OpenWeb founder-CEO refuses to step down and goes on a multiplatform tirade after his replacement was announced.

What You Need for a Great Q4: Video Content

Let’s talk about what everyone’s gearing up for in Q4: video. We’re talking explainers, customer testimonials, product demos. Video content that gets your message out there. Fast.

Marketers and founders are using this stuff everywhere. Websites, social media, sales decks—you name it. It’s a no-brainer if you want to stay ahead.

One agency that’s crushing it with video? Spacebar Visuals. These guys make the whole process easy, especially for startups like yours. They know you’re juggling a million things, so they take care of everything.

Here’s the best part: we’ve teamed up with them, and if you drop the word TechDay, you’ll get an exclusive startup deal. 

Ready to see what Spacebar Visuals can do for you? Let’s make it happen.

📚 Dive A Bit Deeper 📚

Marketing Novices at Startups Need to Know These Tips

When it comes to early-stage startups, the founder is often performing the jobs of 12 different people and four departments. CFO, Sales Director, PR Specialist, you name it. It’s in these early stages that founders learn the most through trial and error, especially when they are entering an area alien to their experience. 

Marketing is one such area. The field is constantly shifting and molding itself, and founders who do not have the experience or the guidance to navigate marketing field dynamics dive can quickly become overwhelming. 

Though not a founder, Jemma Wong, Chief Marketing Officer at the renewable energy platform Tem, went through a similar journey by teaching herself the ways of marketing while working at several startups. In an opinion piece for Sifted, she shares her top three tips for founders (and anyone else who works at a startup) embarking on their marketing careers early in their startup journeys:

1. Learn the Financials

   • Marketing and finance are distinguishable enough to be separate departments but are more symbiotic than one may assume. Wong suggests immediately forming a working relationship with the finance person or department at a startup. “Both of you are keepers of risk — and knowing how to play with risk is what will set your brand apart,” she shares. When a business expands or contracts, becomes high growth or undergoes a rough patch, the marketing must change along with it during these periods.

2. Trust Your Gut

   • Startup founders must dive into opportunities if there is an opportunity for their business to succeed. So, this means founders should have confidence in their ability to take on new roles and responsibilities, as well as have faith in and be willing to defend their decisions. Those are the moments when you learn about your ability to lead. Wong explains, “You won’t finetune your judgement in marketing by sitting in data, you need to actively apply it.”

3. Pick Your Metric Battles

   • In marketing, there is a metric for every little thing, but not every metric applies to a startup’s goals. When gathering data for marketing reports, Wong suggests looking at the data that measure “whether your brand has a sustainable impact. sustainable impact.” Everything else is nice to have, but not need to know.

Learning how to market effectively for your startup is a skill, a muscle you need to train. With these three tips, you will be on your way to mastering marketing at your startup and set yourself, and your business, up for long-term success.

Deep Dives Galore

🤑 THE AI SPENDING BOOM — Like a froyo cup filled with two flavors and a mountain of toppings (including whipped cream), AI is ambitious, a bit frightening, and exhaustively expensive. Yet, VCs keep buying into it despite it being unclear if it will be worth it in the end. Here are some charts that spell out how AI is shaping VC dollars.

👤 THE EQUITY CONVO — Equity is commonplace in startup culture, potentially reaping great rewards for the employees who stay on with a company when it makes big money. If you are a part of a startup and truly believe in the product and company mission, there is an advantage to asking for more equity.