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TOP 10 IN TECH
​a weekly tech newsletter
Curated SaaS and tech insight from around the web repackaged for people to put to good use

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 26, 2019

4/26/2019

 
  1. INVESTMENT: From Crunchbase a great primer on what VCs ask themselves before they invest in Startups. 
  2. GROWTH: Silicon Valley has a bit of an obsession with growth. The 40% rule and the Mendoza line are examples of that. Tomasz Tunguz takes a view this week of growth rates and why they matter so much (it relates to future values of a business and when that is created).
  3. MARKETPLACES: Online Marketplace startups (such as Yelp, TradeMe, Fiverr, and Uber) have done incredibly well over the last two decades. This article from a16z asks what’s next in their evolution?
  4. HUSTLE: A word incredibly over-used in start-up circles but the reality is Hustle/Grit/Resilience/Tenacity are one of the great real moats a startup has. It’s all about the execution. Tomusz Tonguz adds his modern thoughts spun out of a Harvard Business Review article from 1986 (!!) entitled "Hustle as Strategy"
  5. METRICS: There is an old adage that goes something like "50% of my efforts are successful, I just don’t know what 50%". Metrics are key to knowing this and optimizing yields. This site from GeckoBoard has NAILED the design of which metrics to track within different areas of an organization from Marketing and Sales to HR.
  6. STARTUPS 2019: Key insights from our friends over at Silicon Valley Bank Startup Outlook Survey for 2019 (across almost 1,400 technology businesses). AI is the most promising sector and access to talent is the top policy concern.
  7. RENEWALS (deep dive): I’ll keep banging this drum: Customer Success is CRITICAL to growth and sustainability of a modern tech business. Landing a customer is (obviously) important but it is WAAAY more expensive ($1.10+ per $1 of ARR) than retaining or up-selling existing customers (12c-15c per $1ARR) - that’s 8 times cheaper. Finding a repeatable scalable sales processes is something we hear all the time and is required to scale. But don’t be a purely acquisition focused business, gives some love for building out the same repeatable-scaleable process for renewals and also both of these revenue teams need to be aligned.
  8. EXPERIMENT: We have been running some pretty awesome rigor exercises with templates with tech companies lately, with great results (let me know if you want more info on this).  When it comes to entry and growth in new markets there is no right solution or playbook, if executed well however,  a bunch of hypothesis driven experiments can uncover opportunties, insights and understanding to the market that can provide the high impact wins needed for success. 
  9. ROBOTS and DRONES: Interest in automation via drones and robotics is on the rise. PitchBook take a look at this growing market from a VC perspective.
  10. ENTERPRISE: Just what is Enterprise Sales in the US? It's up to your business to define that according to this article but is in general is $60k to $5m in deal size/year, takes 6-18months to win and has, on average 6.8 stakeholders.

POD OF THE WEEK: Intercom COO Karen Peacock on Scaling from $1MM to $500MM ARR

BONUS: An 8-day guided course on how to be an awesome startup leader and entrepreneur from The Information. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 19, 2019

4/19/2019

 
  1. SUBSCRIPTION CHURN: As big brands (like Disney and Apple) move into services, and in particular the heavily saturated Streaming services industry,  a big challenge will be “Sub Fatigue” - which equates to one of the most fatal of recurring revenue metrics: Churn.
  2. NETWORKING: The Dunbar Number is another new phrase for your startup vocabulary: Despite the proliferation of social media and the digital world, the human brain still cannot maintain more than about 150 to maybe 180 meaningful relationships. Network quality over quantity is the lesson for our unscalable minds.
  3. UNICORNS: As the 2019 tech IPO advance begins it’s becoming evident that Unicorns tech companies still aren’t profitable and investors still have a large tolerance for outsized exits (one of NZ’s best Unicorns, PushPay, differed from that mold however and announced profitability in the last quarter).
  4. AIRBNB: From a revenues perspective, Airbnb is now bigger than Hilton (and owns about 20% of the US market). They are continuing to widen focus in readiness for their IPO later this year and acquired HotelTonight last month, and earlier this month invested about $150m in Indian Startup OYO.
  5. VALUATIONS: Last month I referenced some sobering thoughts on the current state of the VC marketplace. But for startups at the earlier stage, how do valuations get assessed? Especially when there is very little traction or data to go on. Jason Calacanis discusses this in more detail on his blog (and with a handy, but poorly drawn, matrix).
  6. VENTURE CAPITAL: Clearbanc has plans to disrupt venture capital. The company is looking to give 2,000 new businesses up to $1B by the end of 2019. With their "20 Min Term Sheet", Clearbanc offers between $10K and $10M to fund a new company within 48 hours(!!!!) and will continue to invest as long as two key metrics are met: spend and unit economics.
  7. CONNECTIVITY IN THE HOME: From Business Insider this is a Teleco and Technology Forecast Book for 2019. Everything you wanted to know about Smart Speakers, Smart TV’s, Streaming, 5G and AR/VR shipments.
  8. SaaS CAPITAL: Do SaaS Startups Still Require Less Capital than 10 Years Ago? Tomasz Tunguz takes a look. TL;DR: Nope, efficiencies are on the decline….a lot. Reasons are more available capital, more competition, and increased wages.
  9. SPACE TECH: I love living in a timeline where this is actually a thing - Venture Capital investment in space tech is reaching new heights (hah!). Crunchbase take a look at the current state of the sector and, of course, NZ’s own RocketLab is in there! In further RocketLab news, they are also headed into the upsell business and getting into Satellite manufacturing
  10. SALES BENCHMARKS: Saving the best for last from Salesforce on industry benchmarks for sales pipeline management. Share this with any b2b customer!!! Sales Qualified Lead to Customer for Events are 1%. For word of mouth its 15x that at 14.7%. 

POD OF THE WEEK:  The catalyst sale podcast ask the question "Is Sales an Agile Process?"

BONUS: Google Marketing Conference- This is a two-day online and LiveStream event -  learn new best practices of leveraging the Google platforms 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 12, 2019

4/11/2019

 
  1. FINTECH 2019 5/5: The final part of a Five part series on the Future of Fintech by Business Insider. This one covering both AI and blockchain which are making the leap from hype to reality.
  2. ROBOTS: APAC will reign as the hub of demand for steadily growing robotics market. Annual shipments of industrial robots in the three markets leading adoption are set to surpass 1.2 million by 2024, up from an estimated 525,000 in 2019
  3. CLOUD: This may come as a surprise to some, but with massive data breaches constantly in the news (and the trending topic at last months RSA!), cloud storage can actually be much more secure than onsite solutions. Also - guess who is adopting cloud faster than other industries?. It’s the Financial Sector. (According to Nutanix, hybrid cloud deployment has reached 21% penetration among financial services firms, compared to a global average of 18.5%)
  4. SALES: Cognitive bias is everywhere and often are of the biggest obstacles to navigate during the sales process. This blog post from the team at Sales Hacker describes some of the biases sellers face and how to use navigate through them.
  5. SERVICES: Microsoft did it, Apple are in the process of doing it (here is a deeper dive on why) Other big brands are finding new life and new growth opportunties in services based revenue over traditional products. Fender are now also in the game, which is validating the business model of NZ’s own Melodics. This article breaks down the pricing and unit economics model of Fenders new service.
  6. WOMEN IN TECH: By the numbers, Bethany Crystal takes a look at women VC’s around the world (and where they are, which is apparently not in NZ). 
  7. WELLNESS: Being a founder of a startup is far from smooth sailing and can take a pretty hefty toll on personal wellbeing . First Round Capital discuss this in detail and in particular discuss the need to admit to being vulnerable and accessing great mentorship and coaching.
  8. ANGELS and VC’s: A majority of all tech companies are at relatively early (seed/pre seed) stages of growth and all face challenges raising capital. This article and complimentary google doc outlines the current state of this stage of the capital market by asking the question "Should companies raise their pre-seed round from angels or VCs?”. Meanwhile US VC funding remained strong in Q1 2019 as investors deployed $32.6 billion across 1,853 deals
  9. VOICE: Amazon is now letting companies create voice skills for use in the office with the launch of Alexa for Business, where users can use existing blueprints to create their own voice-activated commands onto of Alexa without having to write code……..."Alexa, create a Discover Canvas"
  10. ZOOM: Our favorite collaborative tech tool is set to go public later this month (forecast at $8.25 Billion!) and at $425m in ARR and growing, Jason Lemkin and the SaaStr team take a close look at what make Zoom really super impressive: a) it has fantastic unit economics and, b) is very profitable, unlike other IPO businesses. Weirdly enough, in 2018, the profitability of companies that IPO had the INVERSE impact on price.

POD OF THE WEEK: The road to success is paved with failure, Freakonomics talk to creatives on how to fail like a pro

BONUS: Amazon are running a free online conference for Voice developers and designers on May 2nd (Pacific) 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 5, 2019

4/4/2019

 
  1. PITCHING: From Business Insider, The first-time founder's guide to pitching a VC
  2. FINTECH 2019 4/5: Part four of a Five part series on the Future of Fintech by Business Insider. In this deck, Business Insider take a look at how regulation is driving change in the financial services industry.
  3. VC MIXUP: Fresh off the press this week is a massive announcement from one of the premier Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz: They are renouncing their Venture Capital status……….and the reason for this pivot is pretty disruptive; It’s to become a financial advisory service, which in turn will enable them to be more capable of investing into emerging tech asset classes such Cryptocurrency, Crypto Tokens, and ICO’s. Along with this news they also announced that all 150 employees are registering as financial advisors.
  4. THE 40% RULE: What is the 40% rule for SaaS companies? This video explains more but basically when a VC backed SaaS businesses (of over ~ $2m ARR) adds profit + growth rate, the total should be equal to 40% (or more). This helps calculate the cadence of a business: The faster they grow, the less profitable they need to be.
  5. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: This is one of my favorite topics, and one that founders are almost informally delusional about achieving. I never want to pop the enthusiasm of a founder (it’s part of the secret sauce that will help them succeed), but I want to sprinkle some grit in. Thomas Friedman summarizes some great thoughts about the topic in this post: TL;DR Often time Product-Market Fit is an Illusion.
  6. DATA and AI: Splunk just released their 2019 Predictions (as an e-book) about trends in AI and machine learning, IT operations, security, and IoT.
  7. DESIGN: Bringing good design into different elements of a business is nothing new to but there are specialized branches of design constantly emerging. Growth Design is my new all time favorite - merging typical HCD/Empathy Design but adding in the pragmatism of designing the jobs that need to be done
  8. PRICING FEATURETTE: Pricing is hard and it’s never (ever) perfect. a) If companies decide to have a pricing page on their site (which is a whole other topic), Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, lays out some thoughts of what makes a good pricing page. b) McKinsey get technical, outlining how to leverage big data to make better pricing decisions. FUN FACT: On average, a 1 percent price increase translates into an 8.7 percent increase in operating profits. c) Want to look at competitor prices? Comptera have a great article on how to conduct a high fidelity competitive pricing analysis project.
  9. GLOBAL STARTUPS:  Interactive report from late last year or the PDF version here - The US’s long-held singular dominance of startup and venture capital activity is being challenged by the rapid ascent of cities in Asia and Europe  (yes, and also in NZ). The US remains the clear global leader, but the rest of the world is gaining ground at an accelerating rate.
  10. VR: AT&T announced last week that it will exclusively sell the Magic Leap One, a mixed reality headset, in 2019. This could really spur the adoption of a consumer-focused VR headset as AT&T-owned media properties (such as CNN and HBO) are being spun into AR apps and AT&T also plan to introduce a DirecTV Now AR app for Magic Leap.

POD OF THE WEEK: This week is from Y-Combinator discussing Coaching for founders and having tough conversations.

BONUS: Microsoft just launched a free online AI Business School. Microsoft is trying to bridge the gap  "between what people want to do and the reality of what is going on in their organizations today.” More on the press release here.

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