Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending August 9, 2024

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CARR - Contracted Annual Recurring Revenue. This is a forward-looking SaaS revenue metric that estimates the maximum revenue size of a SaaS company, measuring current recurring revenue from your SaaS P&L and future revenue that sits in newly won customer contracts.


2. AGILE MARKETING: Hold on to your hats, Marketers - Agile processes are coming for ya! This is another one for our Tech Dictionaries  - it's how to really validate learnings, make mistakes, and deliver impactful results. Hubspot covers this concept in detail and outlines how DoorDash hardcore-leveraged this methodology to increase revenues from $885m to $2.89 billion in a YEAR!


3. MARKETS 1/2: Earlier this year (see #8 here), Sapphire Ventures released their State of the SaaS Capital Markets report. They are now back with a mid-year update to see how some of their SaaS Market prediction (both public and private) are holding up. Flat and down rounds, Investments in AI, Unicorn creation slow down, and Efficient growth are all things that are tracking well. But a measurable increase in multiples, the re-emergence of Growth Mindsets, VC funding growth, and IPOs are things they either got wrong, or it's still too early to tell - great read!


4. MARKETS 2/2: Also, take a read of the full report; there are some other metrics of note in there outside of Sapphire Ventures predictions:  Growth has fallen to 13% average, this is the lowest rate on record. But funding is on track to surpass 2023 levels - all driven by substantial AI investments. There was also a 21% increase in M&A compared to last year, with significant SMB deals - consolidation trend?


5. CYBER/CLOUD: With all kinds of outage drama happening lately, it's time to hammer this home: Regardless of the size of your SaaS business, security and redundancy should be part of your dev cycle, but know your weak spots well. Founder Institute discusses 6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack that may be a bit leaky. Security needs to be rolled up into the process - DevSecOps being the port-portmanteau, or is that SecDevOps? Heavybit has a great article discussing cloud security challenges (as apparently, if we extrapolate this data from #4 above, 88% of SaaS is now sitting on public cloud). This infographic from Genuine Impact shows how that is distributed in Public Cloud, with Amazon's AWS (and specifically US-East-1) taking on the brunt of that.


6. DEATH (of the internet kind): This post from Noah Smith explores historical trends, current challenges, and future opportunities in the internet sector - insightful stuff to lull on. Despite recent downturns, the long-term potential remains strong, driven by ongoing innovations and shifting market dynamics.


7. HOMEPAGES: IS your homepage a barrier? This article makes the case that it quite possibly is (as potential users want to get their hands on the end product as quickly as possible) - it's a time to value play across PLG and classic Sales lead SaaS.


8. DEV-REL: Dev Relationships are a real things. Developer happiness (and corresponding productivity) are important to measure. There are two primary frameworks for measuring developer productivity: DORA (also the GitLab source) and SPACE - a more holistic framework for productivity. And guess what - we're terrible at it because, according to this new Stack Overflow survey, the majority of developers hate their jobs. And it's not because of AI. It's old-school failed expectations and technical debt.


9. CONTRADICTION: Point Nine Capital discusses the importance of embracing contradictions in business and also uses one of my new favorite phrases, "Startup Advice Industrial Complex". Startup Leaders should balance conflicting priorities, such as growth vs. profitability and innovation vs. stability, to drive success. In theory, understanding and managing these paradoxes should lead to more resilient and adaptable companies (and teams).


10. CASE STUDY: Do your profit margins need a tweak? Here are 40 strategies for improving your profit margins from Sameer Dholakia, with a case study on SendGrid (from high burn to growth and IPO).


POD OF THE WEEK: Lessons from product scale guru Brian Tolkin on scaling Uber and Opendoor.