Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 28, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK - MMM

This is a new acronym for your tech dictionaries - MMM, or Marketing mix modeling, is used to measure the cross-channel impact of all the various marketing and non-marketing drivers on your startup's sales or business efforts and performance. Google's Meridian is its open-source take on it.

PRINCIPLES

I love me some laws and principles - here is a new list of 10 of the lesser known ones. Hanlon's Razor is a goodie: rather than questioning people's intentions, question their competence.

AI THESIS

Sarah Guo built Conviction around one bet: the biggest AI opportunities sit above the foundation models, not inside them. Her logic is simple - the labs become infrastructure, while startups win by owning the application, workflow, and customer.

VERTICAL INTEGRATION

Counterpoint to Sarah Guo above (#3). Akash Bajwa reckons model labs and agent companies are converging the stack, not separating - Anthropic is building products while Harvey is training models. The endgame may be owning the model, the application, the workflow, and the customer around it.

WATERMARKS

Last week Anthropic/Claude announced that it will now embed an invisible watermark into the text it generates - and it can survive copy-paste and some editing. The weird bit: even using Claude to proofread or translate your own writing can leave the mark. Heavy rewriting can break it, but a third-party detection tool is coming. (not necessarily by choice - this is part of Anthropic's EU AI Act compliance).

BENCHMARKS

Stop asking if you're above average. This article argues the more useful benchmark question is whether you're improving faster than everyone or anyone else. Your own trend shows change; the market trend tells you whether that change was actually yours or just the tide coming in for everyone.

SPEND

Speaking of Benchmarks, the SaaS Capital Spending Benchmarks for B2B SaaS Companies is out - bookmark this when it's time to benchmark your wallets y'all! Bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies spend 96% of ARR (hey - I do better than that!!), while VC-backed ones burn 101% (last year it was 95% vs 106%). Equity-backed teams in turn grow at 25% average vs 20% if your boots are strapped.

RETENTION

Meta laid off 10% of staff and reassigned 20-30% of software engineers to AI whatever - now they are reportedly offering $400K-$1M+ in equity to senior engineers trying to resign after layoffs/AI reassignments. Some still left for Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

LIQUIDITY

Startup liquidity is quietly becoming its own market. Carta administered 71 tender offers worth $3B in H1 2026 - the highest first-half total it's logged in at least six years. With IPOs taking longer, tenders are becoming the liquidity pressure valve for employees and investors.

CASE STUDY

WISE: Wise's original Seed deck is basically the opposite of most pitch decks today. No giant TAM slide, no AI-generated design theatre. It explains the problem, shows the before/after economics, proves people are already using it, then asks for $1.3M.