# Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 8, 2026

Published: 8 May 2026
Canonical: https://www.top10in.tech/posts/week-ending-may-8-2026

## 1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

[Time to Profit](https://pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/time-to-profit-and-why-business-sustainability) - Probably one of the most important metrics in the post-COVID Civid/free money era. Most startups die not from bad ideas but from running out of cash before reaching sustainability. Shorter TTP forces discipline: fewer vanity bets, tighter PMF proofs, and faster elimination of anything that doesn't compound.

Link: https://pawelbrodzinski.substack.com/p/time-to-profit-and-why-business-sustainability

## 2. OUTAGES

Now is always a good time to front-foot your architecture. For techies: Google actually has a great article on [Architecting disaster recovery for cloud infrastructure outages](https://cloud.google.com/architecture/disaster-recovery). Here is a [good DR Plan](https://resultris.com/saas/compliance/saas-disaster-recovery-plan/) article, and [here is a good template](https://www.disasterrecoveryplantemplate.org/download/disaster-recovery-plan-template-basic/).

Link: https://cloud.google.com/architecture/disaster-recovery

## 3. SCALING

Sure, software is scalable, but Startups don't scale by adding people — they scale by building systems. [This breakdown](https://www.the-founders-corner.com/p/how-startups-scale-by-building-systems) covers how to layer ops, reduce founder dependency, and keep complexity from killing momentum.

Link: https://www.the-founders-corner.com/p/how-startups-scale-by-building-systems

## 4. FUNDRAISING

Roughly [90% of early-stage financings on Carta now use SAFEs](https://www.thevccorner.com/p/how-safe-transformed-startup-fundraising), with post-money versions dominating new issuance. The VC Corner walks through the full history from Carolynn Levy's 2013 five-page draft at YC to today's edge cases founders still miss - stacked caps, silent dilution, and MFN traps.

Link: https://www.thevccorner.com/p/how-safe-transformed-startup-fundraising

## 5. CHURN

OnlyCFO lays out 10 reasons software [churn is about to spike](https://www.onlycfo.io/p/2026-the-year-of-churn). AI is pushing tools into the "nice-to-have" territory, and switching costs are dropping. There is probably more coming - 90%+ of AI-driven churn hasn't even hit yet because teams were locked into annual contracts.

Link: https://www.onlycfo.io/p/2026-the-year-of-churn

## 6. ENGINEERING

Ok - interesting take - the Coding bit is only [roughly 20% of an engineer's job](https://koushikdasika.com/blog/coding-was-never-the-hard-part/). Apply Amdahl's Law: a 50% speedup in coding yields only about a 7% total productivity gain. The real bottlenecks are along the lines of research, architecture, planning, and feedback loops - these are where AI can help, but they still can't replace judgment.

Link: https://koushikdasika.com/blog/coding-was-never-the-hard-part/

## 7. MACS

The Mac mini is [sold out](https://om.co/2026/03/16/lobster-boil/). The 256GB Mac Studio is unavailable - Apple is [ripping](https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/30/mac-studio-mac-mini-constrained-months) through inventory. [Om Malik explains why](https://om.co/2026/04/27/memory-is-the-machine/) - it's the AI boom. Apple's unified memory architecture, a bet made in 2020, is the only consumer hardware shipping Edge AI-capable devices as SKUs.

Link: https://om.co/2026/03/16/lobster-boil/

## 8. TASTE

Backing up my post a [couple of weeks back](https://www.top10in.tech/top-10-in-tech/top-10-in-tech-what-to-know-for-week-ending-april-24-2026) on [taste](https://www.thevccorner.com/p/why-taste-is-the-new-moat), Contra Labs ran 15,000 creative evaluations across five domains and found [no single AI model leads all three workflow phases](https://contralabs.com/research/human-creativity-benchmark). Claude wins ideation, Gemini wins mockup, Grok wins refinement. The real finding: once output clears a quality bar, every model converges on safe, averaged aesthetics. Taste is still the human moat.

Link: https://www.top10in.tech/top-10-in-tech/top-10-in-tech-what-to-know-for-week-ending-april-24-2026

## 9. MULTIPLES

[Data Driven VC's April market update](https://www.newsletter.datadrivenvc.io/p/the-impact-of-iran-war-on-private-and-public-valuations-here-s-the-state-of-the-market-in-march-2026-e65c): public SaaS top-10 median held at 13.8x NTM revenue while the overall median slipped to 2.2x. The correction cycle that began in late 2024 looks about done. Meanwhile, M&A hit $1T+ in Q1 2026, running nearly 2x YoY on deal volume, with fewer but structurally larger deals, and Anthropic's annualized revenue reportedly hit $30B by the end of March (up from $9B at the end of 2025, a 1,400% YoY growth rate!).

Link: https://www.newsletter.datadrivenvc.io/p/the-impact-of-iran-war-on-private-and-public-valuations-here-s-the-state-of-the-market-in-march-2026-e65c

## 10. CASE STUDY

[SaaStr runs 20 or so AI agents with 3 humans](https://cloud.substack.com/p/254-thats-what-it-cost-us-to-run). Total bill: $2,300/month. Their AI VP of Marketing costs $95/month, AI VP of CS $160/month - roles that run $500-800K/year with humans. Revenue swung from -19% to +47% YoY. Lemkin's hindsight rules: budget 0.5 FTE of human attention per production agent.

Link: https://cloud.substack.com/p/254-thats-what-it-cost-us-to-run

## POD OF THE WEEK

The internal AI tool that's [transforming how Stripe designs products](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-on-how-i-ai-the-internal).

Link: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/this-week-on-how-i-ai-the-internal