Looking back at the SaaS wave that dominated the late 2010s, I've been thinking about how different the tech stocks to invest in 2020 conversation was compared to today. Back then, everyone was obsessed with one thing: software as a service. It wasn't hype either. The whole industry was shifting away from legacy players and toward these lean, fast-growing companies that could deliver software through the cloud.

The thing that made SaaS so compelling wasn't just the growth rates, though those were wild. It was the unit economics. These companies had this metric called net dollar retention that basically showed how much revenue they were keeping and expanding from existing customers. That's the dream metric for any subscription business.

I remember Datadog being the expensive darling of the bunch. Trading at 35x sales sounds insane now, but the company was growing revenue 88% quarter over quarter with 76% gross margins. The real kicker was that 130% net retention rate. That's not just keeping customers, that's customers spending more money with you year after year.

Then there was MongoDB, which was doing something clever. While Oracle owned the traditional database world, Mongo was capturing all the messy, unstructured data that spreadsheets couldn't handle. That's actually most of the world's data. Their Atlas cloud product alone was running at a 185% growth rate. And it was the cheapest of the bunch at 19x sales.

Shopify was wild in a different way. This was the company that actually beat Amazon at something. Amazon literally gave up trying to compete in the merchant software space and left the field to Shopify. By 2020, they had hit a million customers. The market opportunity was massive, and they were still in early innings.

Smartsheet represented this broader shift toward collaboration software. The whole premise was elegant: you didn't need everyone to be a subscriber to collaborate. You could try it, use it with others, and then the adoption would naturally spread through organizations. 134% net retention rate, 54% revenue growth. They were basically creating a new category.

Zoom was the growth monster. 85% revenue growth, 83% gross margins, and they were actually profitable while doing it. They were taking share from Cisco and Microsoft in a market that had been broken for years. The joke was always that videoconferencing was terrible until Zoom made it actually work.

Looking at that list of tech stocks to invest in 2020, what strikes me now is how many of those bets actually paid off. The SaaS thesis was real. These weren't hype plays, they were companies solving real problems at scale. The net retention rates, the growth rates, the market opportunities, all of it checked out.

If you're curious about how some of these tech stocks to invest in 2020 actually performed, most of them became major players in their respective markets. It's a good reminder that sometimes the boring business metrics are actually the most important ones. When you see a company keeping 130% of its revenue from existing customers while growing 85% year over year, that's not luck. That's a real business with real moats.