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​TOP 10 IN TECH

​a weekly newsletter
Curated SaaS and tech insight from around the web repackaged for people to put to good us

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 31, 2019

5/30/2019

 
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  1. SALES: Time-to-ramp is an important metric for Sales leaders to understand and optimize. Especially in the current job market where sales tenure is short (<18 months on average). Doing it well, as well as fast, is key and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality.
  2. FUNDRAISING: Micheal Lints from Golden Gate Ventures discusses the tactics and strategy of fund raising from building the pipeline to securing the lead investor. It’s not to dissimilar to a Sales Pipeline.
  3. CUSTOMER: From Google. Think your company is awesomely customer-centric? Here’s why you’re probably wrong.
  4. DUE DILIGENCE: Most SaaS companies will encounter due diligence requests, especially if raising capital. This article from SaaSX outlines what to expect and this one on how to be best prepared for this often brutally honest look under the hood of your Business.
  5. CHURN: A practical guide to understanding and reducing SaaS churn (article includes a great chart of acceptable gross revenue churn rates).
  6. SDR’S: Companies are beginning to understand the vital role SDRs play in revenue. But measuring their value in meaningful ways can be tricky.
  7. ACV: Point Nine Capital and ChartMogul take a look at Annual Contract Values (ACV) and group them into relatable animals (Mice, Rabbits, Deer, Elephants and Whales) as an analogy for what it takes to build a $100m business and how different segments contribute to total revenues over time.
  8. PODCASTING: It’s now big business and there are currently over seven hundred thousand podcasts available. This in-depth report from a16z covers the origins and growth of this audio-tech and what their investment philosophy is on this growing market.
  9. MARKETING: Modern marketing efforts (combined with advances in Big Data and Machine Learning) have enabled companies to provide marketing experiences that are truly personalized. To do this at scale however requires rigor around collecting data onto a Customer-data platform (CDP) and , according to McKinsey, following the 4 D’s: Data, Decisioning, Design, and Distribution. (Downloadable PDF version here)
  10. DIGITAL ADVERTISING: Amazon is siphoning billions of dollars of advertising revenue from Google and Facebook generating $10.1 billion in Ad Revenue, up from 117% YoY. Read all about it in this report from Business Insider.

POD OF THE WEEK: From This Week in Startups: All Things Sales. Everything you ever wanted to know about hiring, compensation, tools, prospecting, and up-selling.

BONUS: Missed the Alexa Live Online conferences last month? No problem, just replay recordings of all sessions plus resources shared during the sessions. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 24, 2019

5/23/2019

 
  1. SALES: How to align sales compensation with strategic goals and in the seven (yup, seven) layers of compensation.
  2. DEVOPS: I totally nerded out on this. Netflix UX is impressive and the company is a fantastic study on how great engineering and a DevOps focus creates amazing streaming experiences even with the internet connection is Junk! At times Netflix can represent almost 40% of all internet traffic, so to optimize the user experience they created their own CDN service (content delivery network) and also Open Sourced it. If you have a spare half-hour this video really highlight how they manage 100’s of micro-services, 1,000’s of daily prod changes, 10’s of thousands virtual machines on AWS, 100’s of thousands of customer interactions a second, and  millions of customers all with 10’s of ops engineers and zero data centers. They also de-prioritized up-time.......because they could.
  3. TECH FOR GOOD: McKinsey go all in with this report on technology for good attempting to calculate the the impact of technology adoption on welfare growth beyond GDP.
  4. GROWTH: Zapier is an impressive tech company, not just because it created 25,000 search optimized landing pages, but also because it has taken an approach to growth and profitability that is more similar to a bootstrapped NZ tech company than a more traditional Silicon Valley one: It’s 7 years old, has a distributed team, only taken $1.5m in capital, and became a profitable business in year 2 of operations.
  5. LTV: Life Time Value or LTV is one of the most valuable metrics in SaaS, and also the most problematic. This post from ChartMogul takes a deeper look at LTV and how to make this metric more actionable.
  6. DEVELOPERS: This is a really in-depth report from Stripe on the fiscal benefits of developers (Who they calculate at $3 trillion GDP globally). It also highlights the opportunity costs of bad code and technical debt - something that NZ startups such as RayGun and Codelingo are trying to help solve. FUN FACT: NZ has the highest Quality of developers in the world according to this (independent) report.
  7. HUAWEI: Google dramatically severed ties with Huawei this week following an executive order from US President Donald Trump blacklisting the company. Huawei has lost access to Android Operating System updates to all Huawei device and also have access removed  to Google services such as Gmail and the Pay Store.
  8. SALARIES: Hot off the press from Vettery is a report on San Francisco Technology Salary’s. If you are a NZ Tech company looking to hire here - sorry, it ain’t pretty. There is a big premium to be paid.
  9. INFLUENCERS: Brands can reap pretty significant benefits from social media influencer based marketing. But how much will that Instagram post cost? Klear (an influencer marketing platform….which is now apparently a thing) analyzed about two thousand influencers worldwide to build out a 2019 rate card. The rate card can be viewed here, but the blog post about the report is actually a much better read.
  10. BOARDS: Managing Governance in Startups is hard, especially when early stage investors push for board seats when startups should only have advisors. Mark Suster is a governance expert for startups and we have referenced his blog posts in the past, This week he provides a blog post AND a 43 slide presentation on Managing Startup Boards with really interesting continuous integration/agile approaches to management.

POD OF THE WEEK: From This Week In Startups - Lessons on scaling teams in the US (HR, Org Structure, Compensation, Firing)

BONUS: A Business critical webinar for any business headed to the US from Early Growth Financial Services and Gusto: June 19th, 7am NZST understanding HR in the US. 

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 17, 2019

5/17/2019

 
  1. SALES: When on-boarding a new sales leader into your organization, here are six things to focus on for the first few months
  2. VENTURE: At the Seed stage, founders often ask “how much money should I raise?”. This article from The Startup proposes the MVR, or Minimum Viable Raise, which is the smallest amount of money that can get a business to Series A metrics in 18 months.
  3. SAN FRANCISCO. Check this map for a clear reason why San Francisco is such a magnet for new business (all the states in blue have smaller economies than the Bay Area). The team at the Founder Institute have compiled a San Francisco Startup Ecosystem Canvas which is a list of local resources available to help early-stage entrepreneurs based in the Bay Area. It’s a fantastic list!
  4. PITCH: Seed fundraising is hard and competitive. Having a great pitch is critical! Here is a great article on how to make a good pitch great.
  5. RETENTION: SaaS revenues are amazing only if retention in subscriptions (and corollary cash flow) remain high. The team at ChartMogul take a deeper look at this from their own books. In 2018 the majority of cash came from customers who signed up in 2017. 
  6. PRODUCT. My Billion Dollar Mistake by Hiten Shah. This is a fascinating and honest read for anyone who may be overly product-focused (and who may need a reality check by someone who learnt this the hard way).
  7. TELCO: From Business Insider the full telecoms and technology forecast book for 2019. Includes 5G, AI and home-mobile-work integrations.
  8. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION: Another phrase for your tech dictionary. Did you ever notice how apps or software just update incrementally these days? Well this is in-part due to a process called Continuous Integration and this blog post has a great breakdown of what that actually is (and why it’s a great practice).
  9. VIRALITY: What is it about some products that make them viral? Point Nine capital take a look at some of the best.
  10. AGILE: In past newsletters we referenced a road map for implementing a more agile organization. The transformation journey to an agile organization is tough and touches strategy, structure, people, process, and technology.​

POD OF THE WEEK: "If it ain’t blue, I can’t be friends with you". This is all about how iPhone users judge other people with green text bubbles. A great podcast about how technology forces us to make specific choices.

BONUS: Missed the Alexa Live Online conferences last month? No problem, just replay recordings of all sessions plus resources shared during the sessions. 

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

5/9/2019

 

  1. DEMO or DECK?: When it comes to closing deals the teams at Zoom and Chorus got together to take a look at what works better - a presentation or a product demonstration, or a bit of both? Read away for more (and I don’t want to spoil it as the infographic is full of amazing nuggets!). Pro-Tip, Kiwi’s shouldn’t say that second word in the US market.
  2. FINTECH: Insider scoop! From the NZTE Tech Team Five FinTech Predictions for (the rest of) 2019
  3. SOURCING: Just where do the best sources of traffic for SaaS companies come from? Mike Sonders takes a look at this in depth. 
  4. SALES: Scaling into Enterprise sales is hard (and can be costly). Saleshacker review Mutual Action Plans (MAP’s) in this article, which are documents designed to really streamline the sales process in larger scale deals in ways that benefit both parties and align the process well to tangible outcomes. 
  5. HOMEPAGE: Good website design is often outside the wheelhouse of most founders. Here is a list of top tips and trends for good homepage design in 2019.
  6. CHURN: In SaaS Churn is the silent killer and the primary reason why customer success is so important. Here are 3 ways to evaluate and address customer churn.
  7. VENTURE: If you saw the PitchBook Q1 2019 report a few weeks back but found it way to long a read, well I got you covered with an Infographic version of all you need to know. The Unicorn oven is cranking.
  8. GROWTH HACKS: From Jason Lemkin 12 SaaS growth hacks (three of which he has actually used)
  9. CONTENT MARKETING: Great content marketing efforts are what make this newsletter work, here is an extensive review of SaaS Content marketing, with the efforts of over 500 companies being analyzed. TL;DR Blog (but well), be consistent, test, and always offer something valuable in your content.
  10. THE SAAS OPPORTUNITY: Microsoft is now (give or take a few $$) a Trillion Dollar business, thanks primarily to it’s SaaS business model pivot, but their enterprise legacy makes them vulnerable to singularly focused companies like Zoom (Skype for Business) and Slack (Yammer, Teams, et al) that have high virality.

POD OF THE WEEK: The Secrets to Designing a Curiosity-Driven Career from Zainab Ghadiyali, Product Lead at Airbnb
BONUS: Via LinkedIn Learning comes a course from Brad Feld on Validating a Startup Idea

Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 3, 2019

5/1/2019

 
  1. FUNDING:  If you are a European startup and you’ve raised a seed round, what is the probability that you are going to raise a Series A round? Reviewing this article from Point Nine Capital, there are likely lots of similarities to NZ startups.
  2. SALES: 94% of executives and 88% of employees said distinct workplace culture is critical to business success. For a business to be successful, sales and revenue also need to be successful - so how does a great sales manager build an amazing sales culture around the habits that need to be done?
  3. $100m: Five ways to build a $100 million SaaS business: The 2014 edition vs today. Comparing the two, a lot has changed (including the blog platform), but the most significant change is the transition into Enterprise sales.
  4. AI: I often think about what happens in a post-SaaS business model world where information, not software, is the product: Point Nine Capital take a look this from the perspective of how AI can disrupt the B2B Software model and Tomasz Tunguz also looks at The Four Strategic Questions Facing AI Agencies.
  5. MARKETING: I download stuff so you don’t have to. This one is a SaaS marketing fundamentals guide from SaaSX. While this is not necessarily a playbook for everyone, it contains concepts, terms, asset definitions, and channels types descriptions that are really helpful to understand and master.
  6. TEAMS: High performing teams make companies great. Google set out to uncover (via good ol’ fashioned rigor and data) what makes a Google Team Effective and came up 5 key pillars that set successful teams apart.
  7. CYBERCRIME: Turns out Microsoft Office is the dominant target of choice for your run-of-the-mill cybercriminals. Excel, Word, and their buddies account for 70% of all attacks in Q4 2018.
  8. CUSTOMERS: This is the age of the customer and modern tech companies can’t survive without adopting customer-centric values - but where to start? Here are five solid pointers.
  9. CLOUD: Think your personal tech subscription bills are high? Apple reportedly spends $30m USD on Amazon’s AWS services per month. And this is just the bill for overflow from their iCloud data center. Frenemies for life!  Both Amazon and Microsoft reported a 41 percent increase in its cloud business last quarter. While both those growth numbers are the same Microsoft doesn’t report Azure separately. AWS has over twice the market share as Azure (which is the closest competitor).
  10. SLACK: A favorite tool of mine and adding in from above Slack have even bigger AWS bills than Apple at about $50m monthly! They are also going Public this year (and probably next month) and are choosing to do so via an unusual route using what is called a DPO (which Spotify also did). In preparation for their listing, they have to disclose financials and this review of the business, that went from $0 ARR tp $600m ARR in 5 years, by Jason Lemkin shows some really interesting learnings. 

POD OF THE WEEK: From the After On Podcast a deep dive into AI from Stuart Russell (who literally wrote the book on modern AI) and why it scares him.
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BONUS: Want to know how it all ends (The Universe that is)? Check this amazing video when you have a spare half-hour for a 4K journey to the end of time

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