The weekly top 10 for B2B tech operators · Every Friday
Fundraising Metrics. For all of you hitting 2026 in fundraising mode, make your fundraising way less chaotic by getting these metrics dialed in. Unless you are pre-revenue, Investors will expect to see detailed ARR, CAC, LTV, retention rates, and engagement metrics. A strong data deck (or data room) can answer investors' questions and show a clear growth path.
Go to market motions can be pretty specific, and your GTM motions can impact your marketing strategy and your org chart. Robert Kaminski has distilled GTM motions into five types in this article, based on number of use cases. The summary diagram at the bottom is excellent.
It's been a rowdy week in the public markets, and Coatue, like me, loves some good charts (18 in this report) and makes the case that AI is early and not in the bubble zone. $250B in funding, $100B in revenue… and only 2% of enterprise workloads on GenAI today. The mismatch between investment and adoption actually looks quite massive (and I reckon quite unsustainable).
Seed VC is busted! In 2021, 55% of seed rounds had at least one institutional VC - in 2024, it's dropped to 38%. LPs are pulling back, seed funds are missing targets, and exits aren't coming fast enough or at all. NextView warns: many firms raised too much, too fast, and now lack the reserves or conviction to back winners through to liquidity. Sidebar, but even in the top quartile in venture, "Doing Great" isn't enough to raise money.
How do Marketplaces work with AI in the mix? Answer - they go mutant. a16z outlines how AI-native marketplaces will flip the advantage from owning the supply to owning the brain in the middle. Search, summarization, recommendations, pricing - all through agents.
The latest from Multiples.vc: Some Public SaaS is back above 6x revenue (median), but still far from the pre-COVID/free money-era highs. Median EV/NTM revenue is 6.8x, with only 26% of companies above 10x. Dev Tools lead at 10.5x; PropTech drags at 2.7x. 21% of the index is still unprofitable. Market's not frothy - it's got selective.
Jeff Bezos may be over his flying-phallic-rockets-era and back into operator mode as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new AI startup that's already hauled $6.2B in funding (Bezos is one of the funders). It's not chatbots - it's physical systems, aerospace, and hard AI.
Do you have a hard time with product discovery - there seems to be sooooo much out there. Well, according to David Kellogg, "The Sea of Sameness" is real (and IMO it's getting worse). AI and SaaS startups are flooding the market with lookalike products, identical landing pages, and copy-paste taglines. Kellblog lays out why most companies fail to position clearly: they focus on features, not meaning. If buyers can't tell what makes you different in seconds, too bad, you lose. His advice? Anchor your positioning in a deep understanding of why you exist and say something only you can say.
Updated for 2025 - Growth isn't just about hacking anymore - check this deep dive from Kyle Poyar and data from Chartmogul on the "outliers" - which are the companies that made it to $20m ARR (this chart is awesome). The big difference is that Groth levers shift and adapt over time for the outliers - from activation and monetization to expansion and retention. They all compound and have an outlier impact.
Cursor is one of my new favorite apps (I've pivoted it into use on the Product and Operations side), and this case study goes deep inside Cursorand breaks down how the business operates and grew by targeting high-intent engineers, shipping relentlessly, and making copilots feel native to dev flows.
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