Research Radio

Research Radio

By ContraryBusiness
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Research Radio episodes

  • Lithic: Making Cards Simpler

    Lithic, founded in 2014 as Privacy.com, provides an API platform for building card issuing and processing solutions. It simplifies the process of card issuing, authorization, and transaction processing for startups and fintechs of all sizes.

    Lithic co-founder and CEO Bo Jiang joined Research Radio to talk about how payment and card processing works, where the company fits in the fintech stack, and what the future of payments looks like.

    Read our full memo on Lithic.

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    Legal: https://contrary.com/legal

    41 min
  • Lucid: The $3B Visual Collaboration Platform

    Lucid makes visual productivity and collaboration tools like Lucidchart and Lucidspark, helping teams brainstorm, and build diagrams and data visualizations.

    It has become a titan of visual collaboration, serving 60 million users and generating over $100 million of annual revenue. Lucid was last valued at $3 billion.

    Lucid CEO Dave Grow joined Research Radio to talk about Lucid, keeping growth strong after the COVID remote work boom, and owning the "idea to reality" workflow.

    ⁠⁠Subscribe⁠⁠ to the Contrary Research newsletter.

    Legal: ⁠⁠https://contrary.com/legal

    42 min
  • Persona: Solving Identity Verification

    Founded in 2018, Persona is an automated identity verification platform which uses machine learning, computer vision, and algorithmic checks to help businesses confirm their users and customers are who they say they are.

    Co-founder and CEO Rick Song joined Research Radio to talk about Persona, physical and online identity, and how he's building the "AWD of identity".

    Read⁠ our full memo on Persona.

    ⁠Subscribe⁠ to the Contrary Research newsletter.

    Legal: ⁠https://contrary.com/legal

    46 min
  • Moveworks: Conversational AI for Enterprise

    With the rise of ChatGPT and other LLM-powered chatbots, there has been a gold rush to get conversational AI into enterprise. Moveworks, founded in 2016, is an enterprise AI co-pilot that helps employees find information, resolve issues, and get help across 100+ business systems. 

    Co-founder and CEO Bhavin Shah joined Research Radio to talk about how Moveworks makes employees more productive, how it overcomes corporate "knowledge silos" and the future of work automation.

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    Legal: https://contrary.com/legal


    46 min
  • How Stack Overflow Is Facing The AI Future

    Stack Overflow has been one of the key parts of the software development universe since it was founded in 2008, and it has developed from a question-and-answer platform to a crucial resource. Whether they're debugging an error, trying to understand a new concept, or optimizing a piece of code, Stack Overflow has long been the first place programmers go to find answers.

    But the rise of AI and LLMs poses an interesting challenge. After all, why go to Stack Overflow for a coding question when you can ask ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot?

    To help us understand how Stack Overflow and its community works, its AI play with OverflowAI, and what it is doing to remain essential for both new and experienced software developers, we're joined by CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar.

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    Legal: ⁠https://contrary.com/legal⁠

    36 min
  • Knowde: Bringing A $5 Trillion Industry Online

    The chemicals industry is one of the world's largest, touching virtually every manufactured good from the phone in your pocket to the car you drive and the food you eat. But despite its size, the industry remains largely offline, and runs on old school sales.

    Knowde is a chemicals marketplace which connects buyers and sellers of chemicals, polymers and ingredients. Founder and CEO Ali Amin-Javaheri joined Contrary Research Radio to talk about Knowde and where it fits in the chemical industry.

    Read our full memo on Knowde.

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    Legal: https://contrary.com/legal

    41 min
  • Common Room: Helping Community Thrive

    Common Room provides unified intelligence across a company's various online communities – from public squares like X/Twitter, to private spaces like Discord and Slack. It helps software companies get actionable insights into their user and developer communities, and assists them in sending those users the right message at the right time.

    Co-founder and CEO Linda Lian joined Kyle Harrison on Contrary Research Radio to talk about the modern brand journey, how communities help with customer acquisition, and how Common Room works.

    Read our research memo on Common Room.

    Subscribe to the Contrary Research newsletter.

    Legal: https://contrary.com/legal

    44 min
  • Hex: Making Data Shareable

    Hex is a collaborative data workspace that allows both technical and non-technical users to analyze, collaborate on, and share their data work. It wants to do for data what Figma did for design.

    Co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel joined Contrary Research Radio to talk about the “insane” ways data scientists share and collaborate, and how Hex is trying to make it better.

    Read our full research memo on Hex.

    ⁠⁠Subscribe⁠⁠ to the Contrary Research newsletter.

    Legal: ⁠https://contrary.com/legal⁠

    39 min
  • AirGarage: Finding Sneaky Big Problems

    As anyone who has tried finding a spot on a busy weekend will tell you: parking can be a nightmare. It's also big business – and it might be an even bigger business than you imagined.

    AirGarage, founded in 2017, is a full-stack parking management platform. It handles everything from payments and enforcement to maintenance and marketing for owners of parking real estate. That means everything from a small parking lot at a church up to a huge multi-storey parking complex in the middle of a major city.

    Co-founder and CEO Jonathon Barkl joined Contrary Research Radio to discuss AirGarage, how it works, and the world of 'sneaky big problems' that exist in the economy for founders to solve.

    ⁠Read⁠ our full research memo on AirGarage.

    ⁠Subscribe⁠ to the Contrary Research newsletter.

    Legal: https://contrary.com/legal

    42 min
  • Cohere: Building AI For Everyone

    It's no secret that the biggest hype in tech is around AI and large language models (LLMs).

    Cohere⁠, founded in 2019, builds general purpose language models and provides access to them through an API. Its goal is to help enterprise leverage the power of LLMs to complete a range of useful tasks. With Cohere, companies can bring natural language processing to their applications without spending big on training models or hiring.

    Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, was credited as a co-author on the influential paper ⁠‘Attention is All You Need’⁠, which established the transformer architecture that drives the world’s most powerful LLMs.

    For our first episode, Aidan joined Contrary Research Radio to talk about Cohere, its place in the AI landscape, and his predictions for the future of LLM development.

    ⁠Read⁠ our full research memo on Cohere.

    ⁠Subscribe⁠ to the Contrary Research newsletter.

    Legal: https://contrary.com/legal

    40 min

About Research Radio

From the publisher's feed

Diving deep on the world's most exciting private tech companies. Join Kyle Harrison, General Partner at Contrary, in conversation with the founders, leaders and thinkers building the future of tech.