Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 22, 2024

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: In 2024, efficiency is a key measure - see this post from SaaStr and this one from IceHouse Ventures. On the balance sheet, People are the most important (and expensive) metric for any company, especially SaaS. Revenue per FTE is one metric for company efficiency via people efficiency. What should my annual recurring revenue (ARR) be per employee? Here is the chart in one TL;DR visual, but if you want to read the whole article, you can check it out here (and also here as a PDF).


2. M&A: Navigating an acquisition process is a relatively unexplored topic in this newsletter, so check out this guide to running an M&A process as a Founder from First Round Review.


3. NOLS FRAMEWORK: Management talk time: Not all decisions are made equally, and as a former outdoor educator and part of the National Outdoor Leadership School's (NOLS) network, I love articles from another life that apply today. This one focused on group decision-making, outlining 6 different ways to make decisions in a group.


4. MONETIZATION: What are the best ways to monetize based on market segment? It's kinda obvious: For the SMB market (100-200 employees), self-serve is critical. Product-led sales are optimal in the mid-market (200-1000 employees). At the enterprise level (1000+ employees), sales-led reigns supreme. But a bigger question to ask (and Jason Lemkin asks it): How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?


5. RAISING: There is quite a big gap for startups at the Seed and Series A stages, so check this guide for founders to understand the difference between raising their Seed round vs. their Series A. Some seed investors should also read this.


6. VENTURE: Last week, we referenced Corporate Venture, so this week, let's look at Family Offices. The Western World is amid a massive transfer of intergenerational wealth, from the Baby Boomers down to the young-uns. This is also true in the Family Office world, and according to Pitchbook, the VC industry could witness a huge influx of the $100T or so worth of family office assets being transferred over the next 25 years.


7. AI 1/2: Quite a few moves in AI this week and two from Apple: Apple acquired Canadian AI Startup DarwinAI (which specializes in manufacturing efficiency, which makes sense and only Apple's 3rd acquisition in over 2 years)), but surprisingly, rumors are circulating of Apple integrating Google Gemini, into their devices, all part of Tim Cooks promise last month to have AI news "later this year." On the infrastructure side, NVIDIA, fresh off a banner market cap year, unveiled its next-generation AI GPUs and is apparently in advanced talks to acquire AI infrastructure platform Run:ai.


8. AI 2/2: This post speaks volumes to me and my daily use of AI co-pilots/assistants and where I also see it headed (and see the use case for users in my B2B SaaS day job): AI copilots transitioning to "AI co-workers" that can complete tasks and workflows on their own.


9. COMPENSATION: Carta's State of Startup Compensation (H2 2023) came out last week and has all kinds of interesting data - one is broken down into this Twitter post outlining what the first 5 hires at a startup typically receive in terms of equity compensation. BONUS CONTENT: New Zealand Tech industry compensation report from Potentia.


10. CASE STUDY: Last week's Podcast, which discussed lessons learned launching new products at Atlassian, was surprisingly popular, so let's double down again this week with a case study via Tara Seshan (ex PM at Stripe and Watershed), who shares lessons from her playbook for going multi-product.


POD OF THE WEEK: From Peter Walker discussing Startup funding in 2024, the year of layoffs or recovery? And why down rounds may not be such a bad thing.