Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending February 22, 2019

1. NETWORKING: Scaling a tech company requires a bunch of know who. But networking is hard regardless of personality type. Here are some great tips from a veteran introvert. Be Curious!
2. SaaS IPO’s:  Ever heard of the Mendoza line? Well it’s a rule of thumb metric and also a numerical to help SaaS Companies answer that incredibly frequent question “How fast do I need to be growing to be interesting to a venture investor?
3. VC DEEP DIVE: Upfront Ventures took a deeper look at some assumptions floating around about the current state of Venture Capital. The whole deck can be viewed here on SlideShare, but a nice summary article is here. HIGHLIGHTS: 1. Traditional Seed and VC is now more valuable than ever. 2.Value is now more in private markets over public.
4. STREAMING: Last year a misleading news article made the rounds announcing that Vinyl record sales exceeded digital. While this fact was true (and Vinyl Records sales were surging), it didn’t mention that streaming surpassed digital sales in 2015 (mpWhat?), or that the vast majority of all spend in music is now on streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music. An interesting consequence of this is that in the past 5 years the average song length has shrunk by about 20 seconds (due to the economics of streaming). By the numbers streaming’s share of revenue in 2015 was about 1/3. In 2018 it’s over three quarters of all industry revenue.
5. AI: New Zealand has officially launched an AI Road Map that consider future impacts and how to respond. A fantastic forward thinking approach to this sector which is progressing at an incredibly fast pace.
6. GOVERNANCE: Mark Suster (from Upfront Ventures) has started a series on his Medium Blog covering StartUp Boards. With a follow up article (which I think is very relevant to NZ startups) which shows a board structure based on stage!
7. CUSTOMER INSIGHT: When building good product, it seems as though businesses often try to understand their customers in ways that are misleading (you should click all three links in a row), The focus on knowing more about customers takes a product or business in the wrong direction. Successful approaches help customers solve problems by not necessarily understanding everything about them, but by identifying the jobs that need to be done.
8. GOOGLE: Couple of interesting announcements this week: 1. Hybrid Cloud is growing and Google’s hybrid Cloud Services Platform is now available in beta. 2. Google is reportedly developing a Netflix-like cloud streaming service for online games called Project Stream.
9. DATA: We ran a successful NZ8 event for some of our tech and eCommerce companies earlier this week. The topic was on how to build world class data based organizations. Why is this important? I think McKinsey do a fantastic job of explaining why and how.
10. HIRING: Making bad hiring mistakes is almost like a badge of honor that founders need to make. Mitigating (not preventing) poor hiring choices is important to cash. Tomasz Tunguz reviews common mistake in hiring plans: and Jason Lemkin looks at what to look at with Account Exec Resumes.z

​POD OF THE WEEK: This Week in Startups features Keith Rabois (Breaking news! Keith was at Khosla Ventures but is leaving for Founders Fund)

BONUS: Ask Nicley will be featured in a great webinar on the 26th PST/27th NZST this month. The topic is 5 Ways to Scale Customer Experiences through Front-Line Collaboration