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