Top 10 in Tech

Issue 385

August 21 2026

Permalink →

This issue uses the long-form layout — read it on its own page →

Get the top 10, every Friday

Curated SaaS and tech insight from around the web, repackaged for people to put to good use — free.

Issue 384

August 14 2026

Permalink →

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

Churn.: See #2 for more on Churn\*\*.\*\* According to CatchJS, though, we're all calculating churn rates wrong. If you love Statistics, the article is well worth reading, and it even gives some Python code to perform the more complicated probability-based equation they recommend. You can then check out this tool (as a handy Google Sheet) from Newfund as a way to analyze the strength of revenue streams for any B2B startup. A complimentary article outlining the methodology behind the tool is here (and you should read it first).

CHURN

See #1 above\*\*;\*\* it's the ultimate leaky bucket. BVP's guide on tackling customer churn explains how to identify root causes and implement strategies to reduce attrition (that can be terminal). Analyzing churn data, improving customer onboarding, and enhancing product value to retain users are all in there. The guide also provides actionable steps for creating a comprehensive churn action plan to plug those leaks.

INVESTMENT

Hey founders - check yourself (at least your metrics) - Investors have an experienced nose for this stuff, and generally, legitimately good metrics only mean something in pairs. NRR next to GRR tells you if retention is real or propped up by your upsells. Burn multiple at 1.1x - nice, that's top quartile. Now look at Rule of 40 next to it, down from 38% to 22% in four quarters? That's not efficiency, that's a company that stopped spending and stopped growing at the same time.

ONBOARDING (STAFF)

Only 12% of employees reckon their company onboards them well, so check out these 7 steps for onboarding a new team member (and they start two weeks before day one). Real handy if your onboarding currently means a laptop, slap on the back, and a Slack invite.

VENTURE

Carta's VC Fund Performance Q1 2026 is out. $3.9B raised across 86 new funds, the strongest start to a year since 2022, and TVPI (Total Value to Paid-In) is up for nearly every fund vintage. All on paper though. The median 2017 fund has returned 0.31x to its LPs after nine years, and 2018 sits at 0.15x.

AGENTS

Computer-using agents went from 42% on OSWorld a year ago to 85% today (which is past the 72% humans score). Before you get outraged and/or excited - 85% means 15 of every 100 tasks failed, and a business process only finishes if every step does. $6-8 an hour is what a16z reckons it costs to run a computer-using agent, against $10 for offshore people and $30-45 for a US back-office worker.

CPU

Turns out the agent boom isn't only a GPU story - AWS engineers were told in May to cut CPU waste and now reportedly wait days for an EC2 instance that used to take hours - agentic workloads are making CPUs scarce. Apparently, Intel, AMD, and others say customers will take whatever they can get.

VISIBILITY

Your sales are flat so you post more, add a platform, say yes to another podcast......etc. Sylvia Huang calls it "the visibility treadmill" - more output, same revenue, tireder founder. The real question underneath: have enough of the right people actually seen this yet? Until they have, you can't tell a reach problem from a product problem.

TRUST

Report time and ignore the Plaid bias evident in this - rest of it is good. 44% of Americans would let an AI agent execute trades, it goes up to 54% for Gen Z and Millennials. But on the other hand, 80% of Americans think companies should reimburse them when AI makes a mistake with their money, and 78% say AI should be held to the same accountability standards as a human advisor. Can you have your AI cake and eat it?

CASE STUDY

M&A -: Airtable just sold to Bending Spoons for $1.3B, and they last raised at $11.7B in 2021! CJ Gustafson pulled 10 lessons out of it, and they're all worth your time, but here's the one that stings: back-of-the-envelope math from 20vc says nobody who invested after March 2018 made money (that includes employees).

Issue 383

August 7 2026

Permalink →

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

ARR per employee. This is a BIG one for 2026 - the median B2B SaaS company now makes $193K per head, up 29% in a single year, per Aleph and Benchmarkit. The SaaS CFO calls it the biggest one-year move he's seen - AI absorbing work that used to need headcount. R&D as a share of revenue dropped 8 points to 27% over the same stretch.

GROWTH

That 'fastest ever to $100M ARR' headline you keep seeing? Warp's Zach Lloyd says pop the hood and a lot of these AI startups are just reselling inference (and that's at close to zero or negative margin) - so of their $100M ARR, maybe $90M flows straight to Anthropic or OpenAI. Easy to grow, ugly to own, nasty to invest in.

SEED

YC's guide to seed fundraising is still one of the best on the why and how - SAFEs over notes, raise fast then get back to building, let the market set your price. Just ignore the prices. It pegs a seed at $500k-$1.5M around a $2-10M valuation. Carta's Q4 median seed post-money is now $24M. The playbook holds, the numbers doubled.

STARTUPS

The rumors of SF/Silicon Valley being over/cooked have been talking points circulating for years (often measured by U-Haul rates, office vacancy, and Austin lovers): wrong metric, y'all. Per Carta's startup ecosystem leaderboard (measuring $124B of capital over the last 12 months), the Bay Area takes 53.4% of every AI dollar and 56.3% of every B2B dollar. Add New York and those two metros swallow 72% of B2B venture.

MATH

Good one for all us Math nerds - AI just disproved three fairly famous math conjectures in a matter of weeks - problems that had been open for decades (and one for a full century). The models aren't proving big theorems yet. They're finding counterexamples: the low-hanging fruit we stopped checking because we assumed they were true.

OVERPROMISING

We've all done it - promise your best person a promotion, and they're happy for about a day before drifting back to baseline. Deliver it, and they tick up a little. Fail to deliver, and they bottom out for years, and it never stops feeling unfair. Stay SaaSy's rule: never let a happy promise leave your lips unless it's already certain.

SPACEX

Their AI division is spending all their money, but Starlink went from 6 to 12 million subscriptions in a year and $4.3B of quarterly revenue. Now SpaceX wants your phone bill too - building a ground network of towers to sit under the satellites, because AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all refused to rent access.

M&A

Apparently it's a big-time seller's market if you've got the right story. Buyer's market for everyone else. That's GLC's Jim Williams' take on 2026 SaaS M&A. Most deals still clear 3-6x revenue - GRR above 90% and NRR above 100% is now expected (top dollar is more like 92-93% GRR and 110-120% NRR), plus $15M ARR, 40%+ growth, and profitable (or a clear path there).

MARKETING

5 social media strategies for all you early-stage founders, here is a good one to entice you to click: Someone replies to your post. Do not immediately offer them a demo.

CASE STUDY

$14 and a week is what it took SaaStr to move 10 years of data and 450,000 contacts off Marketo. Ten years as one of the first ten customers, ended by an agent. If switching costs were your moat - agents just repriced them. Migration isn't friction anymore.

Issue 382

July 31 2026

Permalink →

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

QUOTAS: Top reps carry more than you think. Per ICONIQ's 2026 GTM data that I referenced a couple of weeks back, top-quartile quotas now run $750K (SMB), $1.35M (mid-market), and $2.25M (enterprise) - and attainment is UP, 85-90% vs the usual 65-75%. Jason Lemkin has a warning: if your enterprise AE is still on $1.5M, you're leaving about 30% on the table, but crank it without the pipeline to back it and attrition will spike.

PRICING

Here's the gut-punch in AI pricing: the customer who loves your product most is also probably the one bleeding you dry. On a flat plan, the power user running the biggest model all day can cost several times what they pay, while the light user quietly subsidizes them. The AI Corner's pitch isn't subscription vs usage, it's charging for the outcome, not the tokens.

BENCHMARKS

A meaty one from SaasRise - (and actually a mashup of other reports and studies): 15+ datasets and 2,500 SaaS companies in one place. The headlines: median growth 26%, NRR down to 101%, gross margin 75%, LTV:CAC 3.3x. AI-native firms grow \~4x legacy but get leaky at the low end. Segmented by size, AI type, and vertical. Tons of good content in there.

MARKETING

Great article (and a self-retrospective review by the author) for a bunch of you early stagers running marketing by yourself. 7 wish-I-would-have-known-tips. For example - Found one channel that works? The instinct is to go list 10 more to try - that's how you end up six months later with a pile of stuff that flopped and no idea why - Don't! Went viral on LinkedIn once? Post daily.

PROMPTING

If you're building on AI (and I know y'all are), your carefully layered instructions are probably hurting you now. Teachable moment - Anthropic stripped 80%+ of Claude Code's system prompts on newer models and coding scores held up. The old habits (examples, hard rules, repeating yourself) constrain today's models. Apparently we need to trim our prompts and let the thing use its judgment.

SEARCH

What we all assumed was a big decline in "Googling" due to Gemini resulting in revenue decline at Alphabet was wrong! Google Ad Revenue is up 14.5% with Revenue Up 24% - it's their biggest quarter ever. They are also sending billions of clicks to websites weekly through AI search.

LEGITIMACY

This one is a longer read for your morning coffee. Tech is gaining the most power it's ever had over society at the exact moment it also seems to have stopped caring how society sees it. It all seems like an insider game, and none of it buys legitimacy with the actual society tech is busy reshaping. So be tech contrary. The flex might be the opposite of lean. The article pitches, in a world scared of AI taking jobs, go 'employeemaxing' - hiring lots of humans, junior ones, beyond just coastal cities.

SOFTWARE

According to a16z, public software is trading at its lowest premium on cash flow since 2014. Cyber, observability, and vertical SaaS seem to be holding up; horizontal SaaS and infrastructure are getting dumped. Sticky ARR, huge feature sets, broad adoption is yesterday's news. The market's verdict: software alone is no longer your moat. What is then?

AEO

Getting recommended by an LLM isn't an SEO problem, it's a positioning one. Adam DuVander says the question isn't your rank but the gaps: where do you beat competitors on a use case, where are you invisible? Add a couple words to a prompt, and the context flips - so tight positioning actually wins.

CASE STUDY

Oura (smart rings) grew from $0 to $1B revenue in 10 Years - here is an overview of 9 growth levers behind it.

▌ Older issues Full archive (385) →

Top 10 in Tech — A weekly top 10 for B2B tech operators: SaaS metrics, pricing, retention, GTM, fundraising and product strategy. Published every Friday.

August 21 2026

August 14 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

CHURN

INVESTMENT

ONBOARDING (STAFF)

VENTURE

AGENTS

CPU

VISIBILITY

TRUST

CASE STUDY

August 7 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

GROWTH

SEED

STARTUPS

MATH

OVERPROMISING

SPACEX

M&A

MARKETING

CASE STUDY

July 31 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

PRICING

BENCHMARKS

MARKETING

PROMPTING

SEARCH

LEGITIMACY

SOFTWARE

AEO

CASE STUDY