Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 25, 2025

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

Here is a highly bookmarkable Guide to SaaS Metrics from equals.com that covers all the greatest hits and more (ARPA, LTV:CAC, Burn Multiples, etc).

STARTUP PLAYBOOK

Check out the Emerging Startup Playbook that lays out eight key emerging strategies taken from high-growth SaaS leaders. Emphasizing "speed over perfection," it suggests streamlining decision-making and embracing usage-based pricing for sustainable growth. Key takeaways? Optimize product stickiness before scaling sales and pivot based on data to stay competitive. This is a great read for early-stage founders figuring out their growth tactics (well, more like experiments).

AI BUDGET

Here is a quick, fun one. How much should you spend on AI? Tomasz Tunguz says early-stage startups are allocating 20–50% of their R&D budget to AI. Nope - not a typo. AI isn't just a feature, it's a core investment now. Just pretty sure you can't claim those R&D costs back in any tax breaks.

SOFTWARE 3.0

Stuff is moving so fast these days, it's hard to keep up. This post (taken in inspiration from these slides) makes the case that we've moved beyond Software 2.0 (ML/neural networks) to Software 3.0: AI-native and conducted in your native language, with API-connected agents reasoning over dynamic data. Tools like LangChain and LlamaIndex aren't the future—they're gonna be the foundation.

SPEND

Brex has launched something called the Brex Benchmark, and so far, the May 2025 Benchmark is a gem: it's real spend data from millions of anonymized transactions. Despite economic headwinds, ad spend is up — a signal of renewed growth bets. But spend on consultants and real estate is falling. SaaS and infra? Holding steady with Claude being the numero uno AI app.

JOBS

AI may be a primary culprit for a bunch of the current economic payoffs. A new CNBC analysis shows AI is playing a much bigger role in job losses than companies admit. The reshaping of work is happening faster than we're told.

ACCOUNTING AI

This one is a bit of a mind-bender from Penrose and explores if LLMs can do accounting and how LLMs can transform ledgers into language, enabling a new term "explainable accounting". It's a weird and dense page, but super interesting for any of you finance ops peeps. BTW - Claude is already on it!

PERSONAL CO-PILOT

This is def another AI-heavy newsletter—but here's how to build an AI co-pilot for your day-to-day. From task routing and meeting prep to knowledge surfacing and auto-recaps, Lenny's Newsletter shares a stack of tools to make AI actually useful (and sticky.....and on-brand) in your workflow. ChatGPT now has a next-level co-pilot, an agent that can actually perform tasks on your behalf.

OUTAGES

We all have them - especially if we host in Public Clouds - for example, last month GCP service control tripped, creating outages across GCP and Google Workspace, triggering Cloudflare issues, which in turn triggered AWS and Azure outages - it was wild. This piece digs into why reliability is so hard at scale—even for top-tier teams. From incident fatigue to architectural tradeoffs, it's a sharp look at how engineering orgs really manage risk (or don't until hindsight). A must-read if you don't know how resilient or redundant your stack is.

CASE STUDY: ONBOARDING

AI onboarding isn't just UX—it's growth. This teardown shows how ChatGPT, Claude, and others use template-activation loops to turn cold signups into active users.