# Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 24, 2026

Published: 24 July 2026
Canonical: https://www.top10in.tech/posts/top-10-in-tech-what-to-know-for-week-ending-july-24-2026

## 1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

Customer Renewal Rate: measures the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions at the end of each subscription period. High renewal rates inform companies about lots of things - product-market-fit, market, pricing fit, value, business model viability, etc. [The authors of this article from Paddle](https://www.profitwell.com/recur/all/renewal-rate) describe the formula and also make the point of differentiating between renewal and retention - one is actively renewing, the other is not actively canceling.

Link: https://www.profitwell.com/recur/all/renewal-rate

## 2. BACKEND

Back of house needs more love in this newsletter **-** [Gartner reckons ](https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/ai-adoption-pc1)that within a few years, 80% of API calls will come from AI agents, not humans. That changes what a back end has to do: waves of agents hammering endpoints non-stop, each with its own quirks. iii founder Mike Piccolo argues [the fix is a new core primitive](https://www.heavybit.com/library/article/back-end-engineering-in-the-age-of-ai), same way that React tamed the front end.

Link: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/ai-adoption-pc1

## 3. MVT

Here is another one for your tech dictionaries: [MVT or Minimum Viable Testing, ](https://review.firstround.com/the-minimum-viable-testing-process-for-evaluating-startup-ideas)which is about creating hypotheses and conducting tests that allow you to predict if a market is going to appreciate a product before even launching an MVP.

Link: https://review.firstround.com/the-minimum-viable-testing-process-for-evaluating-startup-ideas

## 4. PRODUCT MARKET FIT

This is a new AI-era trap - sky-high early usage that looks like product-market fit may really just be experimentation budget and play. Bessemer has [a playbook for AI founders ](https://www.bvp.com/atlas/mastering-product-market-fit-a-detailed-playbook-for-ai-founders)that separates this out - novelty spikes churn, durable ARR. Track your second-order usage - hey, do people come back for a second project and not just the first they tried?

Link: https://www.bvp.com/atlas/mastering-product-market-fit-a-detailed-playbook-for-ai-founders

## 5. DEAD INTERNET

According to Cloudflare, [more than half of all web traffic is now nonhuman](https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/), and human visits to finance, publishing, and retail sites fell about 40% between June '25 and April '26. [Google's AI Mode](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/technology/personaltech/google-ai-mode-search.html) is answering queries and keeping the user - one study found people never left it in [75% of sessions](https://www.growth-memo.com/p/what-our-ai-mode-user-behavior-study). Google disputes that, but the NY Times [takes a more balanced view](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technology/google-ai-open-web.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zVA.zlFm.N0yQj1yEmr0B&smid=url-share&utm_source=tldrnewsletter): Google Is Building a Fence (intentional or not) around the internet. Oh, and they are also [building that shit into Chips](https://thenextweb.com/news/google-frozen-chip-gemini-silicon)!

Link: https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-internet-bot-report/

## 6. PRODUCTIVITY

Here is [a great study on AI tools and productivity](https://annievella.com/posts/the-productivity-experience-paradox/) - but first here is my TL;DR (because I'm pretty sure we can ALL relate to this study): AI makes engineers faster, but the work stopped being enjoyable - and those two things used to go together. The stats are 84% of engineers say AI makes them more productive, but in the same study, the share reporting a worse developer/work experience nearly doubled, 14% to 27%. Productivity dashboards may be awesome - but your people are  :-(

Link: https://annievella.com/posts/the-productivity-experience-paradox/

## 7. TIME-OUT

A two-week break never fixes burnout - it takes six to eight weeks just to stop checking your calendar. DJ DiDonna, who interviewed hundreds of sabbatical takers, says [the real reset doesn't begin until about two months in](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-take-a-sabbatical), and the sweet spot is six to twelve. A month off is a long holiday, not a sabbatical. Some founders take a sabbatical and quietly turn it into another project - the yoga retreat becomes a teaching certification. DJ calls that "the Achiever"- hah!

Link: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-take-a-sabbatical

## 8. MARKETS

For years, Stripe was, by far, the largest privately held business - these days it sits at number 7 and now that that Space/AI whatever train wreck that is SpaceX has gone public, [Anthropic is now the most valuable private company in the world](https://www.newsletter.datadrivenvc.io/p/what-s-hot-in-m-a-multiples-by-sector-concentration-at-the-top-here-s-the-state-of-the-market-in-jul?utm_source=www.newsletter.datadrivenvc.io&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=what-s-hot-in-m-a-multiples-by-sector-concentration-at-the-top-here-s-the-state-of-the-market-in-july-2026) (at an estimated $965B) - the whoel top 10 is massive though and the market is still doing fewer transactions at large to massive average sizes. A pattern that has been pretty consistent for a while.

Link: https://www.newsletter.datadrivenvc.io/p/what-s-hot-in-m-a-multiples-by-sector-concentration-at-the-top-here-s-the-state-of-the-market-in-jul?utm_source=www.newsletter.datadrivenvc.io&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=what-s-hot-in-m-a-multiples-by-sector-concentration-at-the-top-here-s-the-state-of-the-market-in-july-2026

## 9. DEMOS

Founders spend a month on the deck and an hour on the Demo, which, if you think about it, it seems backwards. The deck only says you built the thing. The Demo proves it, live, in front of someone. The VC Corner has some [good top demo tips](https://www.thevccorner.com/p/how-to-give-top-tier-demos), including pick the one belief you want the room to leave with, open on the pain, not the product, and end with a specific ask.

Link: https://www.thevccorner.com/p/how-to-give-top-tier-demos

## 10. CASE STUDY

Demos - continuing on from number 9 above  - For my day-time business, demos play a pivotal role in our sales process to experientially show and discuss the value we can bring to a prospective customer; we also offer some of those on demand. The team at Content Beta analyzed a bunch of Product demo videos and [reported back on places where these videos went right (or wrong)](https://www.contentbeta.com/blog/product-demo-video/).

Link: https://www.contentbeta.com/blog/product-demo-video/

## POD OF THE WEEK

[The Future of AI in B2B SaaS:](https://open.spotify.com/episode/1mUUCkR2YwHIYHMhG66nfi?si=xMH-FY-GQ0Cdai6N8DKzRw) Insights from Synthesia and Theory Ventures - covers all kinds of stuff, from enterprise AI adoption to the evolution of video technology and the changing landscape of venture funding.

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/1mUUCkR2YwHIYHMhG66nfi?si=xMH-FY-GQ0Cdai6N8DKzRw