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1. FUNDING IN REVIEW: VC funding in 2018 eclipsed $100b for the first time since the dot-com era with $130.9B invested by US VCs. PwC and CB Insights also report what happened in Q4 2018 globally with their quarterly VC report. The fewer-but-larger deal trend continues into the new year (more money being spent into less deals) and this infographic can save you a read about this trend. Also, evidently, there still remains a massive gender bias in Startup Funding.
2. IoT: Business Insider's top 5 IoT predictions for 2019 - 5G is coming!
3. Customer Success: Do you know a business needing to deploy a Customer Success team? Here is breakdown of how to structure the first 90 days
4. Go to Market: Finding go-to-market strategies are hard and require strong packaging paired with pricing and using the freemium strategy has fluctuated from being hot to hated. This article takes a deep dive into Freemium as a strategy and asks Is it time to rethink Freemium as a SaaS Go-To-Market strategy?
5. AI: What did the mice say? Project “DeepSqueak" uses AI to translate ultrasonic vocalizations of rats and mice. OK, Why? Well you can’t make this stuff up - DeepSqueak is designed to help researchers figure out what rodents are saying during drug experiments (and the work is already yielding insights).
6. SaaS REVENUE: How (and when) to convert bookings into revenue recognition - knowing this is key to understanding Cash at hand.
7. Digital Advertising: Amazon's online ad business is set to more than quadruple by 2023 —Amazon made roughly $9 billion from advertising spend in 2018 and expects to hit $38 billion by 2023.
8. Microsoft: Microsoft has performed a massive Business model turn around over the past 4 years and proved to be an incredibly resilient Tech company from an investors perspective, especially given the Stock Market behavior of the past few months. CB Insights serves up a massive (67 page) report of Microsoft's recent transformation (downloadable PDF).
9. SALES DEEPDIVE: Just how do tech companies measure and reward sales teams? Well we wrote a neat summary based on last years Bridge Groups Sales Development Metrics and Compensation Research Report, hopefully giving you a digestible read. BONUS: Download compensation calculators (as an Excel sheet) here for SDR's and here for AE's.
10. Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg’s New Years resolution for 2019 is to host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society. He has been setting an annual personal goal for himself since 2009 and this comes from a year where Facebook and Zuckerberg faced a barrage of criticism worldwide about their business practices. Mark Benioff (CEO Of Salesforce) also compared Facebook to Smoking in comments earlier this week at the World Economic Forum.

POD OF THE WEEK: From a16z, Brian McCoullough chronicles the history and evolution of the internet

BONUS FROM GOOGLE: For the Good of NZ? Google has launched an artificial intelligence contest for social good. Please share with any companies who you think may be a good fit. 

1. PRICING FEATURETTE: Product pricing is super hard. Here are top lessons learned from 25 SaaS companies, as well as what the impact pricing changes can have on your business and how to test it.
2. The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail - CB Insights provide a report covering product-market fit challenges to team and culture.
3. Business Insider reports on The Future of Retail - Shareable as a powerpoint. But watch out - it’s a whopper - 109 slides. TL;DR: Use Customer focused Tech! And according to Google, do these 3 things.
4. An Executives guide to Artificial Intelligence from McKinsey and what AI can and can’t do for your business (yet).
5. How Zapier reached $35m ARR (Part of their strategy was creating a 25,000 separate landing pages!)
6. VC or No? Bootstrapping is a perfectly awesome approach to growing a startup or tech company, but more often than not, some kind of Venture Capital is needed to help fund growth and development. Growth rate really matters to VC's and you need to understand exactly why. This article, by Jason Calacanis, lays out why VC firms aren’t focused on slow/modest growth startups and both articles linked here are in response to an article published in the New York Times earlier this month about companies rejecting Venture Capital. 
7. How Xero acquired 350k SaaS users last year.
8. Hybrid cloud has emerged as the preferred method of compute and storage in Australia and New Zealand, which as a region has been slow to adopt public cloud services such as AWS and Azure. This article from Verdict also maps out the business case for hybrid cloud (even though the title is little confusing).
9. Are we seeing an Apple pivot? It looks as though Apple is making moves toward becoming more of a services company by partnering with Samsung to push a stand alone iTunes app to Samsung TVs.
10. You didn’t ask, but I just went ahead and delivered anyway. Here is the report on CES Trends for 2019.

POD OF THE WEEK: From August last year, this is part two of a two part series on the basics of growth for entrepreneurs from a16z. This one focused on growth & retention:  https://a16z.com/2018/08/09/growth-engagement-retention

1. We always talk about achieving Product Market fit as a business. But what does that actually mean?  Andrew Chen from a16z breaks this down for us from a VC’s perspective (as a shareable PDF!).
2. What’s happening with Podcasts? 73 million Americans (that’s 26%) listen to podcasts on a monthly basis and podcast listenership  continues to grow amid declines in consumption of other premium ad environments. Business Insider reports on how brands and marketers can tap into the future of audio. 
3. Most SaaS companies don’t really have a repeatable/scalable engine at $100k in ARR. But usually by $1m ARR things are starting to settle and companies see some real measures and indicators of repeatability. Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, breaks down monthly growth and burn rates of companies he invested in that reached $1m ARR as a comparison tool. 
4. Who are the top 100 VC’s of 2018. CB Insights provides their annual list.
5. Just where are SaaS companies priced after the 2018 Correction? Tomasz Tunguz takes a look at how forward multiples are prices for publicly traded SaaS companies after the market correction we saw earlier in 2018. It’s still well above the 8 year median of 5.2x.
6. As the SaaS industry is reaching maturity and over the past couple of years the app store model has becoming increasingly important with Salesforce, Zendesk, Hubspot, Shopify and Xero, among others, launching their own stores. Here is a lis of the top 50 SaaS Marketplaces.
7. Top 5 Fintech predictions for 2019 - by Business Insider.
8. Top Tech Trends of 2019 (podcast version also included). Michael K. Spencer begins with specialized AI chips, edge computing, and more….
9. Meet the Unicorn class of 2018. Unicorns are officially classed as privately held businesses with a valuation of over $1B USD. Sorry Xero and Push Pay, you don’t count as you are publicly traded, but this year ALL BIRDS made that list (and RocketLab did last year).
10. Mary Meekers new VC Firm will be called “Bond” and will also reportedly target about $1.25B for the debut fund. We have reported on Mary’s “Internet Trends Reports” for the past two years here and here.

POD OF THE WEEK: The Stay Tuned with Preet Episode The Science of Leadership with Adam Grant. While this is usually a very US focused political show (Preet Bharara is a former US Attorney General), Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a professor at Wharton Business School and offers incredible insight on what makes great leaders within organizations. 

1. Late last year, Business Insider obtained confidential startup salary information from top venture-capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Check how much Silicon Valley startup execs really get paid.
2. Who makes the smart speaker with the highest IQ? Loupventures asked each of the top 4 brand speakers 800 questions each. (HINT: The answer rhymes with Dougal)
3. How to Build Growth Teams from Andrew Chen of a16z (shareable PDF!)
4. Callaghan Innovation report on the potential impact for blockchain technologies on the New Zealand economy.
5. Southeast Asia remains the best market for FinTechs. Fintech investments in ASEAN countries in 2018 will exceed the $5.7 billion invested in 2017 by 20% to 30%
6. Smart Speaker penetration hit critical mass over 2018. The smart speaker market nearly doubled, reaching around 41 percent of U.S. consumers, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.
7. Microsoft ends 2018 as Americas most valuable company. Other tech companies (Amazon and Apple) reached a far higher market cap in 2018, both exceeding valuations of over $1 Trillion, however with the stock market bear run late in the year, Microsoft proved to be much more resilient.
8. 15+ of The Top Sales & Marketing Mistakes SaaS Startups Make from Jason Lemkin of SaaStr
9. Innovation disrupted. CB Insights just published a fantastic report on the disruption of traditional business management consulting. A lot for NZTE to extract in this, as well as NZ’s Jumpshift/Adeption who are disrupting 
10. NZTE are off to CES next week and will have a bunch of reporting coming out of the conference. But here is a teaser of what to expect. CES is also becoming the center of innovations in the automative industry.
11. Making it big in the US - Kiwi tech companies that 'got away’ - very interesting article on Stuff about Kiwi tech companies journeys to the US.

BONUS: Founder University is a free course Jason Calacanis and Wilson Sonsini lead in San Francisco designed for founders that have a product in market, but have yet to raise a Series A. The next class is next month: February 11-13. If you know of a suitable founder, they can apply here ( deadline is January 7th).



POD OF THE WEEK: David Skok on choosing the right metrics for the right growth stage