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

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: LVR (Lead Velocity Rate): LVR is the lead growth rate of qualified leads per month. This metric provides a clear understanding of a businesses’ future revenue and growth. Setting a goal to increase LVR by 25% will also able you to equally increase revenue generated for your business. 
2. PZF: a16z contend that the stage prior to Product Market Fit is called PZF (Product-Zeitgeist-Fit). Which is when a product resonates with the mood of the times, which is why first to market is not always the best (Friendster remembers this well). 
3. $Engineer$: I shoulda kept at it! Software engineers, particularly for tech companies on the top end of town, are earning massive salaries in 2019 - up to almost $1m USD/year at Facebook for a Principle Engineer.
4. REMOTE WORK (deep dive): In my new role I now support a remote team distributed across 5 countries and optimizing how we work is a skill I’m slowly learning. As referenced in a previous post here is the 2019 report on Remote Work from Owl Labs, from SaaStr an article on why this matters and from Chart Mogul my current absolute bible on ways of working and communicating in distributed teams.
5. SCALING: The ultimate guide of advice for Scale Up from Jason Lemkin of SaaStr all combined into one downloadable PDF.
6. ANALYTICS: Being a "growth hacker" is just putting a shiny label on high fidelity analytic mastery. It’s all about the data, not the tools. McKinsey give five pointers on how to make analytics work in B2B Sales.
7. VENTURE: Early Growth Financial Services are a great service provider in the US to early stage startups and have just released this 101 guide to raising capital 
8. VIRTUAL REALITY: It’s CES this week, so of course we have to talk about some hyped tech. VR hasn’t exactly made the impact touted by the industry and shipments last year were half of what Business Insider forecast would ship at just 7.6 million units. But 5G is a VR marriage that could change that game and Business Insider look at Telecom’s role in VR value chain.
9. AIR PODS: I use mine daily and here is a fact that blew my mind; With some (slightly more sophisticated than back-of-the-napkin) maths, Kevin Rooke estimates that the AirPods division of Apple makes more money than Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify COMBINED and will likely outpace Uber in 2020. The obvious distinction here is this is mostly comparing subscription businesses to a stand alone product - but equally this does not include any other Apple Products except AirPods and AirPods Pro’s (such as any of the Beats Audio line).  Bonus Controversial Opinion: I prefer regular AirPods over AirPods Pro’s. Change my mind.
10. PASSION ECONOMY: No, not that one. A16z describe the Passion Economy as new emerging platforms that allow anyone to monetize their unique skills - ways they can capitalize on creativity. In this article a16z also list 16 key metrics to understand. Cool to know of some Kiwi-lead companies in this space such as Substack and Ponoko!

POD OF THE WEEK: Trying to build an Enterprise ready product? Security will need to be at the heart of what you build. Heavbit have a great podcast here on passing Enterprise Security Reviews.