Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending January 23, 2025

​1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Cash Runway - most founders don’t even know how many months of cash runway they have left, so here is a new, updated for 2026, Cash Runway model for y'all.

2. OUTCOME-BASED PRICING: Another term for your AI Tech Dictionaries is outcome-based pricing. It’s a pricing strategy tied directly to the value your product delivers to customers, very much a pricing model driven by the growth of AI.

3. AI RESEARCH: VentureBeat flags four new terms for your AI Tech dictionary this year: continual learning (models updating without retraining or catastrophic forgetting - looking at you ChadGPT)), world models (AI learning physical reality from video and interaction, not labels), orchestration layers (routing between models, tools, and agents to stop multi-step failures), and refinement loops (systems that critique and improve their own outputs, cutting cost while boosting accuracy).

4. STATE OF STARTUPS: Carta’s State of Startups report shows capital concentrating, teams are staying lean longer, and AI is eating the stack. Total US startup funding rebounded to ~$110B in 2025, but round counts stayed low. AI startups now capture about 44% of all VC dollars, including about 55% at Series E+. Median net retention sits at 108%, CAC payback is looooooooong - 36 months, and founders are delaying first hires to out. to about 3/4 of a year. The market isn’t back - super different - tighter, faster, and more selective.

5. OPEN APIs: Are Open APIs dying? Tomasz Tunguz highlights a new defensive posture from incumbents: Salesforce is restricting Slack’s API access, Datadog has cut off Deductive AI, and platforms are increasingly treating data and integration as strategic choke points. For many startups, “build on top” now comes with real platform risk in this climate.

6. DATA VIZ: Better charts don’t just change decisions; they can be monetized. This guide lays out some fundamentals of why charts matter (explore patterns, explain concepts, spread ideas) - and the rules that separate insight from chart visualization crimes (pick the right chart, label directly, use small multiples, make it standalone, avoid misleading axes).

7. SALES 1: Even though he hasn't, David Sacks’ “Rule of 10” for sales and revenue has aged well and is a tidy way to stop guessing comp - set AE quota at ~10x base (10% comms, 50/50 OTE), plan for ~70% quota capacity attainment, and give managers a quota at ~80% of team QC.

8. SALES 2: Fast follow from #7 above, Capacity ain’t headcount. Doubling your reps doesn’t double revenue. Capacity planning breaks when you ignore attrition, hiring lag, ramp time, sub-100% attainment, support ratios, seasonality, and mismatch.

9. MARKETING: A follow-up from a bunch of marketing-led articles last week that seemed to get a lot of clicks (though surprisingly no feedback), marketing has a dual mandate: emotional repetition builds mental availability for the ~95% not-buying-yet set, while rational proof converts the ~5% who are in-market with their hands on their wallets. Real quick takeaway - Activation wins quarters. Brand wins cycles.

10. CASE STUDY: This is interesting (aport from all the pop-ups), OpenAI’s early pitch deck, broken down.

POD OF THE WEEK: I like Cursor and use it for product-based work - so this is great for me - the non-technical PM’s guide to building with Cursor.