Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 25, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Here is a highly bookmarkable Guide to SaaS Metrics from equals.com that covers all the greatest hits and more (ARPA, LTV:CAC, Burn Multiples, etc).


2. STARTUP PLAYBOOK: Check out the Emerging Startup Playbook that lays out eight key emerging strategies taken from high-growth SaaS leaders. Emphasizing "speed over perfection," it suggests streamlining decision-making and embracing usage-based pricing for sustainable growth. Key takeaways? Optimize product stickiness before scaling sales and pivot based on data to stay competitive. This is a great read for early-stage founders figuring out their growth tactics (well, more like experiments).


3. AI BUDGET: Here is a quick, fun one. How much should you spend on AI? Tomasz Tunguz says early-stage startups are allocating 20–50% of their R&D budget to AI. Nope - not a typo. AI isn't just a feature, it's a core investment now. Just pretty sure you can't claim those R&D costs back in any tax breaks.


4. SOFTWARE 3.0: Stuff is moving so fast these days, it's hard to keep up. This post (taken in inspiration from these slides) makes the case that we've moved beyond Software 2.0 (ML/neural networks) to Software 3.0: AI-native and conducted in your native language, with API-connected agents reasoning over dynamic data. Tools like LangChain and LlamaIndex aren't the future—they're gonna be the foundation.


5. SPEND: Brex has launched something called the Brex Benchmark, and so far, the May 2025 Benchmark is a gem: it's real spend data from millions of anonymized transactions. Despite economic headwinds, ad spend is up — a signal of renewed growth bets. But spend on consultants and real estate is falling. SaaS and infra? Holding steady with Claude being the numero uno AI app.


6. JOBS: AI may be a primary culprit for a bunch of the current economic payoffs. A new CNBC analysis shows AI is playing a much bigger role in job losses than companies admit. The reshaping of work is happening faster than we're told.


7. ACCOUNTING AI: This one is a bit of a mind-bender from Penrose and explores if LLMs can do accounting and how LLMs can transform ledgers into language, enabling a new term "explainable accounting". It's a weird and dense page, but super interesting for any of you finance ops peeps. BTW - Claude is already on it!


8. PERSONAL CO-PILOT: This is def another AI-heavy newsletter—but here's how to build an AI co-pilot for your day-to-day. From task routing and meeting prep to knowledge surfacing and auto-recaps, Lenny's Newsletter shares a stack of tools to make AI actually useful (and sticky.....and on-brand) in your workflow. ChatGPT now has a next-level co-pilot, an agent that can actually perform tasks on your behalf.


9. OUTAGES: We all have them - especially if we host in Public Clouds - for example, last month GCP service control tripped, creating outages across GCP and Google Workspace, triggering Cloudflare issues, which in turn triggered AWS and Azure outages - it was wild. This piece digs into why reliability is so hard at scale—even for top-tier teams. From incident fatigue to architectural tradeoffs, it's a sharp look at how engineering orgs really manage risk (or don't until hindsight). A must-read if you don't know how resilient or redundant your stack is.


10. CASE STUDY: ONBOARDING: AI onboarding isn't just UX—it's growth. This teardown shows how ChatGPT, Claude, and others use template-activation loops to turn cold signups into active users.


POD OF THE WEEK: Want to know what Software 3.0 (number 4 above)  may look like in real life - this dude has been figuring all this out since only January and presents an extensive (and IMO quite compelling) overview of the new AI-based management paradigm. Makes me feel really far behind.