The Metrics Brothers

Air Street Capital’s Nathan Benaich just dropped the 2025 State of AI Report — a 313-page tour de force on where artificial intelligence is today and where it’s headed next. In this episode, Dave “CAC” Kellogg and Ray “Growth” Rike break down the highlights, surprises, and bold predictions shaping the future of AI, software, and the global economy. They explore: Why this report is becoming the “Ma...

AI Agents (also known as Agentic AI ) are quickly becoming one of the most talked-about ways for enterprises to operationalize generative AI. G2 recently released a new research report — “A Leap of Trust: AI Agents Are Winning Hearts and Wallets” — highlighting where adoption is happening and why. In this episode, Dave “CAC” Kellogg and Ray “Growth” Rike break down the report’s findings and what t...

The buzz about ROI from AI software investments is palpable, so Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike take on the topic of measuring Return on Investment on AI software investments. During today's episode, Dave and Ray discuss the details on measuring ROI including: Defining Return on Investment Soft vs Hard Benefits Productivity - the primary benefit of AI investments today Buy versus Build &a...

9-9-6. A term to describe the work culture of working 9AM - 9PM six days a week. This term is most often associated with those founders, companies, and their employees that work in generational software opportunities - such as we see right now with AI Software. Dave and Ray discuss 9-9-6 from multiple angles in today's episode including: What 9-9-6 is Where did it originate Why is it trending The...

The Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE) represents a fundamental reimagining of the technical role in high-stakes enterprise environments. At its core, an FDE is a software engineer embedded directly with customers to solve their most complex—and often ambiguous—problems. Palantir is widely credited as the originator and early adopter of the FDE model, initially referring to these engineers as “Deltas...

Iconiq recently published its State of Software 2025: Rethinking the Playbook. Whenever a new industry benchmark report is published, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike try to quickly read, analyze and decide if the report should be discussed on an episode of the Metrics Brothers. The Iconiq State of Software 2025 is a solid industry report that includes several key findings that Dave a...

The Bessemer Venture Partners Cloud 100 Benchmarks Report 2025 provides a snapshot into the top 100 PRIVATE SaaS/Cloud/AI companies. This year's report is full of new insights and trends that highlight how AI is impacting the software industry as we know it. Some of the key points in the report that our hosts Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss during today's episode include:  Th...

Positive Business Outlook or Work-Life Balance - which is more important? The "Grindscore" metric combines the two to determine the attractiveness of a company for employees.  Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss the metric from many different angles including: The origin of the Grindscore metric Positive Business Outlook (PBO) + Work-Life Balance (WLB) Sample of Private and...

Bessemer Venture Partners recently released their State of AI 2025 Report, a space exploration manual for the AI software era. With AI now the dominant software force, let's dive into what Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike took away from the report in today's episode: The key differences in performance metrics between AI Supernovas and Shooting Stars Why Vertical AI companies have a unique...

Aventis Advisors recently published a report on AI Valuations which covered the number of investments, size of those investments, median valuations and multiples on AI investments over a 15 year period from 2010 through first half of 2025! Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss some of the highlights including: AI industry categories included Number of financing rounds (2010 - 1H2025) To...

AI-Native products and AI products integrated into a traditional SaaS platform have different Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) than a SaaS platform, which directly impacts Gross Margin. With over 80% of SaaS companies already integrating AI products into their platform, the Metrics Brothers knew it was time to discuss the Gross Margin and Cost of Goods Sold considerations of deploying an AI product: Topi...

AI is creating a level of need for data centers, power and processing capacity that has not been seen before - but how to measure the magnitude of that need is the topic for the Metrics Brothers to take on during this episode. During today's conversation, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss many key Data Center metrics including: FLOPS - Floating Point Operations per Second Model Para...

SaaS companies were traditionally measured on how many years it took to achieve $100M ARR - a key milestone! In today's brave new world of AI, this milestone is now measured in MONTHS. Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike highlight discuss this new AI growth metric in today's episode with many examples including: Lovable Cursor Wiz Bolt Anthropic OpenAI Dave and Ray discuss how these new hyper...

The recent $2.4B deal by Google to purchase Windsurf's two co-founders, key staff and a non-exclusive license to the Windsurf software is an example of the new Reverse Acqui-hire structure. Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss the tradition vs new acqui-hire structure model as evidenced by the Google-Windsurf deal. During this episode, CAC and Growth cover not only the Goggle-Windsurf...

AI and AI-Native companies are changing the software industry and the metrics to measure AI market momentum are still evolving. During this weeks episode, our co-hosts Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss a recent article on AI Metrics by Benedict Evans . AI measurements and metrics discussed include: Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users (DAU/MAU) Tokens - what they are and h...

Figma is a web-based collaborative design platform used by product designers, UX/UI teams and developers. They also just recently filed their S-1. During this episode, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss several aspects of the S-1 including: Customer count & revenue by customer segment (< $10,000 ARR, > $10,000 ARR, > $100,000 ARR, > $1M ARR) Net Revenue (Dollar) Reten...

Go-to-Market is a term often used to describe the strategy, processes, and organizations that B2B companies employ to acquire, retain, and expand their customer base. In this episode, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike discuss the recently published ICONIQ report on the State of GTM 2025...and yes, it includes a lot about how AI-native and AI utilization are impacting all things GTM.  T...

The definition of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) has never been standardized - but in an era of variable pricing models such as Usage-Based Pricing, the innovative approaches to calculating and reporting ARR continue to evolve. During this episode, Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike cover the topic guided by a few recently industry influencer posts - coupled with their own experiences includ...

Mary Meeker’s experience dates back to her role as a leading technology analyst at Morgan Stanley with her “Internet Trends Report”, she was in the middle of the Netscape, Amazon, and Google IPOs, and became a VC at Kleiner Perkins (2010) and then founded Bond in 2018 which has raised $5.75B to fund companies including Canva, Stripe, Plaid, Ironclad and Nextdoor to name just a few. During this epi...

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike break down the recent Benchmarkit B2B Marketing Budget and Productivity Benchmarks Report. Key trends and insights into how the Marketing budgets are established, consumed and reported upon including: Marketing budget as a percentage of revenue including YoY changes and segmented by company size Growth Rates compared to Marketing budget allocation - the chi...

How do you calculate the efficiency of pipeline generation in a B2B SaaS company? Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike take this metric(s) topic on head first by discussing both the Cost per Opportunity and Pipe to Spend metrics - key to understanding how much investment is required to generate pipeline! During this episode CAC and Growth also touch upon the closely aligned metric of "Pip...

Customer Acquisition Cost efficiency continues to be challenged in the B2B SaaS environment, while alignment across the Go-to-Market organization continues to be a topic of conversation. So, Dave "CAC" Kellogg a long time Marketing executive and Ray "Growth" Rike, a long time Sales executive decided to take on the the topic of Marketing and Sales alignment from their respective experiences as depa...

Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike recently did a LIVE episode of SaaS Talk with the Metrics Brothers at the Baker Tilly Technology Finance Symposium in San Francisco. The topic of their discussion was aligning Finance and the Go-to-Market functions and included how SaaS metrics can be used as a core "alignment" strategy.  During this "extended" version of SaaS Talk with the Metric...

Stock-based Compensation (SBC) has been a hallmark of the SaaS and Cloud industry since the early days. Stock Options, Restricted Stock Units, Strike Price, and vesting periods continue to be a key discussion point for potential hires. Today's episode covers how Stock-based compensation impacts Operating Expenses on the Income Statement...and how SBC can impact SaaS metrics. Dave "CAC" Kellog...

B2B SaaS Benchmark reports are popping up like mushrooms - but how do you know if the benchmark report is good, contains valuable insights and how to use the benchmarks to inform your own objectives and SaaS metrics goals?  Dave "CAC" Kellogg and Ray "Growth" Rike take on a topic that is near and dear to their hearts and discuss several key factors that are a tell for a good benchmark report...