Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 5, 2019

1. PITCHING: From Business Insider, The first-time founder's guide to pitching a VC
2. FINTECH 2019 4/5: Part four of a Five part series on the Future of Fintech by Business Insider. In this deck, Business Insider take a look at how regulation is driving change in the financial services industry.
3. VC MIXUP: Fresh off the press this week is a massive announcement from one of the premier Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz: They are renouncing their Venture Capital status……….and the reason for this pivot is pretty disruptive; It’s to become a financial advisory service, which in turn will enable them to be more capable of investing into emerging tech asset classes such Cryptocurrency, Crypto Tokens, and ICO’s. Along with this news they also announced that all 150 employees are registering as financial advisors.
4. THE 40% RULE: What is the 40% rule for SaaS companies? This video explains more but basically when a VC backed SaaS businesses (of over ~ $2m ARR) adds profit + growth rate, the total should be equal to 40% (or more). This helps calculate the cadence of a business: The faster they grow, the less profitable they need to be.
5. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: This is one of my favorite topics, and one that founders are almost informally delusional about achieving. I never want to pop the enthusiasm of a founder (it’s part of the secret sauce that will help them succeed), but I want to sprinkle some grit in. Thomas Friedman summarizes some great thoughts about the topic in this post: TL;DR Often time Product-Market Fit is an Illusion.
6. DATA and AI: Splunk just released their 2019 Predictions (as an e-book) about trends in AI and machine learning, IT operations, security, and IoT.
7. DESIGN: Bringing good design into different elements of a business is nothing new to but there are specialized branches of design constantly emerging. Growth Design is my new all time favorite - merging typical HCD/Empathy Design but adding in the pragmatism of designing the jobs that need to be done
8. PRICING FEATURETTE: Pricing is hard and it’s never (ever) perfect. a) If companies decide to have a pricing page on their site (which is a whole other topic), Jason Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, lays out some thoughts of what makes a good pricing page. b) McKinsey get technical, outlining how to leverage big data to make better pricing decisions. FUN FACT: On average, a 1 percent price increase translates into an 8.7 percent increase in operating profits. c) Want to look at competitor prices? Comptera have a great article on how to conduct a high fidelity competitive pricing analysis project.
9. GLOBAL STARTUPS:  Interactive report from late last year or the PDF version here - The US’s long-held singular dominance of startup and venture capital activity is being challenged by the rapid ascent of cities in Asia and Europe  (yes, and also in NZ). The US remains the clear global leader, but the rest of the world is gaining ground at an accelerating rate.
10. VR: AT&T announced last week that it will exclusively sell the Magic Leap One, a mixed reality headset, in 2019. This could really spur the adoption of a consumer-focused VR headset as AT&T-owned media properties (such as CNN and HBO) are being spun into AR apps and AT&T also plan to introduce a DirecTV Now AR app for Magic Leap.

POD OF THE WEEK: This week is from Y-Combinator discussing Coaching for founders and having tough conversations.

BONUS: Microsoft just launched a free online AI Business School. Microsoft is trying to bridge the gap  "between what people want to do and the reality of what is going on in their organizations today.” More on the press release here.