Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 14, 2020

Happy Valentines Day - in the words of Anand Sanwal. I love you.

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: MRR (monthly recurring revenue). In a surprise statement to no-one, this is the most important metric a SaaS company has. But MRR is a nuanced metric with a few flavors and this is something that everyone needs a deeper understanding of. There are different ways to calculate the metrics and once nailed, can then be leveraged to easily forecast where you are going as a business and which types of MRR are performing best.
2. PLG: Successful Product Led Growth companies are everywhere and in order to get anything done, it requires Pirates, Shepherds and Sherpas within a team or organization. In the PLG vs non PLG world - the roles of salespeople is very different, it’s Sherpas vs Shepherds.
3. MANAGE vs LEAD: Not all great leaders are good at a managing (and vice versa) - especially in product teams. Nick Caldwell, VP of Engineering at Reddit discusses this and how he leveraged leadership to grow his team by over 200%. 
4. VC: What's the hottest new sector for VC’s? Automakers, as in they are talking all kinds of tech investments. Crunchbase take a look at this sectors prolific growth over the last two years with VW and Toyota leading in terms of spend. From ride-hailing apps to driverless car technology.
5. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: Customer loyalty drives the success of a business, and the customer experience (CX) drives loyalty. Zen Desk has published their CX Trends Report for 2020 and its full of great nuggets: 74% of customers feel loyal to a particular brand or company and 52% of customers report going out of their way to buy from their favorite brands.
6. MARTECH: Whats the best marketing tech stack for your business?  Here is what the Team at Wunderkind recommend. They say it’s perfect and I have to admit - it’s not bad.
7. REVENUE MANAGEMENT: This is the system of setting prices and adjusting them based on supply and demand (thanks for the infographic Chargify). In SaaS , which is all about predictability, this is really important, with RevOps being a new category of practice within maturing SaaS companies. 
8. SECURITY: Back-of-the-napkin Math tells us that about 88% of all SaaS is now sitting on public cloud. But building on a major cloud provider’s platform doesn’t make your products secure. This is a great video and transcript hosted by HeavyBit covering the core tenets of modern cloud infrastructure security
9. FINTECH: Let's see how this plays out with Europe going full Brexit this year. According to this report (in handy PDF format) from  Innovate Finance, global fintech funding declined in 2019 compared with the year before ($35.7 billion, down 28%), but in a clear win for the region in comparison to the US, European fintechs, lead by the soon to be estranged UK ($4.9 billion, up 27%) scooped up more in funding (total $8.5 billion, up nearly 50%).
10. COMPENSATION: Betts Recruiting release a compensation guide every year and the 2020 version is now out. It covers salaries of some of the most important roles at high growth (mainly tech, mainly sales) companies. Big take home: The Tech industry is very lucrative still and average tech account executive saw a salary increase of more than 4% last year (beating inflation). Also, in order to hire those same executives, companies were willing to offer starting salary increases of 9%.

POD OF THE WEEK: With new hires, onboarding and ramping are incredibly important for a startup to master. The Startup Chat discuss this in detail, especially on how to get this right for the first 90-days.