Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 23, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: DAU/MAU. The DAU/MAU ratio is a popular metric for companies that need to measure user engagement. Rule of thumb: Average is 13%; apps with over 20% = good. If you have 50%+  - you're world-class.


2. CASH MANAGEMENT: Part 1 of a 3-part Guide to Cash Management for Startups highlights bank account strategies at different Stages. The startup phase needs basic checking and savings accounts for operational expenses and emergencies, maintaining liquidity, managing cash flow, and keeping financial controls strict. It prioritizes simplicity and security in banking structures.


3. CAPITAL EFFICIENCY: Capital Efficiency has been back in Vogue for a while, and according to Bessemer Venture Partners, here are the benchmarks for B2B SaaS to measure your payback against (full report here). Across all companies, engineering is consistently the largest department, with customer success and product at about 10% and marketing at only 7%. This slide also has median headcount by stage - which is a great metric to track.


4. SECONDARIES: Secondaries (selling private startup shares before exit) were quite recently seen as pretty taboo, but now they are becoming critical for seed funds managing longer timelines and shifting LP expectations. Hunter Walk's post nails the why.


5. BUYERS vs USERS: The person writing you a check is not necessarily the same person getting value from your business. So, take a read of this insightful article from HeavyBit on differentiating messaging based on this premise and the different profiles.


6. VENTURE: The Q1 2025 PitchBook NVCA report is out, and the overall VC mood looks complicated. On paper, the $91.5B in deals (thanks to a few giants like OpenAI) masks weak liquidity, stalled IPOs, and just $10B in new fundraising. Tariffs and uncertainty have investors sitting tight, and early-stage deals remain depressed.


7. LEAN STARTUP: Provocative blog post - but maybe not wrong. The Lean Startup world is gone? AI now writes most of the code—so the bottleneck is no longer dev; it's user attention. Time to rethink how we build.


8. FOUNDER OWNERSHIP: Carta's Spring 2025 SaaS report confirms the dilution game: VC money comes at a steep equity cost. Each round chips away—pre-seed, employees, co-founders, SAFEs, and traditional VCs. By IPO, founders often hold much less than they think. Dilution isn't a bug; it's the whole game.


9. QUANTUM: Late last year, I noted that Google had a new quantum chip, Willow, which marked a bonkers leap in compute power (completing a computation in under five minutes that would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years - older than the known universe). Quantum cracking isn't hypothetical sci-fi anymore - it's an inevitability.


10. CASE STUDY: Crunchbase crunched the Venture numbers over the past 10 years, and global VC has nearly tripled in a decade ($158B in 2014 to $433B in 2021's peak), then cooling to $285B in 2023. Deal count? Doubled. The US leads as always, but China has pulled back. This is a data-rich look at a wild decade in VC.


POD OF THE WEEK: Investor Elad Gil (Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase) shares his playbook: Insights on why the market matters more than the founder, why AI may be under-hyped, and why he thinks remote work hurts innovation.