Contrary Research Rundown #4
Research Rundown
One of the more compelling parts of researching companies comes from digging into a theme. You'll see compelling trends start to emerge (i.e. building the metaverse, the future of generative AI) and then you get to think about which companies will be most well positioned to play in that trend. When you're thinking about AI: who will be the biggest part of that story? Google? OpenAI? Nvidia?
This week we dug into Discord's business, and how they're positioned to build the metaverse compared to companies like Meta or Roblox. Will the center of gravity in the metaverse revolve around game building? Communication? Social connections? Exploring a theme gives you a chance to build a framework around how things will play out.
That kind of trend exploration is just as relevant to some of the companies we're excited to share new memos on today. When you think about the ever-increasing importance of managing data for every company, who is best positioned to take advantage of that? We've explored that with Databricks and Snowflake, but today we're going to explore another name riding that wave. Data, cybersecurity, competitive labor markets -- let's dig into some trends!
Some new memos just dropped! We're excited to share some explorations of companies across the modern data stack, taking on endpoint security, and adding transparency to employee compensation.
Pave: a compensation management software company that digitizes the way in which companies make compensation decisions. Their platform is a real-time database for planning, communicating, and benchmarking employee compensation. Read the full memo here.
Cybereason: an endpoint prevention, detection, and incident response solution. Cybereason was built to detect any suspicious activities, quarantine compromised users from the network, and help in conducting a fast, detailed and thorough breach investigation. Read the full memo here.
dbt Labs: As data continues to be a massive part of every business there is more need to transform large volumes of raw data into valuable insights. dbt Labs has a growing community of users built around an open-source tool capable of improving the data team experience. Read the full memo here.
Benn Stancil, the founder of Mode Analytics, has written a series of "How x Will Fail" on different companies within the data stack. He digs in to explore exceptional companies, and how their failure might come about. He's touched on companies like Snowflake, and Fivetran before. This week he released a new breakdown (relevant to one our newest memos): dbt Labs.
Ram Parameswaran, and the team at Octahedron put out a quarterly review called "A Few Things We Learned," reviewing the insights they're gaining as a crossover investor, coming from conversations across public and private companies. They point to what companies are seeing in digital advertising, as well as the introduction of ads across media platforms, and a lot more. All of these often have implications for private companies operating in these same business models.
In 2020, Eoghan McCabe, the CEO and Founder of Intercom, decided to step down and pursue other opportunities. In the interim, the chat space has heated up with companies like Ada Support and Zowie building chatbots, or companies like Cohere building AI models to more intelligently automate those conversations. This week, McCabe announced that he's rejoined Intercom as CEO. His vision for Intercom? Taking on Zendesk.
A spot of Twitter bot gossip; recently, the former AI director of research at Tesla started following Alex Wang, the CEO of Scale AI. The way AI is evolving, its including every company more meaningfully, and the field has a certain set of companies and experts who are always worth keeping an eye on.
Finally, while we happen to know Tegus as one of our favorite research resources, they happen to also be a pretty interesting business themselves. Packy McCormick dug into their business and the unique way they've built their GTM as they attempt to build a digital-native Bloomberg Terminal.
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!