Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 23, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

WIN RATE: This is calculated via closed-won deals divided by qualified opportunities. It's easy to track, and also easy to ignore while everyone stares at their pipeline. According to Jason Lemkin, Owner.com took theirs from 38% to 53% in 10 weeks by having AI score every sales call. Check this list of ways to move it runs from pricing and qualification to the deals that ghosted you.

APPLE

One for the Digital Marketers - Your iPhone retargeting numbers might be about to look weird. AdExchanger reports iOS 27 is quietly blocking hundreds of programmatic data companies across every browser on the phone. Is Apple now a shadow ad regulator?

VENTURE

Corporates are now also on the Cap Table for almost every big AI round. About 88% of US AI deals have some kind of corporate (BUT - Nvidia wrote most of that). Looking at KPMG's Q3 Venture Pulse - corporate VC hit $532.8B at the end of Q3 - already a record year, and 14 deals above $1.5B. PitchBook's new note also prices market entry into the AI frontier at about $100B over five years.

AI

85% of enterprises are working on agentic AI, but only 5% have one in production that pays its way. Uber's agentic coding usage went from 32% to 84% across \~5,000 engineers in a month. The year's token budget was gone by April. That's one of the cases in Ray Rike and Peter Buchanan's rundown of the six things stopping agentic AI from paying off.

VIABILITY

This one is for you early-stagers - Sylvia Huang's guide to early-stage viability lays out what to watch at each step. Good stuff in here - from pre-revenue intent through retention, repeatability, and unit economics to tell them apart.

SECURITY

Tunguz's 2026 survey of 455 senior technical builders. Cloudflare hosts 62% of agent sandboxes. 45% route across models. 48% review AI logs with coding agents. And security is now the #1 headache, up from sixth last year.

PRICING

If you're selling agents by the seat, your buyers have moved on. G2's 2026 survey of 1,019 B2B decision-makers - 57% now prefer pay-as-you-go (38% last year), 19% pay-per-outcome, and only 9% call per-seat the fairest model. And 30% would consider switching vendors for better agent capabilities.

PRO-RATA

Your next round may get crowded by investors you already have. Hunter Walk expects more pro rata conflicts - because early rounds are bigger, rounds land faster, Series B and C can still return 20-100x in the best cases, and have buyers ready to go in Secondary Markets.

PRODUCT vs SALES

The default fix for weak sales is more features. So check out Sylvia Huang's checklist, which tells you whether that's right: prospects who vanish after asking about price or stall-out while onboarding point to the sales process. Users who buy, skip the core workflow, and never renew point to the product.

CASE STUDY

Bending Spoons is basically a holding company for once-great tech that's been put out to pasture: Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Eventbrite, AOL, and now Airtable and Miro too (both bought for around 90% below their peak valuations). Lemkin pulls apart how they run them - about 60 people on Vimeo, and AI writing 90%+ of the code. All part of a weirdly profitable portfolio: Q2 revenue $704M, up 126%.