Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending June 27, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: BURN MULTIPLES.  In this neo-capital-efficient SaaS market, operators are expected to find the balance between growth and efficiency. So it's time to brush up on those efficiency metrics in this 2 part post covering Burn Multiple and  Sales Efficiency metrics (see post 2). A Burn Multiple measures how much a startup is burning to generate each incremental dollar of ARR. The higher the Burn Multiple, the more the startup is burning to achieve each unit of growth. Here is how to calculate this metric, and here is an example.


2. GROWTH: I love this article from First Round Capital. Mainly as it justifies my sentiment around rigor, data, and insight. To quote: "Growth is about implementing a rigorous, customer insight and data-driven process with sustained effort to remove friction."


3. SPEED MATTERS: I write this newsletter during downtime, such as "Coffee Spints ."I prioritize speed and finding quality content over spelling, editorial tightness, and grammar. (My bad!) James Somers feels the same. As does Google, they obviously also made speed a priority for their tech stack, and speed is UX moat for tech companies. Netflix is another great speed-focused tech company that (amazingly to me) de-prioritized uptime in favor of speed and also became their own CDN as part of their speedy experience solution.


4. REVERSE TRIALS: Reverse Trials are a play on freemium, where new users start with a time-limited trial of all your paid features. At the end of the trial, they can either buy or downgrade to a fully free tier. This article also explains how Airtable does this well. The benefit here is that, emotionally, users experience loss aversion, where the pain of losing something is twice as powerful a motivator as the pleasure of gaining.


5. METRICS: SaaS Capital's latest 2025 report is out. Median ARR growth across all private B2B SaaS companies? 22.4%. Growth drops fast with size: under $1M, ARR companies grow ~66%, $20M–$50M grow at just 16%. Tuck this one away for board decks and sanity checks.


6. AI-FIRST: a16z outlines what an "AI-first" company really looks like. Key traits: systems built for agents from day one, constant fine-tuning, and orgs designed around feedback loops—not functions. If AI feels bolted on, this is a good blueprint reference point.


7. MARKETING: Great question - Does every marketing channel suck right now? According to MKT1… kinda. Acquisition is way harder, and it looks like the best teams aren't just optimizing channels—they're building long-term growth engines. Strong POVs on attribution, sequencing, and content that converts.


8. LEAN: Notion VC's new data shows that startups are getting radically leaner; it's a whole new LEAN startup paradigm from the old Lean Canvas one. Median team sizes are down from 25 to 14. AI is the driving force behind this shift. The best Cloud Challengers are AI-native, founder-led, and operationally tight. They embed AI across workflows, automate decision-making, and scale without bulk.


9. EVALUATION: This VC Corner guide breaks down startup exit strategies—acquisitions, IPOs, secondaries—and when to consider each.


10. CASE STUDY: What should your marketing team look like? MKT1 breaks down how org charts shift by stage, with templates from Seed to Series D. Real-world examples, trade-offs, and when to hire what.