Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 16, 2019

1. SCALE-UP: Scaling any business is hard and especially scaling out the market-facing teams, in particular sales. Being ready is key. Here is a great list of questions to ask from Forbes about a companies readiness to scale teams.
2. STOCK OPTIONS: In today's competitive employment market, incentivizing people to stay put is no joke. Using stock options, especially in the US-based tech world, is a tried and true strategy. This post from The Startup is a comprehensive guide on how to deliver employee based stock option grants.
3. VIDEO: Connie Chan from a16z makes the case that eCommerce apps will have to also become video apps as commerce trends evolve. 
4. THE ROSE METRIC: People are the most important (and expensive) metric for any company, especially SaaS (yes, I would argue more important than the software product). Revenue per FTE is one metric to measure when it comes to people efficiency, but a better one perhaps is the ROSE Metric, (Return on SaaS Employees). This metric highlights the tradeoffs between headcount, recurring revenue, and EBITDA growth of a SaaS company.
5. LOYALTY: We are deep into the Age of the Customer and paid subscription-based premium loyalty solutions (it’s hard to figure out where to put the hyphens in that statement) are an emerging retention and value strategy for many brands - for example, Amazon Prime, Lululemon, and Nike Adventure Club. Clarus recently released a study on this growing segment, with great insights on what consumers expect from a paid program, how frequently they want rewards, and how it influences shopping behavior.
6. DEV TEAMS: An article from Marianne Bellotti that I wish I had read 15 years ago describing all the best engineering and management advice she stole from non-technical people. I’ll tease this with the reliability and security-based 100:10:1 rule; Brainstorm 100 things that could go wrong, pick 10 that feel like the most likely, investigate them, and focus on 1 critical problem.
7. SOCIAL COMMERCE: Great report from Business Insider on the Social Commerce sector - forecasting an $84.2 billion social commerce opportunity by 2024, assuming we can address the security and true issues.
8. STARTUP START-UPS: Brex launched out of seemingly nowhere a couple of years ago in San Francisco, proving that servicing startups is a lucrative business and famously ditching digital advertising in favor of physical billboards on buildings and public transportation stops. BONUS: If you are a Kiwi startup looking to use Brex as your internal Credit Card provider I have negotiated a NZ specific landing page with them (with zero fee card issuance).
9. SPEED MATTERS: I write this newsletter during my weekly public-transport commute times using Evernote - I prioritize speed and quality content over spelling, editorial tightness, and grammar. (My bad!) James Somers feels the same. As does Google, they obviously also made speed a priority for their tech stack and speed is UX moat for tech companies. Netflix is another great speed-focused tech company, who (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also become their own CDN as part of their speedy experience solution.
10. ZERO TO TEN: There are a bunch of founder stories out there telling quite scripted PR stories of their growth. But I found this post from the founder of HotJar very insightful (and full of great data on their industry unit economics) .

POD OF THE WEEK: How to Change Your Mind from Freakonmics Radio. A lot is empathy based.
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BONUS: Recruitment. Convincing someone to join your startup is a sales pitch all in itself. Y-Combinator partner Dalton Caldwell gives his advice on how to pitch this.