Contrary Research Rundown #56
Generative AI's impact on knowledge communities, plus new memos on Anthropic, Weblow, and more
Research Rundown
This week on Contrary Research Radio, we sat down with Prashanth Chandrasekar, the CEO of Stack Overflow, to unpack the implications of generative AI on communities that have been driven by user-generated content (UGC).
In the early days of online publishing the internet largely reflected the traditional publishing landscape. Big publications were the only ones willing to do the work to rack servers and host content. That changed quickly in a way that defined the internet. Today, 80%+ of the content online is user-generated.
That is particularly true for communities whose entire existence is owed to a loyal base of contributors—Wikipedia, Reddit, and (obviously) Stack Overflow. But generative AI is targeted directly at that type of UGC. While some estimates believe ~10% of content online could be generated by AI as soon as 2025, those estimates skyrocket to 99% by 2030.
A knowledge community, like Stack Overflow, has always been dependent on the balance of contributors to its site who have helped answer millions of questions. In this episode, we dig in with Prashanth to understand how he’s responding in the face of generative AI, and why he’s supporting companies like Reddit in pushing to charge AI companies for access to this type of user-generated data.
To hear the full episode, you can check it out here, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Anthropic is an AI company emphasizing safety and accountability in its solutions. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Engineering Manager, Inference - SF (Hybrid)
Research Scientist - SF / London (Hybrid)
Webflow is an intuitive visual editor platform and hosting platform that allows users to design, build, and launch professional and custom websites quickly and easily, saving companies time and developer resources. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Backend Engineer, Ecosystem - SF, Ontario / BC (Remote)
Corporate Development Manager - SF, Ontario / BC (Remote)
Gusto sells cloud-based payroll software for SMBs to manage all their payroll operations. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Data Scientist, Product Analytics - Denver
Software Engineering Lead - Istanbul
DataRobot enables enterprises to build, deploy, monitor and manage machine learning models at scale. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Staff Deep Learning Engineer - Massachusetts, California (Remote)
Principal Product Manager, Growth - DC, Massachusetts (Remote)
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Stealth AI Startup | Remote - Founding Engineer
WorkOS | US Timezones (Remote) - Ex-Founder
Hex | US Timezones (Remote) - Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Startup shutdowns continue to rise. According to data from Carta, Q3 ‘23 saw 212 VC-backed startups shutdown, up from just 67 in Q3 ‘21.
Nikil Viswanathan, the CEO of Alchemy, sat down with Emma Casey to unpack his experience building Alchemy into a $10B business. To learn more about Alchemy, check out our memo.
Sacra published a new report entitled “Anduril: the $342M/year Nintendo of American dynamism.” To learn more about Anduril, you can also check out our memo.
This week, at the AI Engineer conference in San Francisco, GitHub announced that its Copilot had become one of the first generative AI products to reach $100M ARR.
Speaking of GitHub Copilot, there was some drama on Twitter about the underlying economics of the product. Some sources indicated that while GitHub charged $10 per month, that it costs Microsoft $20 per user per month. However, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said this was false.
Databricks CEO, Ali Ghodsi, shared a report comparing Databricks vs. Snowflake and indicated that while every company markets that it can do everything, its very difficult to validate open source benchmarks. To learn more about Databricks, check out our memo on the company, and our deep dive into the dynamics between Databricks and Snowflake.
Atlassian announced the acquisition of Loom for $975M, having previously raised at a $1.5B valuation. The team at EquityZen shared a breakdown of the company’s funding rounds and likely returns for its investors. The company shared it had 25M users, and had helped record 1.5B minutes. To learn more about Loom, check out our memo.
Maersk, a $30B Danish logistics company, announced the addition of 300+ SpaceX Starlink connections to its storage container fleet. To learn more about SpaceX and Starlink, check out our memo.
Air Street Capital published its annual State of AI Report. The 160+ page slide deck spreads across topics from the latest technological breakthroughs, the rapidly evolving debate around AI safety, and more.
Lenny Ratchitsky published a new podcast with Karri Saarinen, the co-founder and CEO of Linear, unpacking the company’s approach to taste-making and building opinionated software. To learn more about Linear, check out our memo.