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

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: AI METRICS AI ARR isn't always what it seems. MostlyMetrics breaks down how companies are stretching definitions to inflate AI-related revenue — bundling, attribution games, and vague "AI features." Timely reminder: inspect the footnotes, stay cynical!


2. ESOP: Employee Share Option Plans are a wonderful idea to incentivize and retain great staff, but under the hood, ESOPs are complex, especially with changing valuations, both positive and negative, in today's market. Check out Airtree Venture's best practices for communicating the value of  ESOP to teams. This article also has a bonus financial model template (value calculator, salary package calculator, and vesting schedule). Check this cheat sheet for common ESOP terms.


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


4. ESOP BENCHMARKS: A fast follow from above is this wonderful site that has compiled a set of Option benchmark data, comprising over 20,000 option grants from more than 1,650 startups across the US and Europe, sorted by Seed or Venture stage. Carta has also recently done the math and found that for seed-stage valuations ($1M to $10M), the median pool size is 12.9%


5. LINGO: Here is a mega Tech Dictionary update for you because AI is changing who writes what, and when, so we need new terms for all that: Vibe Coding, Spec-Driven Dev, Prompt Jail, and more.


6. AGENTIC: This article and also Slide Deck breaks down what the "Agentic Era" of software actually means IRL: autonomy, context awareness, and goal-driven UX.


7. VENTURE: Carta's Q2 report is out and shows early-stage VC is still holding steady -  but overall LP appetite is cooling. Time to liquidity is also growing, and markups are slowing.


8. BUBBLE: Is AI in a bubble? One-hundred-friggin-percent it is! But maybe all bubbles aren't all bad? Azeem Azhar takes a look at how over-capitalized hype cycles can actually drive real breakthroughs, as long as excess gets channeled into things like infrastructure.


9. GROWTH HACKING: Hacks that work edition: Growth hacking isn't dead—it's evolving. Foundation shares some cutting-edge strategies to scale in competitive markets. From viral loops to leveraging micro-influencers, there is some true gold in there.


10. CASE STUDY: Complementing #9 above, real growth hacking is about rapid iteration across product, marketing, and data. This First Round piece unpacks what growth hacking actually means today, with examples from Airbnb, Dropbox, and more.


POD OF THE WEEK: Growth by experimentation, Albert Cheng shares how his teams run 1,000+ experiments a year (!) to unlock growth.