Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending November 5, 2021

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: USER ADOPTION - measuring which new users could turn into paying customers (and which are going to drift away). Everything you need to know is in this article - it’s a comprehensive and very deep dive (because these metrics differ between businesses and between cohorts of users).
2. SDR SALES: Chorus.ai has built a great report of what high-performing outbound sales teams are doing to close deals (this is an analysis of over five million sales calls!). You can add in the kind of business you are (SMB, Mid, Enterprise) on this page to see how you measure up. Key nuggets: An SDR dials, on average, 106 people to schedule just one meeting and the typical win rate of a sales qualified lead (SQL) is 19%.
3. BUSINESS SPEED: First Round Capital always has a good perspective on speed at the business level. This is because top tech companies and are market differentiators in part because they operate at a cadence that is faster than most. It’s all about execution and heartbeat, which requires a fierce focus and prioritization. This kind of adaptability is something we all need after last year.
4. VENTURE CAPITAL: Significant news came in late last week from Sequoia Capital (specifically its U.S. and Europe business). In this blog past Sequoia Cap have announced a massive change to its business model by ending the traditional 10-year fund cycle and setting up a single permanent fund called the "Sequoia Fund" that will contain other funds in it and also will become a registered investment advisor (RIA) which will give them access to different asset classes such as crypto and seed investments. This will also give LPs the flexibility to pull their money out anytime (vs. traditionally waiting for distributions) and proceeds from the various sub-funds will return directly into the overarching Sequoia Fund.
5. MARKETING SPEED: Guess what? Your marketing team is slow!. Take a read of this article on frameworks to make your marketers speed up. Tech companies are market differentiators in part because they operate at a cadence that is faster than most. Speed is a competitive advantage that your marketing teams need to leverage!
6. E-COMMERCE: Shopping from home and a massive move to online shopping behavior has been one of the most significant shifts due to the Pandemic: About 40% of Millennial consumers say they didn’t miss shopping in person during the pandemic, Shopify announced earnings so far this quarter of $1.12 billion (up 46% from a year ago) and the 3 big retailers (Walmart, Target and Amazon) are really seeing the lions share of this increased spend. So given we are close to the end of the year (how did that happen?), here is a list of 13 eCommerce trends to look out for in 2022.
7. CRYPTO-SECURITY: My crypto posts a couple of weeks back on the crypto-future of the internet were more popular than I thought. So here is an expansion into crypto-security for all of your newly acquired NFTs and DAOs with new strategies for storing these assets safely while also allowing holders control and access.
8. TEAM MANAGEMENT: Ouch - I seriously need to make an infographic of this and put it on my wall - I've got some work to do as I'm guilty of more of the DO NOT's in this article than I want - it's discussing how to hold employees accountable without micromanaging them. 
9. PLANNING: For many of you your financial end-of-year is fast approaching, so question: How Dynamic Is Your Revenue Plan this year? 2020/2021 may have forced multiple re-forecasts for your business and who knows what BS 2022 is going to throw down (although hosting a Taco Tuesday on 2/22/22 will be my highlight). Anyway - who knows what could stall or even reverse your growth aspirations, so it's time to pull operational techniques from other departments (ie your Dev squads Agile ways) to create a more dynamic revenue plan - take a good read of this article from SBI for hot tips on avoiding poor Sales-based strategic planning. It even comes with an (OK-ish) downloadable planning tool (which I took the liberty to snag and sacrifice my email address for you) and First Round Capital feels the same way - Annual Planning is Killing Your Growth - but take a different tack - building a three-year plan! 
10. CASE STUDY: You may have already forgotten but last month Facebook (and Instagram and WhatsApp) all went offline (so Meta). It was 7 hours of high drama at the time FYI. The team at Cloudflare has run a full postmortem on this event to help us all understand how facebook disappeared from the internet. TL;DR it was DNS, it's nearly always DNS.

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POD OF THE WEEK: It's the podcast version of #7 above - a16z's Crypto Security Podcast.