Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending March 7, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: ARR. Two cool publications. The first one is "The Ultimate Guide to ARR," which offers practical advice on measuring, influencing, and reporting ARR based on experiences at Intercom, Atlassian, and Stripe; the second one is from Bessemer Ventures and claims to be a founder's roadmap to $100 million ARR.


2. GROWTH: ICONIQ's latest report on Growth and Efficiency is really insightful and reveals that top-quartile B2B companies are achieving 100% growth at $25M ARR, targeting 38% YoY revenue growth this year (up from 29% last year). They're achieving this by increasing investments in growth initiatives and keeping operating expense growth below half of revenue growth rates, aiming for that sweet spot of balanced focus on profitability and expansion.


3. MARKETING 1: A quick add-on to #2 above: testing new tactics of marketing growth takes up resources, and most of us are pretty time-poor for running experiments. So check this Google Doc from Dashly, where they collected 100 growth marketing hypotheses tested by a bunch of their experts. (includes advert retargeting, waitlists for product launches, niche glossaries, etc).


4. MARKETING 2: Where do Marketers feel most confident about getting an ROI from their campaigns? This article answers that for you - but the TL;DR - it's LinkedIn (and this is a survey of B2B AND B2C marketers)


5. UN-SCALE: I've talked about this a few times lately - we're all focused on building out that repeatable scaleable business model, but along the way, there are things that have to be done that are totally un-scaleable.  This article highlights three specific non-scalable things sales teams should be doing right now.


6. TEAM: Check this stat: VCs say startup success depends on your TEAM DYNAMICS (56% of them), then timing (12%), and tech (9%). Tech sector likes teams more (64%) than healthcare (42%).


7. INVESTORS: Not all VC money is equal. Dealroom's report breaks down what we all already kinda know about what makes a value-add investor (those who do more than just write checks). The best? They offer hiring support, strategic GTM insights, deep industry connections, and help in closing enterprise deals. If your investor isn't opening doors, they're a dead weight. So check this article on drilling in more, don't ask VCs how they "add value." Instead, grill them on their win rate, portfolio support metrics, and founder success stories. If they can't answer, that's a red flag


8. VENTURE: Silicon Valley Bank's State of the Markets H1 2025 report is out and shows AI gobbling up Venture dollars. 48% of all VC funding in H1 2025 went to AI startups, with mega-deals skewing heavily toward the sector. Meanwhile, revenue multiples are down 10-50% from 2023, Series A valuations now take 2+ years to grow, and exits are still frozen—unless you're an AI unicorn


9. VENTURE MATH: Following from #8 above: Big funds = bigger problems. The Rule of 32 says a $5B VC fund needs $160B in exit value to hit a 3x return—more than Meta + Uber's IPOs combined. But with median exits shrinking 96% since 2019, and LPs paying $1B in fees before carry even kicks in, incentives are breaking. The math no longer works—neither does the game.


10. CASE STUDY: It's a common tech-ism from the tech industry that innovation needs a lot of failure before success, something they often do not configure culturally. CB Insights has analyzed almost 500 startup failure post-mortems - PMF, Cash, and Team Dynamics (see #6 above!) play pretty consistent roles across the board.


POD OF THE WEEK: Funnel and revenue math kindly explained by Mark Roberge and Matt Plank of Rippling in the Science of Scaling podcast.