Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 9, 2019

1. DUE DILIGENCE - THE FINAL PART OF A FIVE PART SERIES. This five part series has covered how most VC's approach the quantitative part of conducting due diligence on potential investments. PART 5: REVENUE QUALITY - looking at the distribution of engagement across the user-base.
2. CAC PAYBACK: In past weeks, CAC (Customer Acquisition Costs) Payback has been discussed and it is one of the most important metrics for a SaaS business (as cash is king). Diving a little deeper into this metric and breaking it into constituents gives a much better indicator of efficiencies. Patric Mathieson has created a (downloadable) template and corollary blog post on how best to do this.
3. INNOVATION REPORT: Our buddies at Silicon Valley Bank just released their latest Q3 report for 2019 on the global innovation economy. The sector remains healthy, which is great considering the ongoing backdrop of global trade tensions and economic uncertainty - likely due to the recent flurry of high-profile unicorn IPOs. There is still a big concentration of capital into mega funds exceeding $1 billion and smaller funds under $200 million, with the spaces between hollowing out.
4. DIVERSITY: Hiring and building a diverse team is essential for a thriving business. In this article Google layout the framework on how to hire and retain diverse teams.
5. AAARRR: Aka "Pirate Metrics”. Thanks to Paul Burke for sharing this one. First proposed from 500 Startups, the great thing about this acronym based grouping of metrics is that it can be applied to non-software products or services as well as traditional SaaS: Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, Referral.
6. INSURTECH: From CB Insights, this is a downloadable (and very shareable) PDF on the current state (Q2 2019) of the InsurTech industry. 
7. PRODUCT TOURS: Product tours are used in most web apps but there is a sophisticated art to design the right engagement that leads to conversion. Chameleon have just released this report from 15 million user interactions using product guidance to provide benchmarks and best practices for designing a sold product tour experience. 
8. PRICING: In the SaaS world, great pricing prioritizes the customer’s success over that of the businesses. That logic seems a little counterintuitive, but the profitability of a customer in SaaS happens waaaaay after a customer becomes an actual customer. OpenView expands on this reasoning more in this complex post on achieving net negative churn (where the average revenue per customer increases at rates which offset any churn) by using customer based value metrics as a pricing strategy. 
9. VIDEO: Storytelling via Video is an every growing and integral part of most tech companies Content Marketing strategies. In this post from Google, testing and experimenting via video is a new evolving approach (and hopefully using tools like NZ’s Wipster and PageProof!) 
10. EDGE: Compute requirements can be a serious bottleneck in todays ever connected cloud and mobile world. Computational processes need to be moved from central servers and infrastructure over to more localized devices to minimize latency and optimize user experience (looking to you to figure this out Siri!). This e-book from DMI explains why edge computing is important now and will be continue to be even more significant in the future.

POD OF THE WEEK: Great interview from Shopify’s reluctant CEO, Tobias Lütke, on NPR’s How I Built This. Great segment in there on how they built their marketing based hypothesis testing.

BONUS:  Book publisher Taschen just released an interactive page that details the history of web design, from 1990 onwards. It details the emergence and growth of Flash, the evolution of the web developer, and the concept of virality that began to emerge in the early 2000s. It also takes us to 2019, where the "next generation" of web design is still being realized, mobile rules, and AR and VR use causes are being prepped for prime time.