Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending November 22, 2019

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Beyond Customer Satisfaction Surveys or Net Promoter Scores is this idea of a Customer Engagement Score. This is a useful tool for managing a companies customer base, making segment decisions easy, therefore enabling different, priorities and engagement strategies -  and being able to measure the impact of those strategies over time. Get started reading this article.
2. PE vs VC: Private Equity is very different than Venture Capital and there are fundamental shifts happening in capital markets that are likely to drive a long-term trend toward much larger PE opportunities vs. traditional public equity models. Private Equity fundraising in the US hit an all time high this month - $246 billion year-to-date. Crunchbase break down the differences between both VC and PE.
3. PRICING: It’s never right as it has to evolve (and we are all not charging enough). Intercom make the case that a solid pricing strategy helps shape an entire business model
4. SALES: Selling success depends on the lens of the buyer - who have never been more in control (and increasingly indifferent to sellers). In B2B it also often involves a Team. CSO Insights commissioned a research recently into the current state of B2B sales, the emerging opportunities for B2B sellers, and the best practices and solutions - download it here.
5. MLP: (thats Minimum Lovable Product). MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is OK but what if no-one likes it? FirstRound capital use the analogy of burnt pizza - pointing out that the fastest and cheapest functional prototype could produce a poor or flawed version of something that people may actually love.
6. BURNOUT: This personal story from a co-founder of Buffer is something that all founders should read - and what can happen (and 4 steps you can actively take to prevent it).
7. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION: CI is a process that dev teams use to iterate and ship software quickly, it can easily be confused with Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery - but they are not the same. This article from Angel.co helps clarify the differences and makes the case why CI is the optimal dev strategy for great customer experiences.
8. SECURITY: To expand on above - as CI becomes widely adopted, security needs to be rolled up into the process as well - DevSecOps being the new port-portmanteau or is that SecDevOps? - anywhoooo……beyond the DevSecOps article, Heavybit also have a great article discussing cloud security challenges (as apparently, if we extrapolate this out, 88% of SaaS is now sitting on public cloud).
9. GROWTH: This article is really great, using well known tech company examples. From Paddle, each software product has 3 times the competition they have 3 years ago, so how to optimize growth in this competitive $600 billion industry? 
10. TRANSPORTATION: I now have an Alexa Auto in my car (after firing Siri) and Big tech is investing big into transportation - from Business Insider this report covers the big 3 (Amazon, Apple, and Google) and their efforts in the sector so far, identifying some opportunties outside of the big ones for tech companies.

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POD OF THE WEEK: From This Week in Startups - HubSpot CEO on his insights on inbound Marketing.
BONUS: Need to raise a bunch of money? LinkedIn learning have a great course covering the fundamentals of raising startup capital.