Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 2, 2019

1. DUE DILIGENCE - PART FOUR OF A FIVE PART SERIES. This five-part series (over the next five weeks) covers how most VC's approach the quantitative part of doing diligence on potential investments. PART 4: RETENTION - this one is all about life-time value.
2. CYBERSECURITY: Software is eating the world and the digitization (much better term than disruption) of many businesses and industries creates  whole litany of risks. McKinsey discuss how to manage and integrate security into the digital transformation agenda.
3. US VC: Check these 21 charts showing current trends in US venture capital. Mega-deals still on the rise and 2019 on pace to surpass 2018’s banner year for VC.
4. FREEMIUM: Is it a good or bad strategy for your SaaS business? ChartMogul weighs the merits (and downside) of this strategy and also asks you to challenge your assumptions.
5. PRODUCT MARKETING: PLG (Product Led Growth) has been referenced in past newsletters and can create massive virality if executed well (and the product can support the effort). UserPilot just launched a great guide on how Marketers can really execute on Product-led Growth Marketing.
6. CLOUD: Big tech dominates public cloud and, based on recent earnings calls, all three big providers (Amazon, Microsoft and Google) showed big gains in this segment of their business: AMAZON: Grew AWS revenue by 37% YoY, increasing to $8.4 billion for the quarter MICROSOFT: Azure revenue was up 64% from the prior year. GOOGLE: The cloud business unit reported an $8 billion annual revenue run rate - that’s double what was reported last year.
7. FEMALE FOUNDERS: The gender gap for startup investment dollars hasn’t broken past 3 percent for female-only founded startups in the last year, but Global dollar volume for startups with a solo female founder or at least one female founder is at 14 percent so far this year, compared with 10 percent in 2014 Several VC firms report progress in funding female-founded companies: 38 percent for Kapor Capital and 28 percent for M Ventures' second fund.
8. PRICING: Packaging up offerings and finding the optimal pricing and features structures for both customers and business unit economics is incredibly hard and never right. The team at Heavybit know this very well and this article from them on using feature flags is a great read.
9. GROWTH: I love this article from First Round Capital. Mainly as it justifies my sentiment around rigor, data and insight. To quote: "Growth is about implementing a rigorous, customer insight and data-driven process with sustained effort to remove friction"
10. AI: In the Tech B2B World, we are reaching the tail end of the age of SaaS and entering the Data/Intelligence age. This article does a great job exploring this next wave of intelligence based tech and the impacts on the software industry coming in the next 10 years.

POD OF THE WEEK: I’m cheating this week as it’s actually an on-demand webinar from Oracle on the trends impacting the venture capital market.
BONUS: From NZ, the Absolute IT renumeration report is out and shows that the national median base is on the rise again.