Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending October 4, 2019

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: CHURN: There are a few kinds of Churn, understanding each and what they mean to the bottom line of a business CoBloom define the differences between revenue and customer churn and David Skok reviews it’s criticality 
2. IPO DRAMA (mini-dive): What was expected to be a bumper year for tech IPOs has instantly become a year of reckoning for current operating models. Balance sheets and profits seem matter to investors again. The Information review IPO performance year-to-date for the companies and Fortune Mag takes a look at SoftBank's role in all of this drama. Tomasz Tunguz also chimes in with his observations on share price.
3. VC NDA’s: Do you need your investors to sign and NDA? It’s not common - here is why (and how to manage it).
4. PMF: Or Product Market Fit if you want to waste syllables was called “the only thing that matters” to early-stage startups by Marc Andreessen 12 years ago. Now his team get a little more nuanced suggesting to focus on Product-User-Fit as an indicator towards achieving PMF. Similar nuance is also true post PMF with repeatable-scalable revenue models as a precursor to a repeatable-scalable business model (you know - the one with actual profits).
5. MILLENNIALS: Are about to enter their prime spending years and CB Insights offers a great overview of 12 Industries that they forecast to benefit the most.
6. RETAIL 4/5: The future of retail is tech-centric and Business Insider are providing a 5 part series on the future of retail (2020 edition) In this Part 4 the focus in on 
7. ONBOARDING: Doing this well is key to increasing value, lowering churn and creating advocates. From HeavyBit here is a 4 phase plan and this article covers 5 Tips to Speed up Sales Onboarding without Sacrificing Quality.
8. ORGANIZATIONAL HEALTH:  Bottom line, here is why you should care: The top quartile of publicly traded companies in McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index (OHI) delivers roughly three times the returns to shareholders as those in the bottom quartile. The best way to run a business is to balance short-term performance and long-term health. Here is a deep dive from McKinsey into the case for organizational health.
9. TRAFFIC: Mike Sonders researches the question: "What are the best sources of traffic for SaaS companies?” Leveraging the 50 biggest public SaaS companies by market cap in the U.S.. In a surprise to probably no-one, Organic search is consistently the biggest source of traffic. Driving up to 68% of all traffic but Email accounts for less than 5% of traffic, on average, but has an incredibly high ROI, upwards of 3,800%.
10. AUTOMATION: Will robots really steal our jobs? Great report from PWC’s UK office offering an international analysis of the potential long term impacts of automation. (And they broke it down into 3 waves (over time) in this report).

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POD OF THE WEEK: Complimenting #2 above on PMF, the 20 Minute VC podcast interviews Brad Feld on his thoughts on Early Stage metrics (and why Market size isn’t that helpful)