Contrary Research Rundown #3
Research Rundown
Happy Saturday! Let's dive into the latest from Contrary Research!
As fun as sharing company stories online can be, we're also excited by the prospect of getting together to share company stories in person. This week, Contrary announced the launch of Contrary NYC. Our goal with the space is to build a creative workspace and events hub for the city’s top builders and technologists. So where does Contrary Research come in? We're excited to kick off a Founder Series in the NYC space over the next few months where founders of great companies can share their stories in person. Interested in attending? Make sure to follow us on Twitter to hear about any upcoming events. If you're a builder in New York? Be sure to apply to become a member of the space.
In July 2022, Contrary held a retreat for our 500+ person community where we had the chance to hear from Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit. As company stories evolve there is always exciting opportunities to learn something new that may feel like it's in plain sight. Reddit is a company that, while a main staple of the online experience for a broad swath of people, could become increasingly indicative of how social media is changing. We laid out the story in a thread this week.
Finally, we've had an overwhelming response from folks excited to work with Contrary Research as Research Fellows. We laid out some of the benefits in a thread this week including networking with top VCs, learning more about exceptional private companies, and getting access to best-in-class research resources. If you're interested in joining the team and helping to tell the stories of great companies, be sure to apply! You can also learn more about the program below!
People's interests this week were spread across a broad set of categories including machine learning, people management, and managing solar projects. See our full collection of reports here.
Aurora Solar: Aurora helps automate the design and proposal process for solar projects in order to reduce costs and increase sales. Read the full piece here.
Lattice: Lattice is a people success platform aiming to make work meaningful and create winning cultures. Read the full piece here.
Hugging Face: Hugging Face is an open-source hosting platform for natural language processing (NLP) and other machine learning (ML) domains. Recently highlighted by Google's CEO. Read the full piece here.
Jacob Effron, an investor at Redpoint, laid out the ways the $230B life sciences R&D industry is evolving. As progress has accelerated in areas like CRISPR and gene therapies, there's an emerging tech stack to support labs in their work. You can see Jacob's deep dive on the broader R&D space alongside in-depth resources and our light memo on Benchling, one of the players in this space, here.
The larger a company's aspirations become, the more they find themselves competing for similar markets. That's a similar idea we explored in our Databricks vs. Snowflake deep dive. Somewhere else that is starting to play out is in app building. Will collaboration platforms like Airtable and no-code tooling platforms like Retool increasingly go head-to-head? Jimmy Chan, the CEO of Dropbase, explores the world of app-builders and tries to answer those questions.
In the midst of a market downturn, startups start to worry that larger companies will shrink their overall technology budgets. The team at Battery Ventures tackled that question in a survey of technology decision makers in larger companies, and the results were positive! "35% of survey respondents expected their overall tech budgets to stay flat in 2022, while a surprising 54% expected their tech budgets to increase."
Figma's CEO Dylan Field sat down with Casey Newton to talk about the future of creative software, and the role generative AI could play in creating digital assets. Will creative AI like DALL-E replace human creators? Here's Field's take: "I feel a deep sense of responsibility to figure out the best way for creatives to utilize [AI] productively. And for it to be a collaboration between AI and humans."
Building a "fantasy portfolio" of private companies that you're fascinated by can go hand-in-hand with the vision we have for Contrary Research: find and understand the most interesting private companies. Patrick O'Shaughnessy asked a thought-provoking question on Twitter: "If you could own shares in a single private company at a "fair" price, what company would you pick?" The responses in that thread are eye-opening, and it's a question that every fan of private tech companies probably think about a lot.
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!