Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 15, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: TOKENMAXXING!

(see 9 for even more) Token usage is the lines-of-code metric of the AI era - easy to measure, easy to game, and totally disconnected from outcomes. Case in point: Uber blew through its entire 2026 token budget by April; Meta killed its internal token leaderboard after backlash. Mostly Metrics surveyed 250 finance leaders and the consensus looks somethin' like: token spend per employee will settle around 20% of cash comp - roughly equivalent to benefits load........ It's not replacing headcount, just a new line item that scales with it.

FULL BREADTH

You heard of full-stack devs - so how about Full breadth? A new one for your tech dictionaries. These are engineers who go beyond deep-tech skills, adding product sense, design taste, and business insight, making them deadly effective in early-stage teams.

LOOP MARKETING

HubSpot has a brand new term for your tech dictionary: Loop Marketing. It's all about ditching the more traditional funnels we all know well and embracing real-time feedback loops that connect product, content, and community to drive growth. Sounds a bit froo froo, but this matters because now about 60% of all Google searches end in zero clicks - users are getting answers from AI overviews without ever visiting your website.

POWER LAW

Only 28 investors in the world - the top 0.14% - have backed 11+ startups that hit unicorn status (or $100M+ revenue). That handful drives a disproportionate share of venture returns. Dealroom's 8th annual Power Law ranking names them - YC leads with 97 outcomes, SV Angel 69, Sequoia 34.

LEADERSHIP

I'm feeling a little judged - an NBER study of 6,000 CEOs found 90% of firms report zero measurable productivity impact from AI. Meanwhile, a Stanford study shows AI affirms users' actions 49% more than humans do, creating a sycophancy loop where leaders overestimate competence. Jake Handy's diagnosis: AI psychosis - optimizing for token consumption, not outcomes.

CONTEXT CHAIN

Feeling judged, part 2. Look at your last few weeks. Was it like mine - how much was carrying context from one event or team to another? Context IS a bottleneck. AI augments innovators and marketers but automates the carriers. Incumbents built their entire org chart around the coordination tax that these AI whippersnappers are now cutting out.

VIBE CODING

Escape audited 5,600 vibe-coded apps and found 2,000+ vulnerabilities, including exposed medical records. Democratization of coding is real, but so is the "vibe code cleanup specialist" or whatever we are going to call 'em.

FUTURE OF WORK

Take this with a pinch of salt (because it's from Microsoft) - but they surveyed 20,000 workers and found organizational factors - culture, manager support, talent practices - account for 2x the AI impact of individual effort. Only 19% of workers sit in the "Frontier" zone, where both individual capability and org readiness are high. The bottleneck isn't your people. It's your operating model (and also maybe CoPilot - heheh).

LOCALMAXXING

Following from the SaaS metric of the week - Tunguz ran 1,400 tasks through local vs cloud models over five weeks. Result: 50% of daily VC work runs fine on a local 35B model - email, scheduling, summarization, admin. The kicker: local runs 2.1x faster than Opus 4.5 (2.8s vs 5.8s mean). Localmaxxing is coming (Apple knows this), the inevitable response to tokenmaxxing.

CASE STUDY

GitHub is slowly losing its grip. Armin Ronacher (creator of Flask) traces its origin to GitHub becoming the center of open source before being acquired by Microsoft, and now something I call the Miroshitification. Instability, Copilot noise, and no clear leadership. Projects are leaving.