Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending July 5, 2024

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: We all know the core SaaS Metrics - CAC, LTV:CAC, ACV etc, etc. But Kyle Poyar from OpenView Partners is making the case for the next era of core metrics. With product lead, expansion, and margin profiles (such as ARR per FTE) being at the core of this new potential playbook.


2. SEED: Too raise or not to raise that is the question most often asked at the Seed stage. Peter Walker of Carta posits that founders should not raise a small seed round. He reviewed 4,000+ software startups and concluded (with a bunch of caveats) that small seed rounds have a lower probability of getting to a Series A in under two years.


3. CAPITAL: Last week, liquidity posts were popular - so here is some more data. Emergence has released a report titled "Beyond Benchmarks 2024," packed with data from B2B startups (60% of which released GenAI features last year). At the early stage ($1m-$5m ARR), top startups are growing 100%, and the median is 53%. For companies $5m-$20m ARR, top quartile are growing 58% but the median is only growing at 29%. It gets really out of whack with companies at the $20m-$50m range.  The top quartile is at 38%, but the bottom bunch is at -7% (yup, that's negative growth).


4. MULTIPLES: Dealroom has a great guide on multiples with in-depth reviews of valuation multiples for public companies, VC rounds, and exits. These multiples vary by stage, sector, and geography, with a big focus on growth and profitability. The guide also explains methodologies for calculating and interpreting these multiples, providing a comprehensive resource for understanding company valuations.


5. CHURN (AI): Bessemer Venture Partners has a good guide for B2B and B2C AI apps with seven strategies to reduce churn, from enhancing user onboarding to leveraging AI-driven insights for customer retention (B2C AI apps are showing weaker long-term retention rates compared to standard app churn rates).


6. LANDING PAGES: Want to get better at creating effective landing pages? Scrapbook's SaaS landing page optimization checklist provides a guide to creating compelling headlines, using high-quality visuals, optimizing for mobile, indexing, and, of-course, using include strong CTAs to boost conversions. BONUS: How to write killer CTAs.


7. STATE OF THE CLOUD 1: The Bessemer Ventures State of the Cloud Report is out. It's packed full of highlights and well worth taking a deeper look at. But here are some highlights: AI is transforming the cloud, but concentrated at the model layer. AI investments have soared, and now every cloud company is, at some level, an AI company. We're certainly all more efficient at building, apparently.


8. STATE OF THE CLOUD 2: The consumer cloud sector is experiencing a resurgence (see the other Bessemer post at #5 above), driven by new innovative AI applications. This trend signals a revitalized market with new opportunities for growth and investment.


9. STATE OF THE CLOUD 3: The AI wars are well underway, and Big Tech's investment in AI is setting the stage for a major tech battle. All of the Big Tech companies are seeing big rebounds to "normal" multiples (along with big outliers like NVIDIA at 22x) and also on AI-quisition burns.


10. CASE STUDY: Three well-known SaaS success stories with very diverse paths, strategies (and financial health). Monday.com has robust revenue growth and solid free cash flow (also in scale-up mode). Atlassian is more established, with capital-efficient growth and high profitability. Despite strong revenue growth and being around forever, Asana struggles with high cash burn.


POD OF THE WEEK: Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, talks about the amount of compute used in training (compute costs for models have been increasing ~4x a year). Dario is also predicting $1 billion and even $10 billion training runs soon!