Contrary

Today we are excited to announce Contrary’s investment in Leland's $12M Series A. We’ve had conviction in John Koelliker ever since he was a founding VP at Contrary back in 2016, and that conviction has been vindicated. In just three years, Leland has developed into an incredibly efficient, cash-flow-positive business that is helping make the world’s expertise more accessible. Congrats to John and the whole Leland team. They’re hiring now – more details below:

Announcing Leland's $12M Series A led by Forerunner! Forerunner has an incredible track record of backing iconic consumer brands and marketplaces like Warby Parker, Chime, Glossier, Inc., ŌURA, Faire, Zola, The Expert, and others. We couldn't be more excited to welcome Eurie Kim to the board and partner with her and Forerunner to take Leland to the next level. Also participating in the round are GSV Ventures, inVest Ventures, and our early investors like FJ Labs, Contrary, Peterson Ventures, and GSBackers. We’re also proud that dozens of Leland coaches and customers participated, in addition to leading marketplace founders, operators, and angels from companies like Instacart, Handshake, LinkedIn, Pluralsight, Mercado Libre, and others. With this fresh capital and support, we're well positioned to accelerate our vision of unlocking human potential by making the world's expertise more accessible. In the past year alone, our coaches have helped hundreds of thousands of people in over 70 countries break into top schools or companies, develop new skills, prepare for interviews or tests, and pursue goals across dozens of unique categories. While a fundraise is never a destination, it certainly represents an opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made and thank the community who has helped us get this far. So, THANK YOU! We know the biggest opportunity is ahead of us, and we’re excited to be building a world-class team to go after it. If you want to join us, we're hiring. if you want to partner with us, shoot me a DM. And if you are interested in working with a coach or coaching the next generation, we'd love to have you in our community. Big thank you to Deborah Quazzo, Ben Capell, Kyle Harrison, Eric Tarczynski, Jason Bornstein, Lauri J. Moore, Karen Chi, Glenn Borok, Jeff Weinstein, Jose Marin, Jen Yang-Wong, Jason Chen, Taylor Jones, ilana stern, Aaron Skonnard, Gary Williams, Martin Rudigier, and the many others who have made this possible through your support! Here's to the next chapter of helping people reach their most ambitious goals. (TechCrunch coverage in comments)

📣 Today, we are thrilled to announce Leland's $12M Series A led by Forerunner! Also participating in the round are GSV Ventures and inVest Ventures, alongside existing Leland investors: FJ Labs, Contrary, Peterson Ventures, and GSBackers. We are very proud that dozens of Leland coaches and customers also chose to participate in the round, in addition to leading marketplace founders, operators, and angels from companies like Instacart, Handshake, LinkedIn, Pluralsight, and Mercado Libre. With this fresh capital and support, we’re positioned to realize our vision of unlocking human potential by making the world’s expertise more accessible. 🚀 So, what’s next? 👉 Launching and growing new categories 👉 Scaling our partnership program 👉 Pursuing new enterprise opportunities 👉 Building out our courses and content experience 👉 Investing in developing a more refined, world-class product 👉…and hiring! Come join our team. Thank you to our exceptional customers, coaches, investors, and supporters. This community is everything, and we would not be here without you. Since our inception, we’ve helped hundreds of thousands of individuals reach their most ambitious goals — here’s to the next, even bigger, chapter. 🎉 💥 You can read more about our vision, progress, and plans for the future by clicking on the links below.

What does the AI landscape look like for “non-AI” companies? “Artificial intelligence” has received the lion’s share of venture investors’ attention and capital since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Check out the following stats: - 75% of the startups in YCombinator’s Summer 2024 cohort (156 out of 208) were working on AI-related products. - In Q2 2024, 49% of all venture capital went to artificial intelligence and machine learning startups, up from 29% in Q2 2022. - In 2020, the median pre-money valuation for early-stage AI, SaaS, and fintech companies was $25 million, $27 million, and $28 million, respectively. In 2024, those figures are $70 million, $46 million, and $50 million. - OpenAI, which was unprofitable and on pace to generate $4 billion in annual revenue, was able to raise new capital at a $157 billion valuation in October 2024 (implying a 39x revenue multiple). But even though the spotlight is on model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and AI-native companies like Perplexity or Descript, the number of “non-AI” companies that will be impacted by artificial intelligence far outnumber companies whose core business is AI-focused. We collectively refer to the impact of artificial intelligence on these other companies as “the long tail of AI.” The ways that companies within this long tail have used AI are as diverse as the companies themselves. For example, did you know that Walmart, a $670 billion low-cost retailer, has developed its own AI models to improve the customer shopping experience? Or that Boston Consulting Group gave all of its employees access to ChatGPT after seeing that the chatbot gave consultants a 40% performance boost on creative tasks? Today we published a new deep dive on “the Long Tail of AI” to explore how non-AI companies are integrating artificial intelligence. It shares lessons and examples of how 14 companies are integrating AI, from retail giant Walmart to private browser startup Brave. Check out the full deep dive in the comment below by Jack Raines and Rohan Gupta.

Congratulations to Sahitya S. and the entire Endeavor team on their $7M seed round led by Craft Ventures. We’re thrilled to have led their pre-seed alongside our friends at BoxGroup and we’re excited to continue supporting them as they build AI to revitalize American manufacturing. Best of all, Sahitya was a Venture Partner at Penn for many years, and we absolutely love to back our own! Read our full blog post linked below.

From Day 1, Contrary's mission has been to identify and invest in the world's most exceptional people. It’s enabled us to be early backers of companies like Zepto, Ramp, Hallow, Anduril, and many others. Our student Venture Partners are a key part of this process, helping us discover the next generation of founders at universities across the US and Canada. With over 1,700 applications, this year was by far our most competitive and selective year yet. From that pool, we are thrilled to welcome 21 new Venture Partners to the Contrary family! This year’s class includes: - 10 current and former founders, backed by YC, HF0, AI Grant, and more - Product builders with apps that have served 10M+ users - Hackathon winners, Olympiad gold medalists, podcast hosts, and competitive freestyle skiers - Published researchers, engineering managers, and former investors - Builders of rockets, humanoid robots, chariots, and flamethrowers In addition, each year we invite one outstanding Venture Partner to join the HQ team as our Chief of Staff. This year, we’re excited to announce that Cooper Saye from the University of Michigan has stepped into the role. Welcome Cooper, and congrats to our newest VPs!

The world is losing about half a percent of arable land per year. If nothing changes, lower crop yields and crop failures may become increasingly common. As one climate investor put it, agriculture will be infeasible in 80 years because of a lack of good soil. Today's Foundations & Frontiers essay evaluates the causes of soil erosion and what's to be done about it.

Wind energy today supplies over 2,000 TWh of electricity, accounting for 7.8% of global energy production. However, wind power continues posing challenges to grid operators as the share of electricity generated by the intermittent resource grows. Wind power has traditionally been a boom-and-bust business — booming in times when energy prices soar, and going bust they fall. As alternatives like solar experience plummeting production costs, it’s an open question as to what its role will be in the global production of energy over the long term. Today's Foundation & Frontiers essay examines the role wind energy may play in the energy mix of the future.

In our latest deep dive, we dig into the story of the company that may be coming for Nvidia's crown. Here's the story of Cerebras Systems's attempt to enable bigger and better AI... This 12K+ word profile of Cerebras unpacks some key characteristics of the company's attempt to build hardware in an AI-centric way: 🧠 Cerebras' AI chips are 56x larger in size & contain 50x more transistors than an Nvidia GPU. 🕔 Cerebras' systems can train a Llama2-70B model from scratch in < 1 day. 🖥️ A Cerebras cluster of 48 CS-3s exceeds the performance of the U.S. Frontier (the world's fastest supercomputer). ⚡ Cerebras' inference is the fastest in the industry, running Llama3.1 8B at 1,800+ tokens! Across 800+ references and 40+ hours of research, Maxx Yung dives into the bull and bear case of Cerebras' business as they tackle the semiconductor space with AI at the core. https://lnkd.in/d_A597Ub

After 41 hours of researching & writing my 1st memo for Contrary Research on Cerebras Systems, it is now officially published! At 12,000+ words with 800+ reference links, it is the most detailed memo EVER published by Contrary 🤯 As a semiconductor researcher, I chose to write about Cerebras – an AI chip company that's gunning for NVIDIA. Here's some INSANE feats accomplished by Cerebras that blew my mind: 🧠 Cerebras' AI chips are 56x larger in size & contain 50x more transistors than an Nvidia GPU. 🕔 Cerebras' systems can train a Llama2-70B model from scratch in < 1 day. 🖥️ A Cerebras cluster of 48 CS-3s exceeds the performance of the U.S. Frontier (the world's fastest supercomputer). ⚡ Cerebras' inference is the fastest in the industry, running Llama3.1 8B at 1,800+ tokens/s! If that sounds insane, here's the full memo that dives into the narrative around Andrew Feldman and his company: https://lnkd.in/e5QRH6hs Thanks to the Contrary Research team (especially Sachin Maini and Kyle Harrison) for giving me this incredible opportunity to write and publish this memo and to Patrick Hulce for helping me understand ML better as a non-ML scrub. #MachineLearning #AI #Supercomputing