Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 9, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

CLTV to CAC Ratio: This is the classic signal of go-to-market efficiency. Everyone quotes 3:1 (too low, likely not PMF; too high, you ain't spending enough on marketing) — but this breakdown goes deeper with benchmarks by sales motion (PLG vs. enterprise), contract size, and stage. Bonus: includes a free model template to run your own numbers.

GROWTH

Testing new marketing growth tactics takes a lot of resources, and most of us often don't have much time to run experiments. So check this Google Doc from Dashly where they collected 100 growth marketing hypotheses tested by a bunch of their experts. (includes ad retargeting, wait list for product launches, niche glossaries, etc).

SALES

Don't be surprised if you land a sales rep from a big company who met quota at their last job but gets 0% with you - these kinda reps succeed on product-market fit, tight process, and real support. Take away any one of the three, and they close nada, because they'd have to invent the sales process deal by deal. The fix is in the article - you gotta click it!

AI PRODUCTIVITY

John at SuccessVP hosted a dinner of CROs and CCOs in New York in September. They're still struggling to find the AI productivity gains. His read: the models aren't the bottleneck anymore; deployment is. Someone has to connect the context, build the evals, and define what done means.

AI WARS

The competition continues, and a16z's David George thinks the AI model rankings no longer matter. We can swap models task by task, so switching costs are gone and pricing is a race to the bottom. What's left is who creates new customer behavior and who owns distribution. (His bet is OpenAI on both behavior and distribution - I'm not sold on that).

MEAT PROXIES pt 2

A lot of comments on the meat puppet post last week. So follow up for all you Meat Proxies - do you still enjoy it? And on the positive side - good thinking here on saying goodbye to the hard parts that never really mattered with your job anyway.

SYSTEMS THINKING

Follow-on from # 6 above. As a former Systems-and-Design-Thinker-for-a-job (and Ecologist), I'll take any excuse to quote Donella Meadows. Tunguz gives me one: Donella says writing code by hand is no longer economically productive, so what's left is the system. Also - let's take the three properties of great system design, resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy, and apply them to AI coding. The code writes itself now. The job is designing the loop that decides whether it's right.

BRAND

Cut a dollar of brand spend now, and BCG reckons it costs $1.92 to win back the lost market share later. Google calls brand cuts an expensive loan against future pipeline. 67% of CMOs trust their marketing mix model to predict sales. Only 40% of CFOs do, in a BCG survey of 81 execs. Google argues this gap is why brand budgets get cut first.

RAISE

Metrics don't get you funded. Harris (ex-YC partner) has seen nine-figure rounds close at $200k in revenue and companies fail to raise at $10M ARR. Be strategically persistent - love the take that "prepared minds get built in casual conversations".

CASE STUDY

This article tracks six liquidity events, from first check to last share, then runs IPO against M&A.Snowflake's lead VC took 9.5 years from first check to seeing a return, and that's the best case. Rubrik's lead is 12.4 years in and 82% out. Wiz went from founding to $32B in cash in six years.