Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending May 24, 2019

1. SALES: How to align sales compensation with strategic goals and in the seven (yup, seven) layers of compensation.
2. DEVOPS: I totally nerded out on this. Netflix UX is impressive and the company is a fantastic study on how great engineering and a DevOps focus creates amazing streaming experiences even with the internet connection is Junk! At times Netflix can represent almost 40% of all internet traffic, so to optimize the user experience they created their own CDN service (content delivery network) and also Open Sourced it. If you have a spare half-hour this video really highlight how they manage 100’s of micro-services, 1,000’s of daily prod changes, 10’s of thousands virtual machines on AWS, 100’s of thousands of customer interactions a second, and  millions of customers all with 10’s of ops engineers and zero data centers. They also de-prioritized up-time.......because they could.
3. TECH FOR GOOD: McKinsey go all in with this report on technology for good attempting to calculate the the impact of technology adoption on welfare growth beyond GDP.
4. GROWTH: Zapier is an impressive tech company, not just because it created 25,000 search optimized landing pages, but also because it has taken an approach to growth and profitability that is more similar to a bootstrapped NZ tech company than a more traditional Silicon Valley one: It’s 7 years old, has a distributed team, only taken $1.5m in capital, and became a profitable business in year 2 of operations.
5. LTV: Life Time Value or LTV is one of the most valuable metrics in SaaS, and also the most problematic. This post from ChartMogul takes a deeper look at LTV and how to make this metric more actionable.
6. DEVELOPERS: This is a really in-depth report from Stripe on the fiscal benefits of developers (Who they calculate at $3 trillion GDP globally). It also highlights the opportunity costs of bad code and technical debt - something that NZ startups such as RayGun and Codelingo are trying to help solve. FUN FACT: NZ has the highest Quality of developers in the world according to this (independent) report.
7. HUAWEI: Google dramatically severed ties with Huawei this week following an executive order from US President Donald Trump blacklisting the company. Huawei has lost access to Android Operating System updates to all Huawei device and also have access removed  to Google services such as Gmail and the Pay Store.
8. SALARIES: Hot off the press from Vettery is a report on San Francisco Technology Salary’s. If you are a NZ Tech company looking to hire here - sorry, it ain’t pretty. There is a big premium to be paid.
9. INFLUENCERS: Brands can reap pretty significant benefits from social media influencer based marketing. But how much will that Instagram post cost? Klear (an influencer marketing platform….which is now apparently a thing) analyzed about two thousand influencers worldwide to build out a 2019 rate card. The rate card can be viewed here, but the blog post about the report is actually a much better read.
10. BOARDS: Managing Governance in Startups is hard, especially when early stage investors push for board seats when startups should only have advisors. Mark Suster is a governance expert for startups and we have referenced his blog posts in the past, This week he provides a blog post AND a 43 slide presentation on Managing Startup Boards with really interesting continuous integration/agile approaches to management.

POD OF THE WEEK: From This Week In Startups - Lessons on scaling teams in the US (HR, Org Structure, Compensation, Firing)

BONUS: A Business critical webinar for any business headed to the US from Early Growth Financial Services and Gusto: June 19th, 7am NZST understanding HR in the US.