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