Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 1, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: PQL: Product Lead Growth is a relatively new SaaS strategy and there are all kinds of metrics that tie into this new category - Product Qualified Leads (PQL) being the lead indicator that the PLG stray a company is investing in is legit.
2. EMOTIONAL HEALTH: This global pandemic is an emotional storm for many. FirstRound capital has some great tips and insight on how to weather this crisis emotionally. This article is designed for team members and managers. First Round also says many of these emotions are good for your career.
3. WRITING: Clear thinking can really help generate something relevant to say, good content has never been more important to grow a business, so take some time to read through Julian Shapiro's complementary article to the one I listed last week on writing well.
4. EXPERIMENT: No one knows but everyone has all kinds of advice of how to operate your business now. The best path to real truth is though experimentation. Fareed Mosavat (Slack, Instacart, RunKeeper, Zynga) has some really great advice on how to run good (and bad) experiments.
5. GROWTH: Building a system for growth is a system mashup of marketing, product, and good monetization - everything is interrelated.
6. SALES: Last week I referenced the State of Deals 2020 Repor. Some great insights in there on how complex and cumbersome deals make closing very hard. Well here are some great tips from the same team (via SaaStr) on what to do about bridging that buyer-seller gap.
7. VENTURE: In a pretty significant signal to the VC World, Y-Combinator has changed its own investment program, investing in its portfolio companies now on a case-by-case basis (it used to be every company) and reducing its investment size from 7% to 4%. This is not necessarily a Covid/Economic slowdown related. But just a sheer volume problem of the y-Combinator beast.
8. LANDING PAGES: What makes up a good landing page in 2020? Unbounce list 20 of the best for you to review. I also gotta add the extreme end of town - Zapier - who have 25,000 landing pages. 
9. LAYOFFS: The overall economic numbers from Q1 are in and not looking good, the tech sector is also feeling the brunt of this measured by layoffs on this site. The third tab is the hopeful one, listing companies that are still actively hiring.
10. MEMES: Ever wonder where all the suddenly came from for 5G and Bill Gates? Memes and social networks have become weaponized, deepfakes and bot armies are only just starting to gain real traction across your beloved social networks. How will we fight disinformation (especially state-sponsored ) and propaganda now and in the future? CB Insights takes a deep look at disinformation via this report.

POD OF THE WEEK: Product Lead Growth primer - how your product is the new SDR (which is why this weeks metric of the week - PQL matters).

BONUS: In addition to # 9 above…..Who’s hiring right now? Some awesome people with a descent amount of time have made this incredible list (google Doc)