This week - I'm taking it to 11. 

Every year since 2004 Mary Meeker (a top-ranked VC) has been releasing an incredibly in-depth analysis of Internet Trends which has become a must-read for insight into the diverse and ever-evolving tech ecosystem. Between last year and this year Mary dramatically departed VC behemoth, Kleiner Perkins, to start a new $1.25 billion investment fund called call Bond but that did not stop her from creating another monster report - 333 slides long. 

Condensing the information from the 11 categories into something digestible took longer than the normal newsletter (I postponed it twice) and there is so much densely packed data in etc report that an expanded form article can also be found here. Below are the email digestible highlights:

1. USERS: Over 50 percent of the world (3.8 billion people) are now online and using/consuming on the internet. This is up from 3.6 billion in 2017. But overall growth is slowing to about 6 percent as new users become harder to come by (also evidenced by the stall in growth of smartphone shipments)
2. E-COMMERCE: Continues to grow, especially when compared to the percentage of all retail sales in the US. eCommerce still only accounts for just over 15% of all retail sales, so there is plenty of room to grow.
3. ADVERTISING: This topic is really interesting and showing the most dramatic changes, with a significant shift in digital advertising spend that is directed at peoples pockets, as Mobile Ad spend is skyrocketing and will more than likely surpass TV in next years report (34% vs 35%). Most of the spending is still on the big two platforms (Google and Facebook), but other companies (such as Amazon and Twitter) are seeing an increase in market share. 
4. USAGE: The Average American spends over 6 hours on digital per day day, 3.6 of which are on mobile (thats one hour/day more than we did in 2014). But time spent on computers/desktop has been sacrificed and has seen a decline (there are only so many hours in a day). Mobile usage has also (probably permanently) surpassed TV viewing (226 vs 216 minutes/day on average). 
5. FREEMIUM: It’s not just for B2C businesses like Dropbox and Spotify. Freemium is now a strategy employed in gaming,  Enterprise, Cloud, and online Payments.
6. DATA GROWTH: Data volume is growing extraordinarily and forecast to grow even more so in future years. The whole concept of “data" is in transition from a noun to a verb and it can be leveraged to win customers through insightful intelligence. 
7. WORK: On-demand/Gig economy workers are increasing in volume the US, due to companies like Uber and Etsy. Remote workers are also on the rise thanks to online collaboration tools such as Zoom and Slack.
8. EDUCATION: Traditional tertiary education schools are expanding online offering classes and full online degrees but completion and retention rates still vary.
9. IMMIGRATION: Immigrant founders have been an important driver for highly valued tech innovation in the US. Something that will likely be impacted by the current administrations stricter views on immigration.
10. HEALTHCARE (TECH): Health care is increasingly heading towards a more digitized industry, with industry outsiders and the Big Tech Leaders taking larger roles. There is also a significant rise in telemedicine and on-demand consultations and digitization of health records.
11. ASIA: We seem to be migrating over to a less Western Internet as most of internet growth is occurring in Asia, namely the Asia-Pacific region and China also seems to be on the rise with innovation.

POD OF THE WEEK: Brain Fanzo talks about digital empathy (another new concept for your tech dictionaries) -- the notion of using digital tools to really understand a buyer.

BONUS: This is not quite tech, but I found it fascinating. This Bloomberg Article discusses a renegade company in Japan called Disco Corp, that charges employees for everything, from $100/hour conference rooms, to desks, and even co-worker advice (at varying rates). They claim to have created an intense free-market atmosphere that eliminates most redundant or unnecessary tasks. 

1. SaaS METRICS: This list the top fifty (yup 50) metrics SaaS companies need to understand (and mostly measure) - Shareable PDF Version! We also have Tomasz Tunguz coming into the mix with Redpoint Ventures Spreadsheet version.
2. PLG: Another acronym for your tech dictionaries - that stands for Product Lead Growth, something that NZ’s RayGun is leaning heavily into. One of our favorite tools at NZTE, Calendly, is deeply driven PLG organization and their VP of Product talks more about that strategy in this article.
3. CONVERSION: From Incredo - 9 steps for SaaS companies to boost conversion rates (beyond free trials)
4. ENTERPRISE: Want to sell product to Enterprise customers? It’s lucrative, but it’s also hard. Great post from openView on what is required (Time, reliability, integration, and Security, Security, Security!). Missing from this is also good old fashioned cash, to weather the often overlooked SaaS Negative Cash Trough.
5. VENTURE: Scott Kupor from a16z has written a book attempting to demystify how VC funding works and Fortune magazine has a great interview with him (a TL;DR version of the book). Andrew Chen - one of his partners at 16z also wrote a nice summary of his insights from the book. BONUS: Scott has  this great article on how to raise money from a VC.
6. DISCOUNTS: Are a great incentive for longer term contracts. But how much should the discount be? Ben "The SaaS CFO” Murray reviews this in detail AND provides a nifty Excel Template you can access here.
7. TERM SHEETS: During merger and acquisitions when founders agree to sell their companies to larger entities, the resulting conversations can be stressful. Atlassian wants to take some of that stress out of the process and earlier this week publicly published its Term Sheet document for acquisitions.
8. COACHING: Often times the best ways we can truly support founders are also the hardest to help address. The team at Founders Coach list of bunch of dilemmas that founders face that keep them up at night (and broken out by company stage).
9. ON-BOARDING: Doing this well as an organization is critical for retention not only of customers but of your team. FirstRound provide a list of 6 must-reads for on-boarding success of new hires.
10. CHURN: A definitive guide (on how to prevent it).

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POD OF THE WEEK: Brain Fanzo talks about digital empathy (another new concept for your tech dictionaries) -- the notion of using digital tools to really understand a buyer.

1. SALES: This week in sales the focus is on Social Selling. According to Hubspot, salespeople who adopt social selling at an organization increase both the win rate and deal size, by 5% and 35% respectively. 
2. VC’s: Ever wonder exactly how Venture Capitalists make money/pay themselves? Here is a quick look at their unit economics.
3. M&A: SalesForce is a SaaS data monster and Tableau, a publicly traded BI company, have been trying to migrate over to a more subscription based model for some time. In a deal that kinda makes sense in hindsight, Salesforce announced this week that it will be purchasing Tableau for a whopping $15.7 Billion USD (this is the 3rd largest acquisition price since 2012). . Tomasz Tunguz takes a deeper look at the acquisition and the consolidation of big Data/BI business.
4. UPSELL: The importance of upsell to the overall growth of a SaaS company is well understood. But when to start up-selling is a more important strategic question.
5. FAILURE (pt 2): Last week was about founder failures, but failure is not just for founders. It’s for VC’s too. Ben Evans dives deeper into failure as a metric  for VC and also notes that there is no such thing as a 10x return in the VC world (it’s more like 26x and in some cases 64x).
6. CRO: That stands for Conversation Rate Optimization and Banklinko have created a great web guide about what it is and how to design for CRO within a business.
7. GROWTH: Organic growth is the holy grail of tech companies and there exists a lot of mythology and lore around the best ways to drive this kind of growth. The smart people at McKinsey take a look at four of the top myths (and debunk them).
8. FINTECH: The big 3 Tech Companies (Apple, Amazon, and Google) are taking financial services by storm and forecast to grab up to 40% of the $1.35 trillion in US financial services revenue from incumbent banks (according to McKinsey) In this Business Insider report, a full competitor analysis is presented to the global financial industry. Great stuff! 
9. BRANDS And it’s not just FinTech where Apple, Amazon and Google dominate. In this years most valuable brands survey by BrandZ. nine of the top ten brands are Tech (or FinTech) companies (shoutout to MickeyD’s as the non-tech company), with Amazon taking the number one spot followed closely by Apple and Google. 
10. SCALE: One of the hardest parts of scaling a company is having to let good people go. This often happens when they are no longer suited for the growth stage of the business. But what if this person is a founder? The Founder Collective discuss in this article.

POD OF THE WEEK: New this week from How I Built This, the story of a company you all may have heard of: AllBirds

​BONUS: DevGuild do amazing half day conferences here in SF. I go whenever I can and drag customers along with me. The last one myself and the team at Marsello attended as it was focused on Product Marketing - a timely subject for them. You can re-broadcast some or all of the day here. I highly recommend the Hiten Shah presentation on The Three Steps of Continuous Customer Obsession

1. SALES: Indirect sales are the Holy Grail of SaaS (as the Cost of Acquisition is low, or the burden of a third party). This article dives deeper into how to achieve this kind of sales success.
2. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Customer-experience transformations, just like digital-transformation are organizationally hard. Here are the seven deadly sins to look out for with customer-experience transformations.
3. INVESTMENT: From the Pitchbook team, 15 charts that show how 2019 could be a record years for US VC.
4. MARKETING: Providing the right metrics for ROI with marketing efforts in a very noisy environment is challenging and Google recommend updating measurement strategies constantly to better represent evolving priorities. How do marketers know how they measure up? Google partnered with Bain to create neat benchmarking tool called Measurement Advantage.
5. FAILURE (pt 1): This is a badge of honor in Silicon Valley and it provides so many lessons for future (or repeat) founders. CB Insights has collected the top 20 reasons why in this report and also listed 17 of the biggest Tech Frauds (this link is just good reading)
6. GOOGLE: Yeah…...you know you are a pretty big company when you produce an annual economic impact report of what you do and can also break it down domestically (in the US) by State. You can download Google's PDF Report here or check the interactive guide (which also breaks it down interactively by State).
7. WEB METRICS: What are the best website metrics to track? The hard and fast answer here is always “It Depends”. But this article from DataBox outlines some of the most important.
8. GROWTH MARKETING + VC's: Andrew Chen from a16z presents a deck on how the skills needed to grow new products can be used both to evaluate new startups that a16z can invest in. And once they have invested; to help them grow.
9. CUSTOMER SUCCESS: What does a good success management strategy look like? ChartMogul take a deeper look at best strategies and SaaSx give a great Org Chart.
10. MACHINE LEARNING: Great little primer from Google on what Machine Learning is and what it can mean for a business.

POD OF THE WEEK: "Scaling Your Startup” is a special 10-episode feature from the team at “This Week in Startups”. If you prefer Audio to Video - click here.

BONUS: Here is the slide deck from the podcast above (if video or audio isn’t your thing): https://thisweekinstartups.com/scale/