Contrary Research Rundown #58
Battle of the data titans heats up, plus new memos on Midjourney and Hadrian
Research Rundown
In 2006 people started saying data is the new oil. Little did they know things were just getting started. The average enterprise is managing 347 TB of data. Globally, the volume of data is doubling every two years. While everyone is foaming at the mouth over the AI revolution, a number of companies are focused on the building block of that revolution — data.
In September 2022, we published a deep dive comparing Snowflake and Databricks, and how these two companies have approached the data landscape from very different angles, but are increasingly in each others cross-hairs. Databricks, expanding from an initial focus on data science, and Snowflake from the data warehouse.
Just this week, Snowflake announced the acquisition of Ponder, a Python platform, which increases Snowflake users’ data science capabilities. Meanwhile, Databricks announced the acquisition of Arcion, a data tool that allows users “to provide native solutions to ingest data from various databases and SaaS applications into the Databricks Lakehouse Platform.”
The data platform goes deeper into data science; the data science platform gets a more robust data platform. Each of these companies are increasingly vying to become the center of the data universe for each of their customers. Upon the foundation of data infrastructure, that enables both companies to dive deeper into the AI revolution.
Databricks and Snowflake have acquired 6 and 10 companies respectively. While Snowflake’s largest acquisition was $800 million for Streamlit, the data-based app builder, Databricks $1.3 billion acquisition of MosaicML is the largest across both companies. That acquisition sets the stage for the next big wave in enterprise data: enabling in-production generative AI models built on a company’s proprietary data engine.
Each of these data titans are battling it out. The question now is who will come out on top?
As the need for imagery online increases, Midjourney could offer a cheaper and more customized alternative to stock photography and reduce time spent on the brainstorming phase for contractors, game designers, and other artists alike. To learn more, read our full memo here.
Midjourney is a small, self-funded, fully-distributed team. If you’re interested in joining them, reach out to their team here.
Hadrian is building factories to accelerate the pace of American manufacturing by delivering parts in less time, and on time. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Public is a fintech company that seeks to capitalize on, and encourage, the expansion of retail investing. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Pave | SF - PM, Senior DevOps Engineer
Select Star | Remote - Sr. PM, Senior Product Designer
In light of Splunk’s $28 billion acquisition by Cisco, the SIEM market is ripe for disruption. Panther CEO, Jack Naglieri, shared a blog post unpacking the transition from monolithic SIEMs to data lakes for security monitoring.
YouTube is working on a new AI tool that would allow users to create videos that use the voices of famous musicians. Meanwhile, several major music labels are trying to figure out voice rights.
After last week saw the shutdown of Convoy, the founders reflected on the failure and how quickly it became apparent that they wouldn’t be able to sell a money-losing business.
Speaking of Convoy, the CEO of FreightWaves shared a breakdown of how the failure happened after speaking to dozens of experts.
In April 2023, X (the artist fka as Twitter) started throttling Substack links. Now, the company is back at it with a new target — Patreon. Creators on Patreon have reported that X is throttling links from the platform.
Ramp CEO shared an update on Ramp Bill Pay, and why it’s become Ramp’s fastest growing service. To learn more about Ramp, check out our memo.
Thrive is leading an investment to buy secondary shares in OpenAI at an $80 billion valuation. To learn more about OpenAI, check out our memo.
Hugging Face recently experienced “regrettable accessibility issues in China.” Supposedly, Chinese users haven’t had access since September of this year. Yet another risk in the centralization of AI, a topic we unpack in our deep dive on the openness of AI.
Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, gave an interview where he claimed he has “plans to crash the AI party.” We unpacked more of the AI extension of the cloud wars in a recent issue of the Research Rundown.