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Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 12 2026

Friday 09:00 NZT Curated by Jon Davies
Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 12, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

ARR alone doesn't tell you what kind of growth you're getting. Check this article (and dashboard) breaks MRR into New, Expansion, Contraction, Churned, Net New, and Ending. A company growing through expansion behaves very differently from one that depends entirely on new logos. Only the Excel bit is paywalled. The diagnostic logic: if trials are stable but activation drops, fix onboarding. If activation is good but the paid conversion flat, the value moment is unclear. If the active base grows faster than acquisition, retention is doing the work.

JOBS 1/2

Pragmatic Engineer has a two-part State of the Software Engineering Job Market 2026 ( here for part 2). It's way less doom and gloom than we assume (see below for more). Meta grew software engineering 20% over two years, then laid off 10% last week. Apple up 10%, Google up 5%, Microsoft and Amazon flat. But Scaleups grew faster: Ramp +94%, Wiz +84%, Datadog +68%, Rippling +55%. AI engineering roles are way up - 50-100% YoY at large tech firms.

JOBS 2/2

Benedict Evans following up on the doom and gloom bit above on why AI job-exposure analyses don't work. The test case: 50 years of financial automation (VisiCalc to ERP to cloud). If you'd done a "professions exposed to automation" chart anytime since the 70s, Accountants would have been at the top. Instead, the accountant headcount kept going up. Just look at the Big 4.

CASH

And shit loads of it - how are we all not screwed? Google generates $174B in annual cash flow - literally the best business model on earth - and it's not enough for that hungry hungry AI. They're spending more this year on AI infrastructure than the world's best cash machine can produce - their solution - an $80B equity raise (the largest ever), $100B+ in total debt up from $25B a year ago, a 100-year bond at 6.125% (matures 2126) - WTF. Anthropic and SpaceX (now an AI company) and OpenAI are all listing REAL soon - so much cash about to be thrown around.

QUOTA

Interesting idea - Your VP Sales (hopefully) has a quota. Your VP Marketing probably needs one too. Check Jason Lemkin's classic 3-question hiring filter: 1) What was your lead/opportunity commit at your last company, and how was it determined? 2) I want to hit $Xm ARR by year-end - what do we do in the first 90 days? 3) How should sales and marketing work together to hit it? If they fumble on this, they prob never owned a number.

GROWTH

Another Lemkin's post: As discussed in prior weeks' posts (see #9 on Productivity), AI broke the link between revenue and headcount. When Google crossed $30B in revenue, it had 32,000 people. When Salesforce did, it had 79,000. Anthropic crossed it with 5,000. And the Time-to-$1T is even more crazy: Apple 42 years, Google 21 years, OpenAI \~10 years, Anthropic \~5 years.

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