Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 1, 2019

1. WOMEN IN TECH: Gender diversity trends in Venture Capital funded startups paint a dismal data point in 2018, with women founders representing a mere 2.3% of all Venture Capital deployed. But taking a closer look, the data  has a more positive forward looking narrative. Even though the number is low, US VC funding for female-founded or co-founded companies has been trending up in recent years, and 2018 saw the creation of several women-led funds, incubators for female founders, and more new companies. Pitchbook take a deep dive into what’s been happening with US investment trends for women in VC over the last 11 years.
2. SaaS LTV:CAC RATIOS: There are some shortcomings with historic LTV to CAC calculations (due to modern growth focused businesses deploying cross-sell and up-sell strategies), Webflow offer an updated measurement formula.
3. BOARD DEEP DIVE (continued): The Governance post last week prompted a few positive responses from people on this list. So figured I would double down on more content: a) Observations on being exposed to high functioning vs low functioning boards (great takeaways). b) Have your management team attend a board meet c) What makes a great independent board member? (and why you need them). d) How to prep for a Board meet
4. AWS SPEND: In previous newsletters I mentioned Amazon Web Services (AWS) is bigger than McDonalds. This growth is reflected, in-part, by many businesses (including some big brands) getting carried away and hit with mega bills. The Insider take a look at this challenge. What is evident is that while Public cloud offers flexibility and cost savings, it’s also very easy to go overboard on spend if businesses don’t pay attention or precisely forecast their computing needs.
5. NO-CODE: Introducing this word into you tech-vocabulary, Welcome to the world of no-code. Technology infrastructure is becoming so commoditized and abstracted that we have now reached a point in time where web services, apps and integrations can be provisioned visually with zero amounts of code needed.  A great example is the new ecommerce site, Webflow, who is competing against Shopify, BigCommerce and the like and requires no developers/engineers to stand up and manage a web store.
6. THINK FAST: To truly deliver excellent customer experiences, prioritizing speed is a key consideration (and eliminating latency). Some companies (such as Pfizer) even have a “Speed budget”. Milliseconds matter!
7. IPO SEASON: Currently privately held unicorns outweigh their public traded counterparts . But probably not for long. 2019 is set to be a remarkably busy year for tech based IPO’s. However the pipeline for newly minted Unicorns is pretty long.
8. FAANG: (this is an acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google). These big tech players are attracting more scrutiny from governments and regulators, in the U.S. and Europe (as well as NZ). Because of the rapid pace of investigations underway this year, The Information have built out an Investigations Tracker to monitor all of the global activity taking place for these high profile companies. Google is currently in the lead, with Facebook taking a close second. (NOTE: Netflix may seem like an outlier company but is included in the acronym as it consumes over 15% of the worlds internet traffic). 
9. VOICE: The battle to win this market is on! The big tech companies are in a heated battle, with Microsoft already admitting defeat (well kinda waving a white flag, but already heading in a different direction with the re-launch of their Kinect product)
10. HIRING: The perpetual start up problem. First Round Capital list 6 must-read articles for creative hiring tactics and Tomusz Tunguz discusses a common mistake.

POD OF THE WEEK: Listen to episode 213 of the Saastr podcast, where Tomusz Tunguz discussed the learnings from the SaaS free trial survey in a more detail.