The Metrics Brothers (fka SaaS Talk)

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 “Mary Meeker Internet Repor...

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 they mean for business leader...

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 & Run - an old prob...

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 importance of Winning...

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.” In this episode, Dave “C...

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 and Ray discuss during th...

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:

•  The Cloud 100 $1,117 bill...

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
• ...

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 outperfor...

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 -...

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 disc...

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 Gigaw...

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 com...

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...

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
• Week...

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) Retention Rate Calculation (13...

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. 

Topics include:

• Funnel...

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 including:

• Ben Murray, The Sa...

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 episode of SaaS Talk with the ...