Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 17, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Forecasting: Forecasting MRR is more art than science - but this post gives you both. A smart walk-through of how to project MRR using cohort-based logic, with a FREEEEE Excel template that looks like it might actually work well.


2. GTM: Tomasz Tunguz just dropped the GTM guide every startup needs. Learn when to hire your first AE (after 10 founder-led deals is a great tech-ism), how to pick your sales model (field vs inside vs self-serve or a hybrid), and why the best GTM teams layer focus before they layer headcount. Includes pipeline targets, comp models, and team structures from $1M to $100M ARR.


3. AI PRODUCT: There is a bit of OpenAI in this week's newsletter - so let's start here with an AI-ism. AI features aren't AI products. This teardown of OpenAI's strategy shows what it takes to go beyond a wrapper: latency-aware UX, agent loops, invisible value, and goal-driven design. But shit moves so fast - that even AI apps don't move as fast as the market.


4. OPENAI: OpenAI Dev Day 2025 happened last week, and a few bombs dropped: GPT-5.5, a native app SDK, and "Agents as a Service." But the bigger shift? Distribution. A new AMD chip deal, first-party hosting, and native monetization rails signal OpenAI's ambition to own the full stack - infrastructure to app store and operating system.


5. TALENT: Is there a tech talent shortage, or is it just a mismatch? The WSJ reports that while layoffs have flooded the market, companies still can't find the right skills for AI, security, and infrastructure.


6. MARKET: Check out the GTMfund's take on the State of the Market: 75% of seed-stage startups have <12 months runway, 60% of Series A+ aren't hitting growth targets, and 25% of sales teams are shrinking. Shheeeeeeeeet. Buyers are more risk-averse, and PLG is on the rise again - not for price, but for speed.


7. SALES 1: Early-stage selling is heavy on Founder-Led sales, but founders often get sales wrong because they confuse product belief with buyer readiness. This playbook is great and covers how to build a sales process from scratch, including market mapping, email scripts, handling objections, founder-led tactics, and why closing isn't the hard part - it's getting to the first meeting.


8. SALES 2: What do you do when growth stalls? Jason Lemkin lays it out for us: double down on sales efficiency, revisit churn (see 10 below), and stop assuming marketing will save you. TL;DR: The answer is almost always "more pipeline."


9. MULTI-LLM: I often run multiple LLM agents on one task just to verify output - I have a lot of hallucination trust issues emerging. Simon Willison explores the rise of using agents in parallel for coding - as it's not just faster, but safer. Think multi-threaded prompts, error-checking via ensemble output, and LLM diversity as a helpful hedge against those friggin hallucinations.


10. CASE STUDY: A two-year mission to reduce churn. This post breaks down what actually worked with onboarding tweaks, activation metrics, internal alignment (and what didn't). The big takeaway is that there are no silver bullets, just sustained efforts to figure it out.


POD OF THE WEEK: Finishing it with a little more OpenAI, Reforge founder Brian Balfour on why ChatGPT is on track to become the next major distribution platform.