Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 13, 2019

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK - NDR. Net Dollar Retention is an important metric in the new world of Product Led Growth (SEE #2 BELOW). It’s used to help answer the following: Does my startup need to increase customer acquisition/marketing spend? Tomasz Tunguz writes in detail about this and Crunchbase do the work to calculate what good NDR benchmarks should look like. 
2. PRODUCT LED GROWTH: So hot right now! TL;DR: PLG is when users drive the adoption and proliferation of products out in the wild - my old Alma Mater, Yammer, were one of the pioneers of PLG, modern equivalents are abundant such as Slack, Zoom, Raygun, and Dropbox. Open View just launched their article on what PLG is and I’m re-listing this great guide from User Pilot on how marketing works in a PLG company.
3. FINTECH: Here is the 2019 H1 report from KPMG. It’s been a quiet start for fintech investment globally and Blockchain/crypto technology investment has returned to the levels of 2014-2016 following a two-year hype period.
4. CAPITAL: In the current tech world, it doesn’t have to always be about Venture Capital or equity (and dilution) when looking to finance. Revenue-based financing is quickly becoming a popular way for startups to raise funds without sacrificing equity, with the rise of significant services such as Lighter Capital and The 20-Minute Term Sheet in the past couple or years.  Here is how it works and what these financiers care about. HINT: It’s ARR and growth. From the SaaS CFO here is the Founder’s Guide to Venture Debt with advantages vs disadvantages of Debt vs Equity.
5. UNICORNS: From PitchBook, the 2019 Unicorn club report (so far) - that’s companies valued at over $1billion: At midyear, there were 187 active unicorns in the US which held an aggregate private valuation of just over US$600 billion.
6. ARCHITECTURE: As a recovering tech architect, the (good) internal design of a software system is something I take a deeper interest in than most people. Martin Fowler has a pretty neat comprehensive guide on the (current) different kinds (and why they matter).
7. WHAT IS TECH? Just like asking the question “What is a Salad?", trying to define what a “Tech Company” is can get incredibly complicated, the edges are very blurry. Stratechery discuss this in-depth to make the case why companies such as WeWork, AirBnB, and Uber hit that mark.
8. HUMILITY: I’m awesome at being wrong. It’s almost a second-rate super-power. This article originally came in via Sam Gribben via LinkedIn (thanks Sam) and really caught my attention on the skill sets needed to be a great Product Manager (Hint: It’s humility).
9. RETAIL 1/5: 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 1 the focus in on delivery (and how US consumers are expecting same-day).
10. SWAG: The Swag industry is a healthy $23.3B industry (annual) and SaaS swag is everywhere! Which means it must work right? Saleshacker dive into this question and get some pretty interesting results. Initial 26% increase in response rate and a downstream 3x  increase in likelihood to book a meeting, and  a 2.42x increase in opportunity value per prospect in their test groups. SIDE NOTE: You may never have noticed this before but Engineers HATE to be sold to, but LOVE to wear the swag of cool tech.

POD OF THE WEEK:  The latest episode of the EnterpriseReady podcast offers a deep dive into why amazing products start with obsessing about UX, and how great on-boarding experiences can scale successfully.

BONUS: It’s currently StartUp School at Y-Combinator and they release all of their lectures/curriculum out to the wild. This is a great one (warning it’s 30 minutes long) from YC Partner Adora Cheung on how to set KPI’s and Goals.