Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending September 11, 2026

SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK

ARR - it ain't the trophy metric it once was - that and other traditional SaaS metric takes from current VCs here.

COMPUTE

The AI price war and the AI debt boom are hanging out at the same time. $500B of other people's money, lent against GPUs. That's Nvidia's new plan with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman, and KKR - announced at the same time token prices fell up to 80% and memory started building toward its next glut.

MAGICAL THINKING

It's a trap! Check these 5 magical thinking traps that are common for new founders to fall into - Build it, and they'll come; launch it, and they'll buy; add more, and they'll convert; move faster, and my fav - a few early customers means a viable business.

SECURITY

I find the threat of AI-enabled cyberattacks terrifying (and they are inevitable) - the president at OpenAI agrees - he lists 10 things to do ASAP against AI-enabled cyberattacks (remember his own agents hacked Hugging Face, so he'd know - see #10 here). Give your security team an agent today, read-only first, triage the backlog, security review in CI. His phrase is "turbo speed."

VENTURE DEBT

A £10M facility quoted at 10% actually costs 14.3% in cash and gives the lender 16.8% once the warrants land. Every point of the gap is disclosed somewhere in the documents - the 2% fee on day one, PIK quietly compounding the balance to £11.3M, a 3% exit fee someone agreed to as a rounding error.

CAPITAL

Every private capital strategy is down this year except one. Private debt raised 27.3% more in H1 than last year and is tracking its second-best year ever. $5 trillion is now stuck in private funds seven years or older - 39% of everything. Fundraising dropped to $1.35T while the number of funds fell 37% to 3,763, showing capital is concentrating - 78.2% of capital went to $1B+ funds, which is up from 59.1% in 2021.

PITCHING

Check this report from Papermrak (they tracked 24,541 decks and 358,672 investor views) - Investors give your deck 4 minutes, and fewer than half of them ever reach the last slide - which is where we all put the ask. Put your best facts in the first three slides, ask early, and the appendix goes behind everything. Super helpful report. BTW - TEAM is the most-read page (at 5.7 seconds).

GRAPH ENGINEERING

New one for our tech dictionaries - A graph is a loop with something that can contradict it. It's worth it for the phrase "a larger hallucination with better project management" alone. 20 AI agents reviewing each other's work ignores the same blind spots and agrees with itself twenty times.

CMO

Founders are killing the CMO position - brand goes into product, demand goes into sales, problem solved. You are better off with no CMO than the wrong CMO. Good idea from the article - hire the person who could run marketing in 18-24 months, and pay a great CMO to advise them for a year. Cheaper than the mis-hire, and the mis-hire builds a team in their image for years.

CASE STUDY

DETOX: 3 days without your phone and your brain starts showing the same activation patterns researchers see in substance withdrawal. Check this study - Researchers took smartphones off 25 young adults for 72 hours. The participants reported no extra craving and no worse mood - which seems fine, but their brain scans said otherwise.