Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending April 9, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Where do you start at the early stages of a startup when it comes to tracking metrics? The most important bottom-up SaaS metrics to track (and how to best visualize them) are in this article and neatly broken out via pre-revenue and post-revenue.
2. PRICING: Many SaaS Companies are shifting to usage-based models (me too!). Charging per-use makes the product more affordable and accessible (and take advantage of the features they need), so check out this usage pricing guide from Baremetrics.
3. SPEED MATTERS: Yup - I write about speed a lot lately. When I write this newsletter I prioritize speed and prioritize content over spelling, editorial tightness, and grammar. (But big shout to Grammarly who I outsource all that to). James Somers feels the same and Brad Dickason goes a step further - calling Speed the killer feature with firm examples of where speed matters in a digital experience and can be a great UX moat. Google obviously makes speed a priority for their tech stack but Netflix is my favorite great speed-focused tech company, which (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy-experience solutions.
4. MARKETING: Guess what? Your marketing team is slow!. Take a read of this article on frameworks to make your marketers speed up. Tech companies are market differentiators in part because they operate at a cadence that is faster than most. Speed is a competitive advantage that your marketing teams need to leverage!
5. TEST TEST TEST: Evaluating the functionality of a software application at every stage is critical to shipping something awesome. Take a good read of this PDF guide (along with real-life examples) and then bookmark this Google Site (blast from the past) page for a comprehensive list of the Stages of Test Development. That list is kind of old school though - so take a read and sprinkle some of this more modern (ie Agile) take on testing. into your QA world.
6. CLOUD: This is actually pretty big news: Cloud infrastructure spending by Enterprise surpassed on-premise spending for the first time in 2020 - it grew by 35% to reach almost USD $130 billion. I do find this number quite a small piece of the approximate $2 Trillion in total annual cloud spend Bessemer ventures reference for 2021 in their Cloud Index.
7. LINK BUILDING: This kind of seems like an SEO tactic of the past, where businesses build links to create a more organically positive Search rating. So is it still a relevant practice in 2020? Well......yah! But the rules have changed quite a lot. Check this article on how to optimize (by careful curation and intent) what to link.
8. JAVA: This is actually outstanding news this week (unless you are Larry Ellison). The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Google was legally allowed to use part of Oracle's Java API while building its Android mobile operating system. This court case has dominated tech industry news for yeeeeeaaaars (about 10)
9. CORPORATE VC: (or CVC) CVC-backed deals declined from a record high of 3,416 in 2019 to 3,359 in 2020, however corporate VC groups participated in 182 mega-rounds in 2020 ($100M+ deals) — a 48% increase compared to 2019 which bumped up the total funding to record highs (screw you Covid) of $74.1 Billion USD. Full (downloadable PDF) report from CB Insights here.
10. CASE STUDY: Canva - I'm a big fan (and user). Apparently, I'm not alone as in just 7 years they acquired over 15 MILLION users - this was back in 2019 when they were valued at $3.6 billion. Jumping over to 2021 they are now a decacorn and passed $500 million in annualized revenue, up 130% from last year!

POD OF THE WEEK: I'm a bit obsessed with Darknet diaries - so this is another one from them (or maybe three, depending on how much you get into the story). It's about the massive user-data breach at LinkedIn back in 2012 - which had a cascading effect around the web leading to other breaches at Dropbox and now-defunct FormSpring.