Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 27, 2019

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Viral Coefficient: This metric can tell you how many new users a current user is referring to your business. A fantastic way to track low-cost acquisition channels (if this method is your thing). But the coefficient has to be a number greater than 1.
2. SEED VC: Deal size inflation isn’t just happening at the high end of town. It’s also happening over at the seed stage. At seed stage this a pretty substantial cheque - we're talking about $5 million and more to qualify as a “supergiant seed round.” Crunchbase dive deep on this trend over the years - the annual quantity of seed rounds of $5 million or more quadrupled from 2014 to 2018.
3. TECH FOR GOOD: A few years ago, Microsoft tasked me with discovering ways their tech is being leveraged for good around the world, and it sparked a keen interest in me ever since. McKinsey have a great blog called FiveFifty, that lets a reader dive as deep as five or fifty minutes into a topic via by it’s UX design (which is fascinating by itself). This one is on Tech for the Greater Good asking the question "Can advanced technologies such as AI improve the well-being of humans?"
4. HR AT SCALE: When does a high-growth tech company need to hire a Head of HR? It’s generally about 50 people and here is the reasoning why. As an add on, people really do like to do this remote. 
5. DELIGHT AUDIT. Yes, in the Age of the Customer, this should be a thing, so stop rolling your eyes! This is an in-depth post from CopyHackers on how to make this kind of Audit happen.
6. VALUATIONS: Skyrocketing valuations have been a consistent theme in VC in the last few years, but valuation growth has (finally) cooled across the board in the first half of 2019. Check this report from PitchBook which covers Angel through Late-stage VC.
7. PRODUCT LED GROWTH: If you haven’t noticed yet, I keep harping on about this. Want to know how well you are doing at PLG? OpenView have launched a Product Led Growth Maturity Grader  -  this tool is designed to give feedback on how far along your organization is on the PLG maturity spectrum.
8. CLOUD: Public cloud revenue is forecast to reach $500 billion by 2023 and SaaS will remain the largest category of cloud computing, capturing more than half of all public cloud spending and a lot of that SaaS spend will be driven by the API/Micro-Services sub-category of SaaS. It was also Oracle World in SF last week, so it would be remiss of me if I didn’t mention Oracles global cloud expansion.
9. RETAIL 3/5: 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 3, the focus in on online checkout spotlight the strategies retailers are using to tap into growth.
10. ANTI-TRUST: In this Business Insider report they tale a look at the three most likely outcomes of the impending US regulatory clampdown on big tech and what it means for digital media and from Forbes an article outlining what should be the (consumer based) focus by lawmakers.

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POD OF THE WEEK: It’s a Video, not podcast this week. The content pumping out of Y-Combinator at present is just too good. YC Partner Carolynn Levy details the basics of startup financing and how modern early stage rounds of financing are done using convertible securities, like the SAFE note.