The weekly top 10 for B2B tech operators · Every Friday
CARR - Contracted Annual Recurring Revenue. This is a forward-looking SaaS revenue metric that estimates the maximum revenue size of a SaaS company, measuring current recurring revenue from your SaaS P&L and future revenue that sits in newly won customer contracts.
ULG is when your existing users become your biggest advocates, driving leads straight into your funnel. It's not for every B2B SaaS company, but when done right, it can build a flywheel that slashes your CAC and ramp times. A classic example is Dropbox's referral program, where users earned extra storage by inviting others—a powerful way to turn customers into evangelists one GB at a time.
On the mission of moving from founder-led to AE-led sales? This article from Bain Capital Ventures makes the case that it's all about the "MVP/ICP Handshake." Nailing the alignment between your Minimum Viable Product and your Ideal Customer Profile is a key step. Without this, bringing in AEs too early can stunt growth (which has been seen time and time again in startup land). Solidify the customer segmentations and product-market fit before even thinking of adding a sales force.
Bottoms up adoption is hard to crack😉 (learn more about the bottom-up model here). For example, according to Gergely Orosz, Hashcorp has 4,300 customers in total, but only ~800 of them generate 90% of their annual revenue. And here is how to forecast.
Thinking Machines raised $2B at a $12B valuation and called it Seed. Humans& closed $480M Seed, and Periodic Labs took $300M. Meanwhile, the median US Seed round sits at $4.1M, almost exactly where it sat five years ago. Same stage by name, but it ain't the same market.
Carta's State of Pre-Seed: Q1 2026 report is out - AI startups now capture 50% of all pre-seed dollars on Carta, up from ~30% a few years ago. That's the same concentration you see at later stages - the filter is happening at the very top of the funnel. Total pre-seed capital is stable at $2.5-3B per quarter. The pre-seed middle is hollowing out. Rounds between $1M and $2.5M dropped from 24% of all pre-seed deals in Q1 2023 to 18% in Q1 2026. Sub-$1M rounds and mega-rounds both gained share.
I bet somewhere someone is asking, "Hey! where's the ROI on the 2M euros we paid Anthropic last year?" Robert Glaser argues most companies are measuring AI wrong - counting seats, prompts, PRs. The better question: what loops closed faster, which decisions improved, which product ideas got killed earlier because a prototype made the weakness obvious?
Skills are the new prompts engineering - Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, Microsoft, Vercel, Windsurf, and Lovable have all converged on skills as a shortcut for context that everyone appreciates. MCPs took 2 years to achieve something that took Skills 6 months. BTW - WTF, Lovable is at 400M ARR, which is $2.77M revenue per head.
Lemkin's call: the best AI-native B2B companies stopped closing with "20% off if you sign by Friday" and started closing with "we'll deploy the agent for you this week, no cost." Discounts ask the buyer to make a bet. Deployment removes the bet. Once an agent is live, it's almost impossible to rip out.
In July 2025, aReplit agent deleted SaaStr's production database(and during an explicit code freeze), fabricated 4,000 fake users to cover its tracks, then admitted "I violated explicit instructions, destroyed months of work." Since then: 8 documented disasters. AI now generates code faster than humans can review it.
Get the top 10, every Friday
Curated SaaS and tech insight from around the web, repackaged for people to put to good use — free.