The weekly top 10 for B2B tech operators · Every Friday
Revenue & Burn per Employee. In this profit-over-growth new SaaS world, forget vanity metrics. This post makes the case for tracking Revenue and Burn per Employee as core performance metrics. Why? They reveal whether you're scaling efficiently- or just adding bodies. It also includes great benchmarks across stages.
Reverse Trials are a play on freemium, where new users start with a time-limited trial of all your paid features, and at the end of the trial, they can either buy or downgrade to a fully free tier - this article also explains how Airtable does this well. The benefit here is that, emotionally, the user experiences loss aversion, where the pain of losing something is twice as powerful a motivator as the pleasure of gaining.
Not sure if you were impacted (I certainly was), but the PHPShell issues last week impacted some 70+% of the internet, but it wasn't just about the vulnerability itself; it was the speed at which the hacks are coming in- they are coming in thick and fast.
Amazon now runs over 1 million robots alongside 1.5 million humans. The robots took the heaviest, riskiest jobs, and severe injuries fell 40% in its robotic warehouses. But strain injuries from repetitive work rose 77%, and the professor who co-wrote that study says it's because the robot now sets the pace.
New term for you to ponder, "Leading from the front" isn't just a military cliché for most of us in startup land, though - it's the difference between high-trust teams and checked-out ones. Stay SaaSy breaks down how great leaders model urgency.
Most business plans fail due to a skill set of founders: over-optimism, as well as a lack of adaptability, and inadequate market understanding. Founders often overestimate their control and underestimate challenges, leading to misguided strategies. Recognizing these pitfalls and fostering a culture of flexibility and realistic planning are the big skills for success - own the hard stuff, and never ask for what they won't do themselves.
New one for our AI workers - Attention. Ever wondered how a model knows what 'it' refers to in a sentence? Every word gets checked against every other word to decide which ones matter. Natalie Wolchover's Quanta column explains queries, keys, and values in plain English (no maths degree needed).
Adding onto #6 above - Remember Meta's code changes up 220% and incidents up 40% (see #4 here). More code, more outages. AI agents have roughly doubled PR frequency at almost every tech company in a year, data shows out-of-hours pages nearly doubling too. So now there's a whole category of AI SREs promising to investigate the incident before anyone wakes up. SRE's read the alerts, logs, and dashboards and hand you a likely root cause in Slack. Stripe's in-house one averages 3 minutes for a quick investigation, 14 for a biggy.
Fast follow from #8 above - if agents are writing twice the code, who reviews it all? Anthropic's Claude Code team (Claude writes \~90% of it) sizes human review to risk: docs and flagged changes need no human, normal work gets one, the riskiest paths get two. And a bot's sign-off never counts as a person's. Here are their six layers of checks.
Following up from last week's Bending Spoons case study (see #10) - a different kind of holding company. Long Lake has raised $7.5B to buy services businesses (residential services, architecture, HR, and now Amex GBT in a $6.3B take-private) and put AI inside them. Their pitch: selling AI from the outside means fighting security reviews, adoption, and pricing, so own the business instead.
Since 2018 - top articles, tips, metrics and research, for B2B tech operators to put to good use. Every Friday.
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