Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 10, 2025

​1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK - ARR per FTE:  See #3 below for the why: The 2022 KeyBanc report pegs the median at $143K for private SaaS, while public companies double that. High Alpha/OpenView's benchmarks show ranges from $42K to $250K depending on stage, highlighting ARR growth per team as a top KPI. Meritech has a great visual with TriNet, Epxensify, and Shopify being in the top 3.


2. PREDICTIONS 1: Kicking off the new year with a list of predictions of what 2025 may bring in Tech - 25 of them from 25 founders. TL;DR: The AI takeover of SaaS continues, personalization (in real-time) will be here, and vertical SaaS (along with market consolidation) will rise.


3. PREDICTIONS 2: Tomasz Tunguz lays out some bold SaaS predictions for 2025. A big one is that PLG growth will stall as AI-powered tools dominate buyer preferences, GPT-driven products shift GTM strategies (nice!), and efficiency metrics like ARR per FTE take center stage - I already called that one!


4. SPACE TECH: One of my personal favs and 2025 is looking to have a stellar ;-) lineup of space missions: commercial moon landers, Universe mapping, asteroid mining, and new satellite tech.


5. AI WARS: I talked about that quite a lot in 2024, and now we're starting off 2025 with ChatGPT pivoting its business model into being a very-much-for-profit by pivoting into a Tech-Standard Delaware C Corp, OpenAI says it can pursue commercial operations, but the nonprofit will have a "significant interest" in the for-profit corp - not a unique biz model (look to Mozilla > Firefox). OpenAI also said they will need 'more capital than we'd imagined,' which is insane as it raised a $6.6 B round in October.


6. GOOGLE: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has pushed an end-of-year rally for his Google employees and has a pretty high-stakes vision for 2025. The focus is doubling down on AI innovation (Gemini did get better toward the end of 2024 tbh), defending search dominance (pffft), accelerating cloud growth to outpace competitors (GCP currently carries approx 11-12% of the cloud market so has room to move ), and figuring out their Monopoly issues (including possibly being forced to divest Chrome)


7. FOUNDER QUESTIONS: What can drive success for all y'all in the early stages in 2025? Check out these 16 questions you can be prepared to answer around strategy, customer focus, scaling plans, etc.


8. VENTURE: Dealroom has a global venture capital roundup for 2024 and has some cautious optimism for us all in 2025. Yup, we still have some historically low funding volumes, but AI-driven sectors continue to attract capital, and early-stage investments are rebounding - whoop! (and of course, the US still leads the way by an insane amount - >340% than the country in second position - China)


9. PRIVATE EQUITY (a Guide): This is actually a detailed guide for those of you looking at Private Equity this year (after raising Venture), highlighting what makes a transitioning startup attractive to buyout firms: Psst - its ARR growth, capital efficiency, and strong retention.


10. CASE STUDY: It's the Billion Dollar Revenue Club study - which reveals some of the secret sauce of SaaS giants achieving $1B+ ARR. (mastering product-market fit, strategic expansions, and a relentless focus on customer retention.


POD OF THE WEEK: Advocating for people's happiness is part of my day job and mentoring mindset, so it's nice when McKinsey comes out with a podcast about why it's cool to be kind.