Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 18, 2019

1. PRICING FEATURETTE: Product pricing is super hard. Here are top lessons learned from 25 SaaS companies, as well as what the impact pricing changes can have on your business and how to test it.
2. The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail - CB Insights provide a report covering product-market fit challenges to team and culture.
3. Business Insider reports on The Future of Retail - Shareable as a powerpoint. But watch out - it’s a whopper - 109 slides. TL;DR: Use Customer focused Tech! And according to Google, do these 3 things.
4. An Executives guide to Artificial Intelligence from McKinsey and what AI can and can’t do for your business (yet).
5. How Zapier reached $35m ARR (Part of their strategy was creating a 25,000 separate landing pages!)
6. VC or No? Bootstrapping is a perfectly awesome approach to growing a startup or tech company, but more often than not, some kind of Venture Capital is needed to help fund growth and development. Growth rate really matters to VC's and you need to understand exactly why. This article, by Jason Calacanis, lays out why VC firms aren’t focused on slow/modest growth startups and both articles linked here are in response to an article published in the New York Times earlier this month about companies rejecting Venture Capital. 
7. How Xero acquired 350k SaaS users last year.
8. Hybrid cloud has emerged as the preferred method of compute and storage in Australia and New Zealand, which as a region has been slow to adopt public cloud services such as AWS and Azure. This article from Verdict also maps out the business case for hybrid cloud (even though the title is little confusing).
9. Are we seeing an Apple pivot? It looks as though Apple is making moves toward becoming more of a services company by partnering with Samsung to push a stand alone iTunes app to Samsung TVs.
10. You didn’t ask, but I just went ahead and delivered anyway. Here is the report on CES Trends for 2019.

POD OF THE WEEK: From August last year, this is part two of a two part series on the basics of growth for entrepreneurs from a16z. This one focused on growth & retention:  https://a16z.com/2018/08/09/growth-engagement-retention