Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 12, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Time for some financial ones. Bookings, Billings, and Revenue are some top-line SaaS revenue terms that need a bit of deciphering. A downloadable PDF version is here, along with an explainer Excel Sheet here. Still confused? Check this article/explainer from SaaSOptics.
2. WOMEN IN TECH: Happy International Women's Day! Call back to the Girls Who Code and Accenture report - check out this metric: By age 35, fifty percent of women leave their jobs in tech. This is primarily (37% of those surveyed) attributed to noninclusive company cultures. The call to action here is that the bottom 80% have a big role to play: If all companies could score as well in inclusion as the top 20%, attribution could drop by up to 70%!
3. CUSTOMER PRICING: In the SaaS world, great pricing prioritizes the customer’s success over that of the businesses. That logic seems a little counterintuitive, but the profitability of a customer in SaaS happens waaaaay after a customer becomes an actual customer. OpenView expands on this reasoning more in this complex post on achieving net negative churn (where the average revenue per customer increases at rates that offset any churn) by using customer-based value metrics as a pricing strategy. Packaging up offerings and finding the optimal pricing and features structures for both customers and business unit economics is incredibly hard though....and never right. The team at Heavybit knows this very well and this article from them on using feature flags is a great read.
4. MARKETING: Marketing is a very broad practice, so this is a conceptually helpful article even if your organization isn't at the separation-of-marketing-functions phase on how to think about marketing efforts this article provides an excellent primer on all of the marketing roles that are out there.
5. PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: The Syms Method - another for your Tech Dictionary that goes beyond features vs benefits but is definitely more a guide on pure feature selection using some good old-fashioned Venn diagrams.
6. LEGAL DOCUMENTS: In startup land, there is a long tail of legal documents that need drafting just to run the business. Here are some great resources for free legal documents so you can stick to the mission: Avodocs - 3 free per month. Cooley Go has a library of documents for the US and UK, from Penn State Law School - a startup Kit bundle
7. STORYTELLING: Adding onto last week's listing on a post discussing Emotional Moats as a competitive advantage: I anecdotally feel like my way of storytelling has shifted from pre-pandemic ways and Google seems to agree with my sentiment.
8. SECURITY. Cybersecurity is now an essential business consideration for organizations of all sizes and stages. The CEO of Tonic thinks that 2021 will be the worst year for data breaches yet (mainly based on the data point that the past few years have seen an unfortunate steady upward climb in the number of data breaches)
9. SPAC: RocketLab is the newest high profile company that will IPO via a SPAC (no not Space) - a Special Purpose Acquisition Company - which seems to be the 'public-offering-du-jour' right now - IPO's (initial public offering) are well understood by most investors, so what is a SPAC then? It's pretty much a publicly listed shell company that merges with a privately held one to create a publicly-traded version of the private one - got it? Here is a quick explainer if not. But FYI there were a record $109 billion in transactions globally, which according to some may be a bit of a bubble.
10. CASE STUDY: Zoom! I don't care what you say - they are an absolute SaaS rockstar. Even pre-Covid, Zoom was on a growth burn. When it IPO'd it was valued at $4billion - now it's trading more than that in ARR (and grown 369% in ONE QUARTER)!!!!! They have a fantastically optimal payback period of about 3-months and a net dollar expansion of 130%+. Want more? Fine how about 54 more stats?

POD OF THE WEEK: This is a cool retro one (a blast from the 2016 past) - The founder of Yammer (my old alma mater and OG Unicorn) and Slack (my old neighbors) get together to talk Unicorns or Bust (this is way before Slack took off