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 Public Company Grindscores
• Why a high PBO and high WLB scores the same as a low PBO and an average WLB (flaws of the metric)

This episode covers a metric\ that most software companies are not using - and the conversation may put a light on some of the reasons why?!

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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 opportunity to outperform horizontal AI companies in the early days
• The importance of building a structured Proof of Concept or Pilot program into your customer acquisition process
• The top 5 predictions for the AI market in 2026
• Top 10 takeaways for Native-AI founders and executive leaders

The top five predictions from the report for AI in 2026 include:

1. The browser will emerge as a dominant interface for agentic AI
2. 2026 will be the year of generative video
3. Evaluations and data lineage will become a critical catalyst for AI product development
4. A new AI-native social media giant could emerge
5. The incumbents strike back as AI M&A heats up

For the best listening experience, open the Bessemer Venture Partners State of AI 2025 report and follow along as Dave and Ray discuss the highlights.

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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)
• Total Capital Raised (2010 - 1H2025)
• Median sizes by round (2010 - 1H2025)
• Valuations (2010 - 1H2025)
• Valuation multiples (2010 - 1H2025)
• Large Language Model valuations vs AI Coding Assistant Valuations
• Summary of the AI funding environment

You can follow along to Dave and Ray's conversation by clicking the below link to the report

Aventis AI Valuation Multiples Report

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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:

Topics that CAC and Growth discuss during this episode includes:

• Gross Margin benchmarks for AI products versus SaaS platforms
• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for SaaS products
• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for AI products
• General Rules for COGS vs OPEX categorization
• Increasing AI product Gross Margins with scale
• The cascading reality of AI investments and build-outs

If you are considering investing capital and resources into an AI product, be it in an AI-Native product or as an add-on to a legacy SaaS platform, this conversation between CAC and Growth provides multiple insights and considerations for many Cost of Goods Sold components for AI products vis-à-vis traditional SaaS products.

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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 Parameters
• Watts and Gigawatts = Power
• Gigawatt/hours = Energy
• First multi-GW data center named Prometheus
• Why data center size is now being compared to the city of Manhattan

AI is changing the world as we know it - and the Metrics Brothers are diving into this trend metric by metric!

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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 hypergrowth AI-Native companies compare to some of the fastest growing traditional SaaS companies including DocuSign, Atlassian, Box, HashiCorp, Zoom and Slack.

The Metrics Brothers then dive a little deeper into the details of the "months to $100M" to discuss WHEN does that clock begin to tick, at launch or at $1M ARR? They then go beyond just AI and discuss how Product-Led Growth was once viewed as a key to accelerating growth to $100M and where the reality meets the expectations.

Lastly, CAC and Growth discuss one example of a fast growing AI company that could not quite sustain the early growth trajectory that was greatly helped by the hype and the hope of AI - a cautionary tale for other high flyers or just an interesting data point?

Take a listen to this episode if you are involved, interested or evaluating how growth rate expectations for software companies in the new era of software!!!

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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 deal, they also discuss the broader impact to the future of acquisitions across the software industry. Topics discussed include:

• The timeline of the Google, Windsurf and now Cognition deal
• Overview of the traditional tech acqui-hire deal structure
• Discussion on how the new "reverse acquihire" is different
• Comparing professional athlete's top salaries to top AI and software talent in reverse acqui-hires
• WHY the use of the new reverse acqui-hires happen and why it will probably continue

If you enjoy going beyond the traditional headlines of industry acquisitions and thinking about the underlying reason why tech acquisition deal structures are evolving and changing - this discussion on the Google-Windsurf deal provides great content to go beyond what and think about the why!!!

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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 how they are calculated
• Weekly User Retention

Dave and Ray take us on a stroll down "metrics memory lane" as they discuss the early days of the internet, and some of the metrics that were used in the early days, that evolved and changed as the use of the internet began to mature - some of those metrics included:

• Internet Hosts
• Hits
• Page Views
• Eyeballs

Lastly, the term Occam's Razor was introduced to discuss why sometimes the simplest metrics that require the lowest number of assumptions is a good place to start when initially measuring new things.

The Metrics Brothers are excited to expand their metrics-centric analysis and insights into the rapidly evolving world of AI, and specifically AI software and AI metrics!

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