# Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 12, 2021

Published: 12 March 2021
Canonical: https://www.top10in.tech/posts/week-ending-march-12-2021

## 1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

Time for some financial ones. Bookings, Billings, and Revenue are some top-line SaaS revenue terms that [need a bit of deciphering.](https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/decipher-key-top-line-saas-terms-like-bookings-billings-and-revenue/?ck_subscriber_id=727562333) A downloadable PDF version is [here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/47y86zquy6fi90z/Decipher%20key%20top%20line%20SaaS%20terms%20like%20bookings.pdf?dl=0), along with an explainer Excel Sheet [here](https://www.dropbox.com/s/ajbwm358fiqefwq/Top%20line%20SaaS%20explanation%20v1.1.xlsx?dl=0). Still confused? [Check this article/explainer from SaaSOptics](https://www.dropbox.com/s/062rg6kozxyl0ln/SaaSOptics_Complete%20Guide%20to%20Revenue%20Modeling_c.pdf?dl=0).

Link: https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/decipher-key-top-line-saas-terms-like-bookings-billings-and-revenue/?ck_subscriber_id=727562333

## 2. WOMEN IN TECH

Happy International Women's Day! Call back to the [Girls Who Code and Accenture report](https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-134/Accenture-A4-GWC-Report-Final1.pdf#zoom=50) - check out this metric: By age 35, fifty percent of women leave their jobs in tech. This is primarily (37% of those surveyed) attributed to noninclusive company cultures. The call to action here is that the bottom 80% have a big role to play: If all companies could score as well in inclusion as the top 20%, attribution could drop by up to 70%!

Link: https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-134/Accenture-A4-GWC-Report-Final1.pdf#zoom=50

## 3. CUSTOMER PRICING

In the SaaS world, great pricing prioritizes the customer’s success over that of the businesses. That logic seems a little counterintuitive, but the profitability of a customer in SaaS happens waaaaay after a customer becomes an actual customer. OpenView [expands on this reasoning more in this complex post](https://openviewpartners.com/blog/how-to-achieve-net-negative-churn-by-using-value-metrics-in-your-pricing#.XUniRpNKhTY) on achieving net negative churn (where the average revenue per customer increases at rates that offset any churn) by using customer-based value metrics as a pricing strategy. Packaging up offerings and finding the optimal pricing and features structures for both customers and business unit economics is incredibly hard though....and [never right](https://www.heavybit.com/devguild/pricing-strategy/#priced-to-scale-the-only-constant-is-change). The team at Heavybit knows this very well and [this article from them on using feature flags](https://www.heavybit.com/library/blog/optimize-pricing-and-packaging-feature-flags/) is a great read.

Link: https://openviewpartners.com/blog/how-to-achieve-net-negative-churn-by-using-value-metrics-in-your-pricing#.XUniRpNKhTY

## 4. MARKETING

Marketing is a very broad practice, so [this is a conceptually helpful article](https://mkt1.substack.com/p/marketing-org-chart) even if your organization isn't at the separation-of-marketing-functions phase on how to think about marketing efforts this article provides an excellent primer on all of the marketing roles that are out there.

Link: https://mkt1.substack.com/p/marketing-org-chart

## 5. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

[The Syms Method](https://taprun.com/articles/product-managers-visual-guide-to-feature-selection)- another for your Tech Dictionary that goes beyond features vs benefits but is definitely more a guide on pure feature selection using some good old-fashioned Venn diagrams.

Link: https://taprun.com/articles/product-managers-visual-guide-to-feature-selection

## 6. LEGAL DOCUMENTS

In startup land, there is a long tail of legal documents that need drafting just to run the business. Here are some great resources for free legal documents so you can stick to the mission: [Avodocs](https://www.avodocs.com/documents)- 3 free per month. [Cooley Go](https://www.cooleygo.com/documents/) has a library of documents for the US and UK, from Penn State Law School - a [startup Kit](https://www.law.upenn.edu/clinic/entrepreneurship/startupkit) bundle

Link: https://www.avodocs.com/documents

## 7. STORYTELLING

Adding onto last week's listing on a [post discussing Emotional Moats](https://productlessons.substack.com/p/building-personal-moats-and-killer) as a competitive advantage: I anecdotally feel like my way of storytelling has shifted from pre-pandemic ways and [Google seems to agree with my sentiment](https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/future-of-marketing/management-and-culture/rebooting-storytelling-principles/).

Link: https://productlessons.substack.com/p/building-personal-moats-and-killer

## 8. SECURITY

. Cybersecurity is now an essential business consideration for organizations of all sizes and stages. The CEO of Tonic thinks that 2021 will be [the worst year for data breaches yet](https://www.tonic.ai/blog/how-data-privacy-will-impact-devops-in-2021) (mainly based on the data point that the past few years have seen an unfortunate [steady upward climb](https://www.identityforce.com/blog/2020-data-breaches) in the number of data breaches)

Link: https://www.tonic.ai/blog/how-data-privacy-will-impact-devops-in-2021

## 9. SPAC

[RocketLab](https://www.rocketlabusa.com/) is the newest high profile company [that will IPO via a SPAC](https://spacenews.com/rocket-lab-says-spac-deal-will-accelerate-development-of-neutron-rocket/) (no not Space) - a Special Purpose Acquisition Company - which seems to be the 'public-offering-du-jour' right now - IPO's (initial public offering) are well understood by most investors, so what is a SPAC then? It's pretty much a publicly listed shell company that merges with a privately held one to create a publicly-traded version of the private one - got it? [Here is a quick explainer](https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-a-special-purpose-acquisition-company-spac-5114375#:~:text=A%20SPAC%20is%20a%20business,company%20within%20a%20specified%20timeframe) if not. But FYI there were a [record $109 billion in transactions globally](https://www.morningbrew.com/daily/stories/2021/03/01/spacs-start-2021-torrid-pace?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=cd10ca9ed36cb43bfb2313c8f1e30c6c6cf2dd27-1614895917-0-AdbHZmCwLn9b1kNLlnN505ZhOXA8pIYbyavh86QjFFNDqRKh-NzEL6aoAsZjOAA6XtdRh21aOJArf5eGm8PUQydNNGU5pBsCzdRWGKt8CT5mXRFcpq2TNoB3dyepbf_qpLhAVQ_OJMQBTRqg0PqFFjQNGSEz_u1-Z25ZuKAIa-68fIVI3OIR9N3byaGgt5w9rV5dftLd6jE7Md1cpMby3cgoTXxvG4_jKwFjT8_Ote5PZC8Jbo-rbmJt5R2ulLpzNijCpgmKS3WbDdCSh0qF13FmHezkWO0qVENcNwGhxWeJlj9Uzrk2AesO2c1sKPPj3keWewQx2yzI_JWKZ9oAuo-sUpeD6K8aZh5Vs-y-tcUIImeI0D2lYLJyfzwqYQ_0cEmqzcDJSuXEYp-uDtjcLR2I58gg5f69-5W0UEPGpQN2NGoJF4_ELzAReHnCjMhZPQ), which [according to some may be a bit of a bubble](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobwolinsky/2021/02/28/hedge-funds-clash-over-special-purpose-acquisition-companies/?sh=567946687f1f).

Link: https://www.rocketlabusa.com/

## 10. CASE STUDY

Zoom! I don't care what you say - [they are an absolute SaaS rockstar](https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-about-zoom-at-4b-in-arr/). Even pre-Covid, Zoom was on a growth burn. When it IPO'd it was valued at $4billion - now it's trading more than that in ARR (and grown 369% in ONE QUARTER)!!!!! They have a fantastically optimal [payback period of about 3-months](https://tomtunguz.com/payback_period_2020/) and a net dollar expansion of 130%+. Want more? Fine how about [54 more stats](https://usefyi.com/zoom-statistics/)?

Link: https://www.saastr.com/5-interesting-learnings-about-zoom-at-4b-in-arr/

## POD OF THE WEEK

This is a cool retro one (a blast from the 2016 past) - The founder of Yammer (my old alma mater and OG Unicorn) and Slack (my old neighbors) [get together to talk Unicorns or Bust](https://youtu.be/4NbXBGjUrA0) (this is way before Slack took off

Link: https://youtu.be/4NbXBGjUrA0