Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 27, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

BURN MULTIPLES - See #9 below for some of the why, but in this market, operators are expected to find the balance between growth and efficiency. So it's time to brush up on those efficiency metrics in this 2-part post covering Burn Multiple and Sales Efficiency metrics (see post 2). A Burn Multiple measures how much a startup is burning to generate each incremental dollar of ARR. The higher the Burn Multiple, the more the startup is burning to achieve each unit of growth. Here is how to calculate this metric, along withan example.

GROWTH

I love this article from First Round Capital. Mainly, as it justifies my sentiment around rigor, data, and insight, to quote: "*Growth is about implementing a rigorous, customer insight and data-driven process with sustained effort to remove friction*".

SALES

Deal mechanics! How can Account Executives who are getting the same amount of meetings booked by SDRs outperform their counterparts? According to this article - best-practice deal mechanics. It's about what also happens between meetings, using video, phone, and LinkedIn to engage all the decision-makers involved in complex enterprise deals, giving your prospects an out, and setting next steps. Jason Lemkin also swoops in this week with some top tips to help sales execs close more.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

In this current age of the customer, this article makes the argument that Customer Success is actually part of the product. Want to start building out that product? Check the HubSpot guide on getting started with your customer team.

PERFECT

Perfection is the enemy of progress or something, and it's also the fastest way to look inexperienced. A startup is by definition searching for a scalable model - if you claim you've found it, you're selling theater. The tell is in the pitch: founders who say "we've solved everything, just wire the funds" are dreamin'.

SHIFT WORK

Here is a real interesting idea -invert the standard agentic coding model: own the day - write specs, architecture, think hard - all so agents can run autonomously overnight while you sleep. The framing is the cool bit (and I think the markdown files are hard): time and cognitive energy are expensive and constrained, no context switching; agent tokens are cheap and plentiful. By morning, you can wake up with a changelog, a commit history, and a bunch of work done.

GTM

Clay went from $1M to $100M ARR in two years. ElevenLabs hit $330M ARR without a traditional sales org. The numbers behind the shift: AI SDR platforms run $12-60K/year vs $139K fully loaded for a human, handle 1,000+ contacts daily vs 50-80, and drop cost per lead from $262 to $39. The AI SDR market reached $4.1B in 2025 and is projected to reach $15B by 2030! Most teams are still running the 2020 playbook, and as I mentioned a couple of weeks back (see #9), Small teams move faster because communication scales badly.

A FUTURE OF WORK

A three-person team (at StrongDM) built a Software Factory with two rules: code must not be written by humans, code must not be reviewed by humans. Agents write it, testing agents try to break it, and they loop until done. Each engineer budgets $1,000/day in tokens. Here is the article's take: we've moved from working with AI to managing it - and the organizations figuring out what that looks like are going to be setting the precedent for everyone else.

VENTURE

The 2026 fundraising reality check: median time from seed to Series A is up 30%+, getting tighter, diligence that took a week now takes two months, and what got you a Series A in 2021 is now just the baseline at seed. (plus AI captured 41.7% of all seed capital last year). Burn multiple below 1.5x is the new bar - above 3x and the conversation is gonna get uncomfortable fast.

CASE STUDY

Cloudflare, I'm a fan - Most B2B companies are decelerating, but they just posted 34% growth ($2.4B ARR, up 27% YoY. Q4 numbers: 37,000 net new paying customers in a single quarter, $1M+ customers (up 55% YoY), NRR at 120% (up 9 points in a year), new ACV growing ~50% YoY - fastest since 2021. The reason: they own critical infrastructure nobody can defer to; AI traffic has gotta pass through their network. (Also, they fixed go-to-market a couple of years ago and are harvesting.)