Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 14, 2019

1. SALES: This week in sales the focus is on Social Selling. According to Hubspot, salespeople who adopt social selling at an organization increase both the win rate and deal size, by 5% and 35% respectively. 
2. VC’s: Ever wonder exactly how Venture Capitalists make money/pay themselves? Here is a quick look at their unit economics.
3. M&A: SalesForce is a SaaS data monster and Tableau, a publicly traded BI company, have been trying to migrate over to a more subscription based model for some time. In a deal that kinda makes sense in hindsight, Salesforce announced this week that it will be purchasing Tableau for a whopping $15.7 Billion USD (this is the 3rd largest acquisition price since 2012). . Tomasz Tunguz takes a deeper look at the acquisition and the consolidation of big Data/BI business.
4. UPSELL: The importance of upsell to the overall growth of a SaaS company is well understood. But when to start up-selling is a more important strategic question.
5. FAILURE (pt 2): Last week was about founder failures, but failure is not just for founders. It’s for VC’s too. Ben Evans dives deeper into failure as a metric  for VC and also notes that there is no such thing as a 10x return in the VC world (it’s more like 26x and in some cases 64x).
6. CRO: That stands for Conversation Rate Optimization and Banklinko have created a great web guide about what it is and how to design for CRO within a business.
7. GROWTH: Organic growth is the holy grail of tech companies and there exists a lot of mythology and lore around the best ways to drive this kind of growth. The smart people at McKinsey take a look at four of the top myths (and debunk them).
8. FINTECH: The big 3 Tech Companies (Apple, Amazon, and Google) are taking financial services by storm and forecast to grab up to 40% of the $1.35 trillion in US financial services revenue from incumbent banks (according to McKinsey) In this Business Insider report, a full competitor analysis is presented to the global financial industry. Great stuff! 
9. BRANDS And it’s not just FinTech where Apple, Amazon and Google dominate. In this years most valuable brands survey by BrandZ. nine of the top ten brands are Tech (or FinTech) companies (shoutout to MickeyD’s as the non-tech company), with Amazon taking the number one spot followed closely by Apple and Google. 
10. SCALE: One of the hardest parts of scaling a company is having to let good people go. This often happens when they are no longer suited for the growth stage of the business. But what if this person is a founder? The Founder Collective discuss in this article.

POD OF THE WEEK: New this week from How I Built This, the story of a company you all may have heard of: AllBirds

​BONUS: DevGuild do amazing half day conferences here in SF. I go whenever I can and drag customers along with me. The last one myself and the team at Marsello attended as it was focused on Product Marketing - a timely subject for them. You can re-broadcast some or all of the day here. I highly recommend the Hiten Shah presentation on The Three Steps of Continuous Customer Obsession