Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 20, 2019

1. FREEMIUM vs FREE TRIAL: Which is better for your SaaS Startup? Craft ventures take a review, starting with my old alma matter (and one of the original Freemium products) - Yammer. Tomusz Tunguz also conducted a survey on Free Trials last year - My favorite fact: Conversion rates aren't impacted by trial length (so make them shorter).
2. MAPPED: Google Maps says that it now covers 98 percent of the places in the world where people live, including 10 million miles of Street View. The product also has 1 billion monthly users.Google obviously have some solid things to say on driving product usage and retention.
3. HANDOFF: The customer journey has plenty of touch points and handoffs. Chartmogul provide some great tips on customer handoff from sales to Customer Success teams.
4. CHURN: To understand why customers churn, it’s equally as important to look at why customers stay. But to get there the fidelity of the data collected to evaluate this needs to be high
5. SALES: What does success look like? The answer is: It depends on your business. This article interviews sales leaders from a variety of successful companies and how they measure success in their roles.
6. PRODUCT MARKET FIT: How does an early stage company know if they have PMF? This article has some great PMF definitions.
7. CYBER CYBER CYBER: Security should be part of your dev cycle but also know your weak spots. Founder Institute discusses 6 points of vulnerability in a tech stack that may be a bit leaky.
8. MARGIN: Andreessen Horowitz explores Enterprise SaaS margin, believing that there is a significant downward pressure on margins for software startups.
9. TERM SHEETS: As 2019 and the decade comes to a close there has been a significant disruption in the Venture Capital space, primarily centered around the #metoo movement, diversity in tech, and a shift in expectations on Growth vs profitability. According to Fortune magazine, Term Sheet readers will have more pragmatic expectations on valuations and bigger focus on inclusivity and ethics.
10. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: Requires great leaderships - here are interview with Head of Growth at Reddit and Head of Product at Twitter on how to create a good vision and strategy.