1. ZERO-BASED DESIGN: Another concept for the dictionaries: Zero-based design has emerged as a potent approach for businesses to improve performance and redesign their products, services, and even organizations. McKinsey go even deeper with a look at this from what they call Operations Practice and is the kind of modernization process problem that companies such as NZ’s own ProMapp help solve
2. SALES COMPENSATION. A two part primer. Part one: Ratability and golden rules. Part Two:  Compensation Plans.
3. CHURN: A key metric for SaaS benchmarking. This video dives into churn rates and how to benchmark the different kinds of churn.
4. eCOMM: Consumers spent 18 billion hours in shopping apps last year according to a report from App Annie. Mobile is key here and mobile commerce (m-commerce) is projected to account for almost 75% of all e-commerce sales as soon as 2021.
5. SAASTR: Here it is! Attend the SaaStr conference at your own pace via this Massive repository of all the slides presented at SaaStr Annual 2019.
6. GROWTH: RSM have published a quality paper (downloadable as a PDF), covering key growth investment considerations for scaling a tech business.
7. LTV: Is never been harder attracting and retaining customers than todays competitive environment. Understanding customers and their Life Time Value (LTV) requires great data and Google take a look at how to find (in order to retain) these amazing customers.
8. ANGELS: Angel investing is an important part of the Startup ecosystem, however, 2018 observed the fewest number of angel-led financing rounds since before 2010 (156 last year compared to 714 in 2015 and also round size has dropped dramatically). The reason seems to be Institutional seed has come to dominate.
9. FINTECH 2019 3/5: Part three of a Five part series on the Future of Fintech by Business Insider. This episode dives deep on Fintechs beyond just core banking services.
10. TEAMS: No - not the Microsoft kind (although apparently Clippy is making a comeback). Harvard Business Review take a look at what makes a successful startup team

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POD OF THE WEEK: Fascinating talk by After-On on the potential existential risks enabled by near-term scientific & technological developments (this is part 1 of a 2-part series)

BONUS: LinkedIn Learning have a great class for Entrepreneurs on Raising Startup Capital

Kia Kaha / كن قويا

1. SALES: Indirect Sales strategies give a slightly different Cost of Acquisition (CAC) calculation than more direct sale routes - they are also the holy grail of SaaS growth if executed right. TOP TIP: NZ’s very own Qotinet is a leader in this space providing Enterprise Sales Teams a Channel Intelligence platform to truly lower CAC (Cost of Acquisition) and accelerate sales.
2. GAMING: The annual Game Developers Conference is currently underway with many NZ game developers in attendance and as part of the conferences keynote, Google just announced its big foray into the video game market with Stadia, a console-free, streaming-only gaming platform.
3. RECRUITING: The current jobs market both in NZ and the US is highly competitive. Here is a list of top HR Tech/Tools that modern HR teams use to recruit in such a competitive environment. (Shout out to NZ’s own Weirdly being listed)
4. NZ8 and DATA: Some of you asked about the content of our NZ8 event last month, the topic was on how to build out world-class data based organizations, the slide deck can be downloaded here.
5. GROWTH: Five ways to build a $100M business - just follow this simple video and you are good to go (Xero and Vend are referenced)! This is a fantastic way to think about customers, segments, pricing, and cohorts.
6. SxSW RECAP: We just got back from Austin for another year of SXSW…...Highlights: Mitsubishi showed off an interface that turns voice into 3D text; Amazing presentation by Neil Patel on the future of Enterprise Marketing (HINT: Its Omnichannel), AI is everywhere, as is #MeToo and shortcomings with diversity and inclusion in tech. The Instagram co-founders also had a reunion.
7. VALUATIONS: Gil Dibner from Angular Ventures provides some sobering thoughts on the current state of the VC marketplace. Pointing out the big bubble in tech private valuations, mainly due to the excess of capital available, and the compounding affect of future valuations this will create (and also what to pragmatically do about it).
8. FACEBOOK: The continued negative press of Facebook continues, with a report last week that U.S. users are leaving Facebook by the millions (estimate is about 15) and as Mark Zuckerberg promised to revamp the platform with security and privacy in mind, it was also revealed that Mobile Numbers used for two factor authentication and Security were being use to search for users
9. DIGITAL ADVERTISING: Amazon’s ad business growth outstrips Facebook and Google. Valued at $1.5 billion  revenue, in 2016, revenue has increased by about 120% YoY.
10. FINTECH 2019 2/5: Part two of a Five part series on the Future of Fintech by Business Insider. This week Business Insider  take a look at the mega-trend of open banking, which is reshaping financial services

POD OF THE WEEK: From the a16z Podcast: Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise

1. RIP PASSWORDS? Last week, the World Wide Web Consortium approved WebAuthn, a new authentication standard for password-free logins. This new standard allows websites to communicate with a security device to let a user log into their service. Dropbox and MSFT have been early adopters of the standard so far.
2. 5G: Verizon outlined it's 5G growth strategy late last month and rollouts (in the US) are not expected until 2022. The war to win 5G is definitely starting to heat up and is creating an opportunity for wireless network operators to expand their potential subscriber bases into the home. ISP’s should be nervous and/or starting to partner.
3. BIG RETURNS FOR THIEL: Peter Thiel (an early Investor in Xero), operates the VC firm Founders Fund which beats the pack when it comes to returns on investment in the VC industry.
4. SaaS IN CHINA: I know nothing about this topic. Luckily the team at ChartMogul do. Here is their report (TL;DR its about a 5-10 year lag to the US, which is the land of early adoption).
5. SECURITY: The RSA conference just finished up in SF this week. NZ businesses were there and here are some top highlights: The long tail impact of small scale data breaches; Cyber Threats on Mobile; Kyla Guru an amazing 16-year-old high schooler on Tales of a Teenage Security Supergirl.
6. RETENTION (of teams): In much the same way that companies measure life-time-value (LTV) of customers. We should also look at similar strategies with our internal teams (especially team members who are revenue focused).
7. FINTECH 2019 1/5: Part one of a Five part series on the Future of Fintech by Business Insider. I’ll be posting each one weekly as it is published. This first part covers the surging of fintech financing across the globe..
8. SALES: Choosing the Right Sales Metrics to measure for a SaaS business need to include the efficiency, quality and effort of all revenue focused activities.
9. STARTUP TIPS: There are some brilliant nuggets in this article from Punit Soni around his experience navigating the leap from a big tech to a startup….<Me nodding approvingly> “Worry about go-to-market, not product” and "Serve the user, not yourself".
10. AI? Not so fast with the Buzzwords tech startup! Close to half of startups jump on the Artificial Intelligence bandwagon without actually implementing any AI tech. But spending on AI  globally is forecast to reach $35.8 billion this year, an increase of 44% from last year.

POD OF THE WEEK: How to Spot and Build in Non-obvious Markets from First Round Capital

BONUS: REFORGE is a part-time and online growth, retention deep-dive, and advanced growth strategy program designed for Product Managers, Marketers, Engineers, Data Analysts, and UX/Designers in both B2B and B2C companies run by Andrew Chen of a16z. Applications here: https://program.reforge.com/apply

1. PRIVATE EQUITY: The past 5 years have been quite remarkable in the Private Equity (PE) Industry and we have seen a few NZ businesses being funded, or acquired via PE funds (especially in the last 12 months):  ProMapp, SLI Systems, and SwipedOn among others. Bain and Company offer an extensive PE report for 2019. There are fundamental shifts happening in capital markets that are likely to drive a long-term trend toward much larger PE opportunities vs. traditional public equity models.
2. SEGMENTATION DEEP DIVE: Audience segmentation isn’t a new concept.  But it's a constantly moving target and can be a hard topic for startups to master. In this rapid deep dive, learn What segmentation is:  Why it matters and How to implement. If done right, there are massive upsides. But Cohorts are also a necessary ingredient into Segmentation analysis. 
3. SaaS UPSIDE: The SaaS business model, even though being challenged by AI and Data based businesses and revenue models, is not going anywhere. The reason why is pretty basic: Both sides benefit; customer and business. We see this mutual upside represented well (fiscally) in public markets and as reporting season for Q1 2019 ends, SaaS stocks are still in very good shape, with 10x multiple valuations of revenues.
4. ONBOARDING: Onboarding is critically important for both customer conversion and retention. Here is an entire Medium publication reviewing On-Boarding Email communications, what works and, more importantly, what doesn’t.
5. AGILE: The ability to quickly re-orient organizational capabilities is becoming an important component of business sustainability in todays rapidly changing and more digital markets. McKinsey lay out a road map for implementing a more agile organization.
6. MICROSOFT: Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a "lite" version of Windows for dual-screen devices and Chromebook competitors (and it could launch as soon as this year).
7. SaaS VITAL SIGNS: SaaS hits every industry and sector but the business model remains relatively universal, with a simple set of well understood trackers that allow the health of a business to be studied in real time. This article reviews four of the top signals to measure.
8. REGTECH: Add this to your tech vocabulary. RegTech is a subset of FinTech and helps close the gap between FinTech and traditional Financial Services. This category doubled capital invested last year (from $1.9B to $4.5B). Regtechs are likely to see continued investment as financial regulations and requirements become more complex and security more important and under more scrutiny. CBInsights report here and Business Insider report here.
9. DATA ANALYSIS: Continuing with the theme from our recent NZ8 event in Auckland on building a data driven culture, Google discuss the need to converge data silos within an organization to unify data truths and reach full fidelity of data.
10. SILICON VALLEY EXODUS: (But they didn’t wander too far). I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over 15 years and Tech Companies have been slowly drifting north from Silicon Valley to SF city limits for most of that time. Y-Combinator is the newest tech business to add to that list, due to the majority of YC employees and portfolio of founders who reside in the City. This migration is impacting housing, with rents soaring to a national high this month ($3,690/month for a one-bedroom apartment).

POD OF THE WEEK: From a16z. Product-Market Sales Fit (and what comes first?).

BONUS: SurveyMonky are hosting a great looking webinar on How to Create a Customer-Centric Culture 10:00 AM PST March 13/ 7:00 AM NZDT March 14 

1. WOMEN IN TECH: Gender diversity trends in Venture Capital funded startups paint a dismal data point in 2018, with women founders representing a mere 2.3% of all Venture Capital deployed. But taking a closer look, the data  has a more positive forward looking narrative. Even though the number is low, US VC funding for female-founded or co-founded companies has been trending up in recent years, and 2018 saw the creation of several women-led funds, incubators for female founders, and more new companies. Pitchbook take a deep dive into what’s been happening with US investment trends for women in VC over the last 11 years.
2. SaaS LTV:CAC RATIOS: There are some shortcomings with historic LTV to CAC calculations (due to modern growth focused businesses deploying cross-sell and up-sell strategies), Webflow offer an updated measurement formula.
3. BOARD DEEP DIVE (continued): The Governance post last week prompted a few positive responses from people on this list. So figured I would double down on more content: a) Observations on being exposed to high functioning vs low functioning boards (great takeaways). b) Have your management team attend a board meet c) What makes a great independent board member? (and why you need them). d) How to prep for a Board meet
4. AWS SPEND: In previous newsletters I mentioned Amazon Web Services (AWS) is bigger than McDonalds. This growth is reflected, in-part, by many businesses (including some big brands) getting carried away and hit with mega bills. The Insider take a look at this challenge. What is evident is that while Public cloud offers flexibility and cost savings, it’s also very easy to go overboard on spend if businesses don’t pay attention or precisely forecast their computing needs.
5. NO-CODE: Introducing this word into you tech-vocabulary, Welcome to the world of no-code. Technology infrastructure is becoming so commoditized and abstracted that we have now reached a point in time where web services, apps and integrations can be provisioned visually with zero amounts of code needed.  A great example is the new ecommerce site, Webflow, who is competing against Shopify, BigCommerce and the like and requires no developers/engineers to stand up and manage a web store.
6. THINK FAST: To truly deliver excellent customer experiences, prioritizing speed is a key consideration (and eliminating latency). Some companies (such as Pfizer) even have a “Speed budget”. Milliseconds matter!
7. IPO SEASON: Currently privately held unicorns outweigh their public traded counterparts . But probably not for long. 2019 is set to be a remarkably busy year for tech based IPO’s. However the pipeline for newly minted Unicorns is pretty long.
8. FAANG: (this is an acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google). These big tech players are attracting more scrutiny from governments and regulators, in the U.S. and Europe (as well as NZ). Because of the rapid pace of investigations underway this year, The Information have built out an Investigations Tracker to monitor all of the global activity taking place for these high profile companies. Google is currently in the lead, with Facebook taking a close second. (NOTE: Netflix may seem like an outlier company but is included in the acronym as it consumes over 15% of the worlds internet traffic). 
9. VOICE: The battle to win this market is on! The big tech companies are in a heated battle, with Microsoft already admitting defeat (well kinda waving a white flag, but already heading in a different direction with the re-launch of their Kinect product)
10. HIRING: The perpetual start up problem. First Round Capital list 6 must-read articles for creative hiring tactics and Tomusz Tunguz discusses a common mistake.

POD OF THE WEEK: Listen to episode 213 of the Saastr podcast, where Tomusz Tunguz discussed the learnings from the SaaS free trial survey in a more detail.