Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 30, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

Cap Table - I'm bending this week's post to make it fit - I just think this article is pretty cool, and your Cap Table is a definite metric, I'll fight you on this. Your Cap Table isn’t just an ownership spreadsheet - it’s used as a decision-making constraint. It defines control, dilution, hiring leverage, follow-on funding options, and exit outcomes. Messy early cap tables compound quickly, especially with SAFEs, friends-and-family deals, advisor equity, and uneven founder splits. Clean cap tables preserve optionality; broken ones can quietly kill deals (moral), and most importantly, future raises.

CO-FOUNDERS

Starting from an idea, but being non-technical often means looking for or finding a technical co-founder. This article makes the argument that non-technical founders stall by outsourcing progress. Be productive first - talk to customers, validate demand, ship scrappy versions, reduce market risk. TL;DR - Productive founders will attract productive co-founders and efficiently build product.

SOLO

Fast follow from #2 above. And according to this article (bit of a biased domain name, though, tbf) - going Solo is no longer taboo, and 1/3 of all startups are currently flying solo. Driven by better tools, a bucket ton of AI leverage, and lower operating costs. The tradeoff hasn’t disappeared - speed and control go way up, but resilience and perspective are the things that go down.

BENCHMARKS

Mostly Metrics kicks off some good benchmarks for 2026 - they surveyed 132 SaaS companies (≈50% >$25M ARR, ~25% >$100M). Median renewal rates sit around 91% (top quartile ~95%, bottom ~84%). CS headcount peaks at $10–50M ARR then compresses at scale. 56% of CS teams are paid on expansion, but 63% don’t control it. Median CS variable comp is just ~20%, and the data show that product quality and customer fit drive renewals more than comp plans or org structure.

LEAD

New term for you to ponder, "Leading from the front" isn’t just a military-ism 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, own the hard stuff, and never ask for what they won’t do themselves.

GROWTH

Growth is now a trust problem, not a funnel problem? With SEO (see #7 below to question that), paid, and corporate social collapsing under AI pressure, Elena Verna argues growth shifts to trust-based systems: employee-led distribution, creator credibility, community, and product-led brand. Retention also follows the same logic: when features commoditize, customers stick with products they trust will keep delivering outcomes, not just efficiency.

VELOCITY

Fast follow from 6 above; If growth is now a trust problem, velocity is the new authority. Om Malik argues that modern networks don’t reward being right, deep, or durable - they reward momentum. What travels fastest wins: first take beats best takes, access beats independence, memes beat meaning. The algorithms look to be optimizing for speed (and that ain't necessarily).

SEO

Oh shit - turns out, I'm kinda wrong - search (and SEO) isn’t dead. Graphite + Similarweb data across 40k sites shows organic traffic is down just -2.5% YoY, not the -25% to -50% collapse everyone’s been yelling about. AI Overviews do hit CTR (-35%) but only show ~30% of the time, mostly on low-value informational queries. Commercial search still holds, and 90% of Google clicks remain organic. SEO is changing, not dying.

CHURN

AI is facing a retention reckoning we can all learn from. ChartMogul data across 3,500 companies shows AI-native apps have ~40% GRR and ~48% NRR (for perspective - that's worse than B2C and far behind B2B SaaS (82% NRR)). The issue is all those “AI tourists” - low-cost, easy-to-buy tools that are just as easy to cancel. Pricing matters: AI products >$250/month look like real SaaS (70% GRR, 85% NRR). Durable ARR comes from deeper workflows, higher price points, annual plans, and narrowing the gap between shipping AI and actual adoption.

CASE STUDY

Here is the start of a great 3-part article from Notion covering the challenges faced by (VC-backed) startups towards $100m in revenue. Fun (?) fact: Only 1.2% of us achieve this milestone.