Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 11, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CARR - Contracted Annual Recurring Revenue. This is a forward-looking SaaS revenue metric that estimates a SaaS company's maximum revenue size, measuring current recurring revenue from your SaaS P&L and future revenue that sits in newly won customer contracts.


2. KNOWLEDGE BASE: I complain all teh time that building a comprehensive and useful customer Knowledge Base platform is hard. But here is something to really consider (it's certainly a helpful article for my mindset): There are probably stakeholders/purchases of your product who do not respond well to traditional marketing and, in fact, may actively hate it. These people are like me, and while I may moan about how difficult creating good documentation is, it may be one of the best anti-marketing-marketing tools you have available, Especially if you have an API as part of your product.


3. AI TEAMS: I brought up the idea of AI-first startups a few weeks back. But here is a great article on AI-first product teams. It's not just about adding AI features— it's rethinking how products are built. From architecture to staffing to shipping, the best AI teams blur the lines between data, design, and engineering. Great examples and org patterns


4. TARIFS: Last week was fun for anyone with a passive stock portfolio. Buckle-up Tariffs are here for who knows how long. CJ Gustafson nails the moment IMO: a two-day $6.6T hit to global equities and SaaS multiples dropping below 5x. Tariffs triggered it, but the future implications go deep—slower procurement, delayed renewals, and CFOs reverting to spreadsheets. Ruben Dominguez backs it up with details: tariffs on chips, EVs, and AI hardware are redrawing supply chains, squeezing margins, and will complicate GTM for startups globally. If you're building software, your customers may be hurting. If you're building hardware, you're already in the blast zone of this absurdity.


5. VENTURE: Let's see how #4 above will impact Venture because we WERE on a bit of a comeback. The new CB Insights State of Venture for Q1 2025 report is out, and VC funding reached the highest level in nearly 3 years at $121B - but deal count keeps falling. This is all led by OpenAI's mammoth $40B round. Annual median deal size is the highest it has ever been ($3.5M), and AI continues to reshape the venture ecosystem, driving 1 in 5 deals.


6. TERM SHEETS: ESG clauses hit 26%: HSBC's 2025 Term Sheet Guide breaks down 588 UK deals. Seed deals surged 46% YoY—driven by the good ol' AI buzz—while later-stage rounds saw tighter terms, more board controls, and a rise in participating prefs.


7. CLOUD: Notion Capital's 2025 Euro-centric Cloud Challengers list is out. 50% of the top 100 are (surprise surprise!) AI-native. Average team size? Just 16. Seed rounds surged to a median of $5.2M. Developer tools dominate, and PLG is going hybrid.


8. AI MODELS: (of the business kind) Check out this super interesting discussion centered on AI is breaking old SaaS economics. Legacy biz models show us where value will accrue: either let users own it (platforms), or fully outsource it (services). "Operate" plays are caught in the middle and at risk.


9. SALES: Need to boost conversions? Try Psychology. This post unpacks why buyers actually convert—highlighting the classics: urgency, FOMO, loss aversion, and more. Full of simple, high-impact tactics you can all steal today.


10. CASE STUDY: ChatGPT is one of the fastest-growing apps ever, and its parent company, OpenAI, is projected to hit $12.7B this year (up from $3.7B last year) and projected to hit $29.4B next year, but the organization still expects to lose money until it hits $125B ARR. Why? Infra costs are massive, and margins still look like those of hardware startups, not software. A killer reminder: scale ≠ profitability in AI (yes, yes we know about Deepseek). Also, the first-mover advantage normally doesn't play out well.


POD OF THE WEEK: From David Kellogg and Co: CARR, ARR, and the Impact of Usage-Based Pricing. Contracted Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) are commonly used terms in the SaaS and Cloud Industry but are not standardized, leading to inconsistent calculations.