Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 22, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: The nag Metric, I'm bringing this one out of the archives, as I have been nagged a bit lately (and I'm also away this week;-)):  A call to action within a site or customer journey is kinda like a parent trying to get their kid to clean up their mess. It just gets a bit naggy after a while and gets mentally filtered out. This can impact your brand/NPS over time or just irritate people into churn. The Nag Score - outlined in detail here - is an attempt to quantify this.


2. NCT: Crack open your tech dictionaries, I have a new acronym to lob your way. OKRs are old school.  Ravi Mehta's NCT (Narrative, Commitments, Tasks) model simplifies goal setting. So instead of vague objectives, start with a clear Narrative explaining the "why" behind each goal. Next, set 3-5 measurable commitments for the quarter, with Tasks as actionable steps. The difference is that OKRs can be overly ambitious, but NCTs focus on achievable milestones that align closely with strategic priorities, more Agile in a way, as course corrections are easier (and it increases team accountability).


3. AI: Polytheistic AI certainly is a phrase to wrap your heads around. It means multiple powerful models coexisting and not one AGI "god.". As part of a top 10 list of thoughts on AI, the article calls today's AI "amplified intelligence," excelling in the middle of tasks while humans still handle prompts and verification.


4. MOATS: Euclid VC digs into why tech moats are harder to build (and keep) than ever. Market speed, AI, open source, and fast-followers erode advantages quickly, meaning execution speed and distribution now trump IP in defensibility.


5. MARKET: Shopify, Datadog, and Palantir are all re-accelerating, showing that in B2B SaaS, the best can still crush it despite the macro gloom. For top players like these guys, growth (and multiples) are back.


6. AI: In AI, marginal costs trend toward zero—so this article points out that if this is true, then pricing should shift from scarcity to abundance. Think access-based, outcome-based, or ecosystem-driven models, not per-seat limits.


7. SHIP IT: AI teams these days are often told to "just ship it," but as us oldies know, rushing shit leads to underbaked products. Leah Tharin breaks down why speed still needs guardrails—especially when trust, safety, and market fit are on the line.


8. MARKETS: Silicon Valley Banks H2 2025 report shows Series A ARR medians nearly doubled to $3M since 2021 (crazy right?), with the lower quartile growing fastest. Translation: "Meh" traction will probably no longer get funded; fewer rounds is a higher bar.


9. PRICING: I make the joke/tech-ism that "pricing is like software - it's never done", too often. But it's true, dammit! So check this great 6-Step Guide to Pricing (With Case Studies), which is good and agrees with my tech-ism about how hard it is.


10. CASE STUDY: Shopify's AI mandate is now "operational law" — no resource or headcount is approved unless a team can prove AI couldn't do the job. AI fluency is in every performance review. An internal LLM proxy + MCP infrastructure makes AI instantly available to the entire company. This is culture remade in some weird AI way.


POD OF THE WEEK: How ChatGPT accidentally became the fastest-growing product in history.