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

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

SPEND - 48% of equity-backed private SaaS companies are running at a loss, versus 17% bootstrapped. Crazy stat - VC-backed companies are spending 100% more on marketing and customer success, and 70% more on sales, to grow 25% a year against a bootstrappers' 20% average. The biggest single line is R&D at 22% of revenue, ahead of sales at 15% and marketing at 8%.

BUYERS vs USERS

The person writing you a check is not necessarily the same person getting value out of your business. So take a read of this insightful article from HeavyBit on differentiating messaging based on this premise and the different profiles.

SPEED

Sure, AI can make you fast - but can it make your company faster? This article argues that it's because we are handing off the slow stuff to everyone downstream of you.

BEZOS

The AI Corner watched a 90-minute Jeff Bezos interview so you don't have to, and also pulled 10 ideas founders and investors should/could steal. Here's a good one - the engineer's job is not typing code; it's identifying problems, and that's the layer that survives.

VENTURE

Venture is on a boom. Global venture funding reached an all-time record of $510B in H1 2026 (ALL of 2025 was $440B). Sounds crazy, but the majority of that money is concentrated into some insane deals (OpenAI and Anthropic account for $217 B of that figure all by themselves). IPOs and M&A are also back.

AI COSTS

It's getting competitive - Model prices are collapsing. a16z clocked a 100x drop, from $60 to $0.60 per million tokens in three years. But AI bills are going the other way - because token burn is going way up.

SEARCH 1/2

Check out this study of 1M+ high-volume keywords - about a 30% decline in search demand. But SaaS is a winner: its search volume is up 48% year-over-year, one of only three verticals beating the AI-driven drop-off. FinTech got hit hardest; it's down 37.7%. Also - crazy new data point - 18% of consumers have bought something on an AI recommendation without running a separate search

SEARCH 2/2

Want to read a 40-page paper on "The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience"? Didn't think so, so here is the TL;DR - When a Google AI Overview appears (on about 40% of searches), clicks throughs drop 39.8% and zero-click searches jump 34.5%. What is interesting here is that Ad clicks don't move, so Google's revenue is just fine, and the publisher eats the loss. Users were no happier with the summaries than without - so it's diverting traffic without really helping the searcher.

JOBS

Everyone's future problem - AI is eating the bottom of the Dev career ladder, not the top. US software developers aged 22 to 25 are down 19% from their late-2022 peak, while the 41-to-49 cohort is up 14%.

CASE STUDY

Coca-Cola cut their marketing-investment decision cycle from two weeks to an hour using 'Fuel Light 360', their proprietary AI scenario-modeling tool. It lets teams model marketing spend scenarios in real time, which also shifted meetings from arguing over whose right to actual decisions.