Technology

The sector at a glance

Technology, AI and robotics with a B2B software spine: enterprise SaaS and the way it is actually bought, priced, secured and run - ARR and retention economics, product-led versus sales-led go-to-market, procurement and compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, HIPAA, GDPR), identity and zero trust, cloud infrastructure, developer tooling and DevOps, data platforms, observability and incident response - plus large language models and AI agents, robotics and automation, cybersecurity, semiconductors and the Austin technology market.

Topic guides

Concepts

ARR / MRR

Annual and monthly recurring revenue - the normalized subscription run-rate a software business is valued on.

NRR / GRR (net and gross revenue retention)

NRR is revenue from existing customers a year later including expansion, minus churn and downgrades - above 100% means growth without new logos. GRR strips expansion out, can never exceed 100%, and shows the true leak rate.

Churn

Customers or revenue lost in a period; logo churn counts accounts, revenue churn counts dollars.

CAC (customer acquisition cost)

Fully loaded sales and marketing spend divided by new customers won.

LTV (lifetime value)

Gross-margin revenue expected from a customer over the whole relationship; usually read as an LTV:CAC ratio.

CAC payback period

Months of gross profit needed to earn back what it cost to win the customer - the cash-efficiency number boards watch.

Magic number

Net new ARR divided by prior-period sales and marketing spend - a quick read on whether growth spend is working.

Rule of 40

Growth rate plus profit margin should clear 40 - the shorthand test for balancing growth against burn.

PLG vs sales-led

Product-led growth lets the product itself drive signup, adoption and expansion before anyone talks to sales; sales-led growth runs on reps, demos and negotiated contracts. Most B2B software now runs a hybrid of both.

Freemium

A permanently free tier used as the top of funnel, with paid tiers gated on scale, teams or admin controls.

Land and expand

Win a small team or single use case, then grow seats, products and spend inside the same account.

Seat-based vs usage-based pricing

Charging per named or active user is predictable but decouples price from value once AI does the work; charging per unit consumed - API calls, tokens, events, compute - tracks value but makes forecasting harder. Hybrids are now common.

TCV / ACV

Total contract value across the whole term versus annual contract value in a single year - the two numbers deals get quoted in.

Pipeline coverage

Open pipeline divided by the quota it must produce; 3x to 4x is the common planning rule.

MQL / SQL

Marketing qualified lead (fits the profile and engaged) versus sales qualified lead (sales has accepted it as real).

POC / pilot

A scoped trial with success criteria agreed up front; without written criteria it becomes an unpaid deployment.

RFP

Request for proposal - the formal, scored procurement process large and public-sector buyers run.

MSA

Master service agreement - the umbrella contract; individual orders attach as order forms or SOWs.

DPA

Data processing agreement - the contract governing personal data a vendor handles, required under GDPR.

SLA

Service level agreement - the committed uptime and response targets, with service credits when they are missed.

Uptime / nines

Availability expressed as nines: 99.9% allows about 8.8 hours of downtime a year, 99.99% about 53 minutes.

SOC 2

An independent audit report on security controls; Type I tests design at a point in time, Type II tests operation over months.

ISO 27001

International certification for an information security management system - the standard European and global buyers ask for.

FedRAMP

The US federal authorization program for cloud services; expensive and slow, but the price of selling to federal agencies.

HIPAA

US health-data rules; handling protected health information requires safeguards and a signed business associate agreement.

GDPR

EU data protection regulation covering lawful basis, subject rights, transfers and breach notification.

SSO / SAML

Single sign-on via a corporate identity provider; SAML and OIDC are the protocols enterprises require before rollout.

SCIM

The provisioning standard that creates, updates and - critically - deprovisions accounts automatically when staff leave.

RBAC

Role-based access control - permissions attached to roles rather than individuals, the basis of least privilege.

API-first

Designing the API as the primary product surface so the UI, partners and agents all consume the same contract.

Webhook

An outbound HTTP callback fired on an event, so consumers get pushed updates instead of polling.

SDK

A language-specific client library wrapping an API with auth, retries and types - it is what shortens time to first call.

REST vs GraphQL

Fixed resource endpoints versus a single endpoint where the client specifies exactly the fields it wants.

Rate limit

A cap on requests per interval that protects shared capacity; well-behaved clients back off and retry.

Multi-tenant vs single-tenant

Many customers sharing one logically isolated instance versus a dedicated instance per customer - cost and scale against isolation.

VPC deployment

Running the vendor's software inside the customer's own cloud account so data never leaves their perimeter.

On-prem

Software installed in the customer's own datacenter - still required in defense, healthcare and parts of finance.

Technical debt

The future cost of shortcuts taken today; it compounds as interest paid in slower releases and more incidents.

Incident & postmortem

A tracked service disruption, then a blameless write-up of timeline, contributing causes and concrete follow-up actions.

SRE (site reliability engineering)

Operating production with software engineering methods - SLOs, error budgets and toil reduction.

Observability

Logs, metrics and traces together, enough to ask new questions of a live system without shipping new code.

CI/CD

Continuous integration and delivery - every change is built, tested and shipped through an automated pipeline.

IaC (infrastructure as code)

Declaring infrastructure in version-controlled files so environments are reviewable, repeatable and rebuildable.

Zero trust

Never trust, always verify - every request is authenticated and authorized regardless of network location.

SBOM & supply-chain security

A software bill of materials listing every dependency, so a newly disclosed vulnerability can be traced to what shipped.

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