Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 2, 2020

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: MONEY: aka Bookings or is that Billings? I mean Revenue. Wait, no ACV! etc, etc. These are all key top line SaaS metrics that seemingly are plucked from the same bucket of numbers and dollars. Don’t pretend you understand the differences! Take a read of this to decipher the nuances (with handy graphics and charts).
2. FINTECH: This is a two part series covering the M&A FinTech spree that has occurred over the past year most dramatically across digital banking, corporate cards, and mobile wallets, which is where it starts here with Part 1 and Part 2 can be found here that covers wealth management, alternative financing, and digital payments.
3. CAPITAL: From Mighty Capital General Partner Jennifer Vancini: 5 Fundraising Lessons (covering post seed, pre-C rounds). This is a TL;DW article from the long-form AMA Webstream, which can be viewed here. 
4. SALES: A great primer on SaaS Sales from our friends at Lighter Capital. Sales cycles, commission rates, models, and metrics all explained (with best practices).
5. EMOTIONS: Unlocking the potential in your people is (in my opinion) that hardest part of a startup and for all the tools we have to optimize productivity, there is no tool or app to work around peoples feelings yo. Emotions can run high in startups  outside of a global pandemic and recession. Everyone working from home just makes all this way harder. Managing and harnessing emotions before they get the best of you (and the team) is a useful skill and has never been more vital, so grab a self-reflective beverage and take a good read of this.
6. DEVELOPERS: Speaking of people - lets talk about Developers. The 2020 State of the Developer Report is out from AnswerHub. It’s a pre-pandemic sample, so there is the now-bizzare interest in attending in-person events, but we can substitute that for good old fashioned community in our post-COVID cynicism. So how can Devs build a great support community? Check this article to learn more. Side note - here is a really in-depth report from Stripe on the fiscal benefits of developers (They calculate it at $3 trillion GDP globally) and it also highlights the opportunity costs of bad code and technical debt.
7. GROWTH: Quick read from Sujan Patel listing 7 lessons learned in 5 years of growing SaaS companies and how to get maximum value for your business and to add an additional layer to this - check this article detailing case studies from some top SaaS Growth companies (including Canva, Intercom, and Hubspot).
8. USER EXPERIENCE: Optimizing a User Experience is key to the long term success of any service or product. Google is all over this and launched Web Vitals earlier this year. It’s a program that offers developers guidance about user experience. It’s benchmarking very Google based metrics: loading, interactivity, and visual stability.
9. CURATION: Hey - this article is talking about this newsletter, well not literally, but ya know, it’s curation. Growth in Content Marketing = content overload. According to the article there are an average of 550 new social media users each minute, and over 40,000 search queries on Google every second and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to identify relevant and quality content in all this noise. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s your attention (so thanks for reading this newsletter!)
10. CLOUD: Now that cloud computing powers pretty much every industry Forbes have a “Cloud 100” list which is an annual ranking of the world’s top private cloud companies. This is the fifth year of this list and the number 1 atop of the list, Snowflake should actually be scrubbed off the list as it went public earlier this month (and CRUSHED it). A global pandemic+recession hasn’t slowed this group down. They represent a combined value of about $270 billion and at least 87 companies are Unicorns - valued at $1 billion or more.