Finding information and data on private companies is hard. Our mission at Contrary Research is to open-source that data and curate all the best knowledge on private markets. This week, we shared some of the best resources that we utilize for researching private companies. See the full list of resources here.
Some of the challenges in understanding private companies comes from the intricacies of a business model. Take, for example, The Boring Company. The business operates with massive long-term government contracts, and has an intricate web of financing options from different government entities and interested parties. You can see our full thread on The Boring Company.
Another aspect of understanding the markets that private companies play in is understanding the trends that they're riding. The IDC estimates over 750M new cloud-native apps will be created by 2025. Over the past five years, we’ve seen the proliferation of SaaS tools within the enterprise. We shared our memo on Vendr which is a company that helps SMBs and enterprise track and manage their SaaS spending. Helping companies to manage that growing wave of applications is going to be increasingly important.
Finally, we have to understand the defensibility of private companies. Sometimes, you can look for similar business models to appreciate whether or not a particular private company actually has a competitive moat. We can look at persona-specific systems of record, like GitHub or Atlassian's Jira for developers as a comparable example for one of our recent memos. Products like Jira are incredibly sticky because they make it easier for engineers to manage software development cycles. Productboard wants to be the system of record for product managers by providing a software platform that helps with product management. See our memo on Productboard
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