January, 2024

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Make Hay When the Sun Shines : Liquidity in Startup Exits

Tom Tunguz

Companies aren’t bought. They’re sold. Hang around startups & venture capital long enough, & you’ll hear this aphorism. It means it’s much easier to sell a company when there’s plenty of demand. In any given year, there’s an 82% chance the value of startup liquidity will change by more than 77% - both up & down.

Startup 292
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Venture Backed or Bootstrapped? There’s a Third Way. Just Raise One Round.

SaaStr

There’s so much debate on social media and elsewhere on bootstrapped vs VC. Bootstrapped you maintain control, and the unit economics. But many see it as so much harder. And it’s almost always longer. VC can let you go faster, but it can become an addiction. And the dilution all-in generally ends up being 60%-70% by the time you approach an IPO.

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The American Dynamism 50: AI Edition

Andreessen Horowitz

From the last mile to low Earth orbit, solar fields to the battlefield, artificial intelligence is redefining our barometer for progress. Thus, this year’s American Dynamism 50 — a16z’s annual spotlight on 50 groundbreaking tech companies advancing the national interest — all harness AI to fulfill their missions.

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10 Standard UCaaS Features + 7 Cutting-Edge Capabilities

The Daily Egg

Successful organizations know that the more interconnected their communication channels are, the better they can perform overall. With UCaaS (Unified Communications as. The post 10 Standard UCaaS Features + 7 Cutting-Edge Capabilities appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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Struggling to Scale Test Coverage Under Pressure?

When test coverage falls behind release velocity, quality suffers, and your team feels the consequences. This guide outlines when it makes sense to outsource quality assurance (QA), the risks to watch for, and how to scale testing without increasing headcount or slowing down engineering. You will learn how leading teams are leveraging external QA partners to expand coverage, enhance defect detection, and remain aligned with CI/CD timelines.

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Our First Fixathon: How We Squashed 44 Bugs in One Week

Buffer Resources

Buffer, as a company, closes the last week of the year every year, and historically, as an engineering team, we’d do a code freeze for the week before we’re closed so nothing broke heading into the holidays. (Pretty smart of us.)  This year, we did something different, and it still worked out. We used the last week of the year as a “fixathon” for our whole engineering team.

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The Fastest Growing Software Sectors in 2024

Tom Tunguz

The fastest growing software category in the public markets is security. Data follows. Security companies as a group average 29% expected revenue growth in 2024, compared to 23% for Data (or DaaS which stands for data-as-a-service). Fintech & SaaS (horizontal) average ten percentage points fewer expected growth. Anticipation of this growth propels multiples.

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Fake Multi-Product vs. Real Multi-Product

SaaStr

So one thing that’s changed radically in SaaS over the past few years if everyone has realized to truly scale, you need to be multi-product. Sometimes by as early as $20m ARR, sometimes by as late at $200m ARR, or later. But net net, the average public SaaS compay has 35,000 customers. So once you cross 3,500, let alone 10,000 — you’re starting to saturate most B2B markets.

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Forget Support — Optimize for Full Funnel Customer Success

FastSpring

With years of experience at managing customer success (CS), Jake Dipple knows how important it is to foster collaboration between businesses and their customers. And at a company like Sideways 6 — whose product is an idea management software to help organizations engage people and foster innovation — that emphasis on collaboration gets even louder. Jake, Head of Customer Success for Sideways 6, explains that the current trend is to measure their success through the customer’s success, with CS be

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8 IVR Survey Tips: Get Vital Feedback Instead of Noise

The Daily Egg

IVR surveys are a set of pre-recorded automated questions customers can answer via voice or phone keypads. Aside from the benefits IVR. The post 8 IVR Survey Tips: Get Vital Feedback Instead of Noise appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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What’s New in Apache Airflow® 3.0—And How Will It Reshape Your Data Workflows?

Speaker: Tamara Fingerlin, Developer Advocate

Apache Airflow® 3.0, the most anticipated Airflow release yet, officially launched this April. As the de facto standard for data orchestration, Airflow is trusted by over 77,000 organizations to power everything from advanced analytics to production AI and MLOps. With the 3.0 release, the top-requested features from the community were delivered, including a revamped UI for easier navigation, stronger security, and greater flexibility to run tasks anywhere at any time.

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SEO-Driven Content Architecture — Whiteboard Friday

The Moz Blog

Does all of your content come together in a structure that allows it to be scaled? Learn how to accumulate organic traffic, clicks, keyword rankings, and drive conversions by creating SEO-driven content architecture.

Scaling 142
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Clouded Judgement 1.26.24 - Q4 Earnings Season Kicks Off

Clouded Judgement

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now ServiceNow Kicks Off Q4 Earnings Season ServiceNow kicked off Q4 earnings season on Wednesday (they are almost always the first software company to report), and I thought I’d dig in to see if they left any clues for what we should expect for the broader software market.

Cloud 170
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Open Source Models : What Can We Determine from Download Patterns?

Tom Tunguz

Open source models have become a critical part of the AI landscape. I was curious about the trends in the open source ecosystem, so I analyzed HuggingFace data on the top 300 open source models, both by overall usage & also the top of the trending list. Open source models are governed by open source licenses. Similar to regular open source software, Apache & MIT dominate the licenses by model count. 76% of the top models choose one of these licenses.

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Look, No VC Wants to Fund a Startup With So-So Growth. Except Maybe Your Existing Investors.

SaaStr

Ok some of this post I’d hope would be blindingly obvious. But it isn’t, so I’m going to try to help by being brutally direct: No VC on Planet Earth Wants to Invest in a Startup with Mediocre Growth None. No one. I can’t tell you how many emails a week a month that go something like this: “It’s been a challenging year with 30%-50% growth, but with some funding, we can grow much faster next year!

Startup 337
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Agent Tooling: Connecting AI to Your Tools, Systems & Data

Speaker: Alex Salazar, CEO & Co-Founder @ Arcade | Nate Barbettini, Founding Engineer @ Arcade | Tony Karrer, Founder & CTO @ Aggregage

There’s a lot of noise surrounding the ability of AI agents to connect to your tools, systems and data. But building an AI application into a reliable, secure workflow agent isn’t as simple as plugging in an API. As an engineering leader, it can be challenging to make sense of this evolving landscape, but agent tooling provides such high value that it’s critical we figure out how to move forward.

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5 Themes We Expect to See Across Social Media in 2024 (ft. Expert Contributions)

Buffer Resources

“This year is going to be transformative!” As humans, we tend to say (and believe) this statement about every year. And it’s true – we don’t stay stagnant, and neither do the industries in which we work. But something about 2024 makes me think it stands poised to redefine the social media landscape and the creator economy.

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Squaretalk Review

The Daily Egg

Squaretalk offers a budget-friendly, adaptable, and intuitive cloud communication platform to enhance your sales and support teams’ performance and productivity. Its vast. The post Squaretalk Review appeared first on The Daily Egg.

Cloud 289
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What I Have Learned From Conducting Over 100 Website Migrations

The Moz Blog

Conducting your first migration or looking to improve your workflow?

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Clouded Judgement 1.5.24

Clouded Judgement

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. Follow along to stay up to date! Subscribe now 10Y Rising The start of the year has not been kind to software stocks! In the basket I track and discuss in Clouded Judgement (~80 companies), no one is up on the year. In just the last couple weeks from mid December to today we’ve seen the 10Y move from 3.8% to 4%.

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State of AI in Sales & Marketing 2025

AI adoption is reshaping sales and marketing. But is it delivering real results? We surveyed 1,000+ GTM professionals to find out. The data is clear: AI users report 47% higher productivity and an average of 12 hours saved per week. But leaders say mainstream AI tools still fall short on accuracy and business impact. Download the full report today to see how AI is being used — and where go-to-market professionals think there are gaps and opportunities.

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Dissecting Delegation: Diving Deep on The Missing B-School Class

Tom Tunguz

Last Friday’s post about delegation called The Class Missing from Business School, spurred a deluge of great advice from readers. There was a recurring theme when delegating: Identify the time-consuming & repetitive tasks by coloring or labelling your calendar, or calculating at the end of the week or month. Record a video/Loom/Scribe* detailing the process.

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A Low Burn Multiple is Great. But — It Doesn’t Mean You Won’t Run Out of Money.

SaaStr

David Sacks classic post on Burn Rate Multiple is A+ and a key metric for every venture-backed startup. It simplifies a lot of complexity into one metric. That if you’re venture-backed, yes, you do have money to spend (and burn). But the best burn less each month than they bring in in new bookings and revenue (a Burn Multiple of 1x or less).

Startup 333
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5 Themes We Expect to See Across Social Media in 2024 (ft. Expert Contributions)

Buffer Resources

“This year is going to be transformative!” As humans, we tend to say (and believe) this statement about every year. And it’s true – we don’t stay stagnant, and neither do the industries in which we work. But something about 2024 makes me think it stands poised to redefine the social media landscape and the creator economy.

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What is TCP and Why Is It Too Reliable for Making Calls?

The Daily Egg

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a transport layer network protocol that is essential to how computers communicate. It’s commonly used for sending. The post What is TCP and Why Is It Too Reliable for Making Calls? appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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5 Ways to Improve Revenue from Integrated Payments

Speaker: Pete Uselman, Director of Partner Experience at Wind River Payments

Most integrated payments providers share a percent of the payment revenue with their software partners. But, oftentimes, that revenue share is only a fraction of the true income potential software providers can realize. If you want to maximize income opportunities from your payments program, check out Wind River Payments’ webinar-on-demand.

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Breaking the Boundaries of Branding: Harness Non-Branded Traffic for Sustainable Growth

The Moz Blog

This article will teach you how to attract and nurture non-branded traffic to guide your users through the marketing funnel, converting them into loyal customers for sustained growth.

Branding 141
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Why 2023 Was AI Video’s Breakout Year, and What to Expect in 2024

Andreessen Horowitz

This post has been adapted from a thread from a16z Partner Justine Moore on X. Follow Justine on X for more analysis and observations. 2023 was a breakout year for AI video. At the start of the year, no public text-to-video models existed. Just 12 months later, dozens of video generation products are in active use, with millions of users worldwide creating short clips from text or image prompts.

AI 134
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The Class Missing from Business School

Tom Tunguz

I remember my graduate classes well : marketing , operations research, statistics, macroeconomics, strategy, & negotiation. But having worked for about twenty years, there’s a class missing from business school for a skill used as frequently as public speaking & negotiation : Delegation. After starting in the working world, at some point we start managing others.

Business 225
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Gartner: 2024 Will be Tougher Than We Thought, But We’ll Still Cross $1 Trillion in Software Spend

SaaStr

So Gartner is cutting back its growth projections for this year a bit. It was previously projecting a 13.8% spend in software spend in 2024 to over $1 Trillion. It’s now cutting that back a bit to 12.7% growth in 2024, basically flat with 2023. But that’s still a lot of growth. To over $1 Trillion in software spend worldwide — for the first time ever.

Software 328
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SaaS Essentials: Failed Payment Solution Guide

For SaaS businesses, improving retention is one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive revenue and profits. With a clear link between failed payments and customer churn, having a robust failed payment recovery solution isn’t optional—it’s essential. Achieving your retention goals starts with the right solution.

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What is Good B2B Content? Content Leaders on 9 Must-Haves for Standing Out From the B2B Crowd

Buffer Resources

Inaccurate, packed with "filler," or completely AI-generated — bad B2B (business-to-business) content is easy to spot and even easier to find online. According to one study, it also costs over $50 billion annually due to wasted resources alone. But what makes B2B content good ? Tough question. With Google promising to prioritize "helpful content" going into 2024 and studies showing that as little as 5 percent of all content assets generate 90 percent of customer engagement

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The Complete Call Center Fraud Prevention Checklist

The Daily Egg

Call centers are all about speed, but in the race to be as helpful and efficient as possible, many companies might be. The post The Complete Call Center Fraud Prevention Checklist appeared first on The Daily Egg.

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It’s Your Time to Shine — MozCon Community Speaker Application Form is Open!

The Moz Blog

MozCon is bringing the Future of Search back to Seattle this June 3 & 4, and we’re excited to announce the return of our annual call for up-and-coming community speakers!

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