Contrary Research Rundown #10
The World of Cybersecurity + Memos on Notion, The Boring Company, & More
Research Rundown
One key theme that stuck out to us this week was the reality of underestimated markets. The most important trends often come attached to an estimation that turns out to dramatically undersell the opportunity. Security, independent retail, remote work -- these are just some of the categories that have continued to exceed expectations.
In 2017, Gartner estimated the cybersecurity industry was worth $86 billion. However, today security has become almost a $180 billion market growing double-digits. Cybersecurity has become mission-critical across the enterprise, governments, and individuals. This week, we launched our cybersecurity deep dive; you can read more about it below. This is a primer, and the first in a series of reports that covers the cybersecurity market. In the future we'll dig into endpoints and the world of Crowdstrike, and how identity is evolving rapidly. We share a thread sharing the TLDR of this first report. So far, we’ve written about nearly a dozen cybersecurity companies, all of which we summarized in our cybersecurity round-up.
Last weekend, we published a memo on Faire. You can also read our thread on Faire’s story to get the TLDR on how the two-sided marketplace has been successful, and how they grew to $1B+ in GMV in what many considered a small, niche vertical of independent retail.
When you think of categories that felt niche, that was remote work in 2019. Only ~5% of people were working remotely, but during COVID that shot up to 18%. A lot of people expected that number to return to earth post-COVID, but its increasing; expected to hit 22% by 2025. We shared our memo on Loom last week, a video messaging platform that serves over 14 million users and 200,000 businesses. To learn about the business, read our full memo.
Unlocking The Cybersecurity Landscape
Cybersecurity is at the forefront of the technology sector as security continues to become more mission-critical. Multiple CTO survey reports show that security is currently one of the highest priority budget items of technology spend. Cybersecurity threats have evolved over the past decade as technology has become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives.
The companies tackling various parts of the attack surface area are dealing with these constantly evolving attackers and potential threats. This has led to a more complex industry, which can be difficult to grasp for tech investors and startups. Our report aims to demystify the sector by breaking it down into subcategories centered around the fundamental components of any business. Read our full report here.
Instawork: 47 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021, as workers start to look for more flexible options. Instawork is a cloud-based platform for on-demand staffing. Read our memo here.
The Boring Company: As the world readjusts after COVID, traffic is still reaching record highs. The Boring Company, founded by Elon Musk, is a developer of underground transportation infrastructure. Read our memo here.
Notion: The rise of collaborative tools, and low-code / no-code platforms, along with the the popularity of remote work has put platforms like Notion front-and-center in the ways that people work. Read our memo here.
Matt Mochary, and his team of coaches, specialize in helping companies implement the Mochary Method with clients like Notion, Rippling, Robinhood, Coinbase, Reddit, Plaid, Flexport, and Opendoor, as well as partners at Sequoia, YC, Benchmark, and many others. He recently released his entire method, which can be accessed here.
Swyx, Head of Developer Experience at Airbyte, wrote a piece about how AI is eating open-source, including a couple of datapoints on how this is happening today with examples from Github and Hugging face. Here is the link to the article.
a16z published their first list of American Dynamism companies. This is a list of 50 US companies tackling some of the nation’s most pressing challenges using new technologies in the process. Some of the companies include a few we've covered previously in memos, like Anduril, SpaceX, and The Boring Company.
Speaking of SpaceX, the company is reportedly in talks to raise a new round of funding that would value the company at over $150 billion, making them the most valuable private technology company.
Deloitte published their annual report that highlights the most innovative, and fastest-growing public and private companies from all over North America. Over 78% of the list included private companies like dbt Labs, Fivetran, and Discord, many of which we’ve written about in previous memos.
Base10 published a detailed market map of the generative AI space after completing a 6-month research process. Base10’s research report can be found here. Sacra also published an insightful report mapping the total ARR for the key players within generative AI, which demonstrates just how early the category is.
Panagiotis Kriaris had a post outlining his thesis for the future of fintech and how it’s going to be increasingly embedded into software and vertical solutions.
Matt Turck of FirstMark interviewed Cockroach Labs Founder and CEO to talk about the evolution of the database market, the future of serverless, and Cockroach’s GTM strategies. If you missed our memo on the business, see our full memo here.
Contrary Research Fellowship
At Contrary Research our vision is to cover hundreds of companies. We can't do it alone, nor would we want to. We focus on bringing together a variety of different perspectives.
That's why we're opening applications for our Research Fellowship. In the past we've worked with software engineers, product managers, consultants, and more. If you're interested in researching and writing about tech companies, apply here!