Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 5, 2025

1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK: Growth Endurance Score (GES). This is a new one for me, but it's a keeper.  It's a metric that assesses a company's ability to sustain growth over time (something I have been discussing quite a bit lately, as I try to maintain my own growth momentum). GES measures this efficiency by factoring in both net retention and customer acquisition efficiency. A high GES correlates with long-term business health and resilience. This score provides valuable insights for businesses aiming for consistent, sustainable growth. Bessemer has drilled deeper into it and plotted ARR growth lost YoY, and found that the decay is fairly predictable at 30%. That's a benchmark - in other words, you should expect next year's growth rate to be 70% of the current year's, as the stakes get higher.


2. PRODUCTS: Balancing the needs of existing vs new customers is a hard product act to balance, and that push and pull is nicely described in this article with some great analogies and tips on how to influence the product roadmap, along with an article from First Round Review with a list of things to avoid when building highly-technical products.


3. AI NOISE: This is a great article, sending a warning that the signal-to-noise ratio in AI markets looks to be collapsing. As AI accelerates all kinds of content and capital flows, genuine information is getting harder to parse, distorting valuations and decision-making. So, the inevitable upcoming market correction may be less about fundamentals and more about all that noise.


4. STATE OF AI: I love me a good Bessemer Ventures Report. Their AI report is out, and it's a beast. TL;DR: Infra is hot, agents are messy, and the winners will balance open-source velocity with enterprise-grade plumbing. And it's kinda adding onto #3 above, over 50% of Series A+ AI startups are building infrastructure (vs apps or agents) — infra is where the early-stage dollars are going (and they are less noisy). Agents still hallucinate. Plumbing, not magic, will win IMO.


5. PR: Getting good PR if you're an unknown startup is hard (and also can be seen as a low priority in the endless stable of things-to-get-done) - but it's not as hard as you think without a publicist.  Here is a great 101 article from Point Nine Capital (they call it PR for dummies) on how to get great press coverage. ChartMoguls also has an article on PR for SaaS, complete with sample scripts.


6. OUTAGES: Now is always a good time to front-foot your architecture. For techies, Google actually has a great article on Architecting disaster recovery for cloud infrastructure outages. Here is a good DR Plan article, and here is a good template.


7. GROWTH: Testing new tactics of marketing growth takes a lot of resources, and most of us often don't have much time for running experiments. Check out this Google Doc from Dashly, where they've collected 100 growth marketing hypotheses tested by their experts. (includes advert retargeting, wait list for product launches, niche glossaries, etc).


8. API DESIGN: You know the good thing about APIs? They are pretty much boring AF. That's the point. Sean Goedecke breaks down why a "well-behaved" API should feel predictable, invisible, and dull — like a fav spoon, not a Swiss Army knife.


9. MARKETING: Why do some B2B SaaS ads actually land? Because they nail three truths: product (what you do), emotional (why it matters), and cultural (why now). Stripe and Slack get it. Most don't.


10. CASE STUDY: Slack took 8 years to hit $1B ARR. Zoom? Just 4. Jason Lemkin asking the ultimate question: Does it matter? Because, maybe not. Saastr breaks down why long-haul growth often leads to stronger fundamentals (and fewer layoffs).


POD OF THE WEEK: Fascinating thought exercise on what design is (As a design nerd, trying to answer that question is the cool bit). In the SaaS world, we are so CX focused - so what, in this new AI world, if that Customer was a non-human/machine? What changes from a product design and build perspective (API Design is a start) - new acronym alert - AX (Agent Experience).