Contrary Research

Back in September I announced the launch of a new project I had been building: Contrary Research. This past week, less than 6 months in, we hit a big milestone! We launched our 100th memo. We’ve written about companies like OpenAI, Ramp, Hugging Face, Anduril and a ton more. You can see all of our reports here.
We also produce a number of deep dives where we dive into a specific category. Thus far we’ve gone deep on how Snowflake and Databricks will increasingly go head to head, how design companies like Figma and Canva are more important than just making simple logos and presentations, and how cybersecurity is evolving rapidly whether it’s endpoints, cloud security (which we just published this week), or identity (coming in the next few months.)
In addition to co-authoring our recent piece on cloud security, I’ve spent a lot of time pouring my heart and soul into building our content library at Contrary Research. If you’re a fan of my writing on Substack, and you’re intrigued by the names and topics I’ve mentioned above, I’d love to have you subscribe below to get our weekly newsletter from Contrary Research.
Each week we share a couple of different things:
- A breakdown of an interesting topic touching private companies. In the past we’ve covered semiconductors, aerospace & defense tech, company building, and more
- 5 new memos every week on different private tech companies
- A rundown of the most interesting research, analysis, and commentary that we’ve been reading
- The latest events from Contrary Research (including an upcoming webinar on Building Customer Love with panelists from Sourcegraph, Vercel, and HashiCorp)

Either way, you can still expect a weekly post from me on the art and science of building and investing in tech companies. But would love to share our work with you from Contrary Research as well!
Referenced in
- 20 Minute VC note
- 2023 In Books essay
- 2024 in Books essay
- 300 Pages on Anduril: Inside Modern Warfare note
- A Latticework of Knowledge essay
- An Interview With Replit Founder Amjad Masad note
- Back To The Grass essay
- Backing Bold Founders from Seed to Scale note
- Capital Inferno Heaven note
- Colossus note
- Contrary GP on Talent & Research-Driven Investing note
- Equity Research note
- Finding Product-Market Fit as a Venture Firm note
- Foundations & Frontiers essay
- Funding the Future note
- Having a Conversation With Yourself: 2022 essay
- Historical Futurism (Essay) essay
- How To Avoid a Climate Disaster book
- Intel, Chips, and America's Future note
- Investing 101 essay
- Investing in People Years Before They Start Companies note
- Investing in People, Talent Vortexes, Writing, & Tradition vs Progress note
- Knowledge Economy note
- Nadia Eghbal note
- Newspeak note
- Open-Source Knowledge essay
- Read Old Books essay
- Stratechery note
- TBPN — Tuesday, August 5th note
- Techno-Optimism, Talent Vortexes, & Writing “Investing 101” note
- The Anduril Thesis essay
- The Anduril Thesis (Book) book
- The Centralization of Power in AI note
- The Cogsec Chronicles essay
- The Openness of AI essay
- The Power Law: Venture Capital & the Making of the New Future book
- The Scramble Landscape essay
- The Wrath of Reading & Writing essay
- Unbundling note
- VC Contagion: Is Venture Capital Killing Itself? note
- VC: An American History book
- Venture Capital, Mormonism, and Driving Your Own Life note