Contrary Research Rundown #76

TikTok's Running Down The Clock, plus new memos on Wiz, Stord, and more

Research Rundown

This week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers announced the introduction of a bill to force TikTok parent company, ByteDance, to divest TikTok in order to continue operating in the US. Pirate Wires described the series of ups and downs the app has experienced over the last few years.

Chinese law requires the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) be able to access any customer data from Chinese companies, which led to an investigation in 2019 and a class-action lawsuit in 2020, leading to an executive order pushing for the ban of TikTok, though that ultimately failed. Next, in 2021, TikTok executives testified the company didn’t share data with the CCP before, in 2022, leaked internal audio at ByteDance revealed employees in China accessed confidential American user data.

TikTok’s most recent attempt to assuage concerns in the U.S. was the creation of Project Texas, “a $1.5 billion initiative to ‘make every American on TikTok feel safe’ by ensuring their data was stored on US-based servers operated by Oracle, an Austin-based company… Yet shortly after the hearing, Pirate Wires found a number of “limited exceptions” clauses in Project Texas allowing ByteDance employees to access American user data.”

Between an estimated ~$7 billion in 2024 revenue, and a rapidly expanding commerce operation, TikTok represents a formidable business. The ban of a company that size, with over 100 million users, can feel untenable. But that’s before you remember that China’s “Great Firewall” has blocked US social media companies for years, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and more.

Destabilizing geopolitical conditions will continue to shape the technology market. And increasingly, that line will be drawn across different value systems. For example, while US companies are deploying significant effort to enforce policies like GDPR and CCPA, China has built a mass surveillance state and social credit score based on that surveillance.

From AI and robotics to commerce and logistics, there will be an increasing divide between Chinese and US operations. While the economic motivation to engage with the Chinese market kept the US open-minded for decades, that is changing. In one 2023 survey, 46% of Americas said they believe “US leaders are not paying enough attention to the issue of US competition with China.” The TikTok divestiture may be a high profile divide, but it is unlikely to be the last.

Stord is a company that provides a cloud supply chain solution that combines supply chain management technology and “port-to-porch” 3PL logistics. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:

• Data Architect - Atlanta, GA, Remote

• Parcel Analyst - Atlanta, GA

Whatnot, which launched in December 2019, is a livestream shopping marketplace. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:

• Software Engineering Intern, Summer 2024 - Remote

• Data Scientist - San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, Phoenix, AZ, Seattle, WA, Denver, CO

Wiz offers a suite of cloud security solutions that allow security teams to manage their cloud infrastructure within a single platform. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:

• AI Expert Backend Engineer - Tel Aviv

• Azure Cloud Partner Sales Manager: Americas - USA Remote

Check out some standout roles from this week.

• Vannevar Labs | Remote - Senior Full Stack Engineer, Senior Software Engineer - Backend, Senior Backend Engineer - Machine Learning

• Finni Health | Remote US/Canada - Senior Full-Stack Software Developer, Senior Full-Stack Software Developer (Product Leaning)

• Bunkerhill | Remote - Machine Learning Engineer, Full-Stack Software Engineer, Software Engineer

• Speaking of TikTok, Lenny Rachitsky interviewed the head of TikTok’s monetization product strategy describing the company’s product philosophy.

• Anthropic released Claude 3 Opus, which the company claims can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini 1 Ultra.

• Snowflake and Databricks have been on a collision course for years, though Databricks has been uniquely positioned for the AI boom. Sridhar Ramaswamy, Snowflake’s new CEO, is racing to bridge that gap with partnerships like Mistral.

• Speaking of Databricks, the company announced that in its most recent fiscal year, the company had generated $1.6 billion in revenue, growing 50% year-over-year. In addition, the company indicated an IPO wasn’t in the near term.

• Monzo Bank has raised a new round of funding at a $5 billion valuation as the digital bank positions itself to re-enter the US after withdrawing its application for a US banking license in 2021. For more on the banking ecosystem, check out our deep dive.

• After a rare discovery of a copper deposit in Zambia, KoBold Metals continues to outline the confidence it has in its process for leveraging AI to identify rare mineral deposits.

• Zapier announced the launch of Zapier Central, a platform to “create bots purely through natural language and equip them with access to data and knowledge from a spreadsheet, Google Doc, or Notion.”

• A former Tesla scientist has announced they’re joining Hugging Face to work on an “ambitious open robotics project,” marking the AI companies expansion into hardware.

• Bird (fka MessageBird) is the latest company to announce meaningful layoffs as the result of leveraging AI, rather than a broader macroeconomic struggle. The company indicated that AI had enabled it to layoff 20% of the company.