Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 24, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Burn Multiples tells you how efficiently your startup converts cash burn into ARR. It's the clearest signal of whether your growth is efficient - or just an expensive way to burn money. This breakdown covers benchmarks by stage and why 1.5x is the new magic number for survival.


2. FINANCE: Think you understand your P&L? Probably not well enough. This teardown by OnlyCFO explains how each line of the income statement connects to growth, margin, and cash. Especially useful: benchmarks, red flags, and why you can't ignore gross margin math at early stages.


3. AI: The 2025 State of AI report just dropped from Airstreet, and it's (313 slides) huge. Training costs for frontier models are flattening, while open-source LLMs continue to close the quality gap. AI safety is (finally) growing up, with more labs publishing evals and investing in red-teaming. AI-first startups are now scaling into tens of billions in revenue (bubble anyone?), NVIDIA still dominates the hardware race, and power supply is fast becoming the new bottleneck. The PDF Version is here, as the Google Slides are a little annoying.


4. STATE OF SOFTWARE: This one plays hard into both #1 and #3 above. The ICONIQ State of Software 2025 is mandatory reading because IMO it's a reality check: the old playbook is officially dead. While the Rule of 40 is still the strongest predictor of valuation, median growth for SaaS companies has dropped to 19% YoY (down from 29% in 2022). AI-Native companies are rewriting what's possible, scaling 2-3x faster than traditional SaaS peers. A new (and bonkers)  data point: they're hitting $100M ARR in just 1-2 years, often with fewer than 20 employees. Side note for #1 above - public SaaS firms with Burn Multiples below 1.5 are commanding a 40% valuation premium.


5. GTM: So, based on #4 above, traditional Go-to-Market isn't dead, but maybe it's dying? So shit gotta change. Jason Lemkin warns that mediocre, copy-paste GTM executions are failing faster than ever. AI hasn't replaced sales and marketing; it's made bad playbooks easier to scale, so only truly excellent, AI-augmented execution wins. Buyers want outcomes, not promises.


6. FACILITATE: A super fun and VERY bookmark-able resource this week. It's a library of tools available to facilitate your next session with people or a team, including team building, brainstorming, icebreakers, and check-ins. They are all there!


7. FUNDRAISING: What does it take to raise a Series A? How do you break through the $10M ARR barrier and secure growth capital? More Intelligent offers a comprehensive guide, along with must-hit fundraising milestones—from scaling your go-to-market motion to tightening unit economics and KPIs.


8. VIBE CODING: I give Vibe Coding a (deserving) amount of shit, but to its credit, the idea is maturing. This piece traces that shift - from building fast with AI-assisted tools. Platforms like Solid are bridging the gap with full-stack code and proper control. But the "vibe wall" is real: fast prototyping hits limits without control and scalability.


9. PRICING: Your pricing is broken (but that's kinda OK) - but hey, it's not totally because of your tiers. Kyle Poyar breaks down why most SaaS pricing fails: it's static, and it mashes with my commentary of pricing is like software - it's never done. The best teams iterate on pricing every quarter, not every couple of years, to track the real value. His post unpacks seven pricing traps (like sticking with usage-based just because it's trendy), and gives a roadmap for fixing your monetization blind spots.


10. CASE STUDY: The $2 Trillion Founder Playbook is all about how Larry Page quietly reclaimed control of Google after being sidelined. Page played the long game—shedding titles, backing bold bets like Gmail and Android, and redesigning Google's structure for scale.


POD OF THE WEEK: The video version of number 5 above about the new Go-to-Market thinking needed for success in today's markets from SaaStr.