Foundations & Frontiers
Defining What It Means To Be a Research-Driven Venture Firm
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In most of my writing, I focus on my thinking about a particular topic. I don’t as often touch on the specific ways I’m putting that into practice. However, all of the dynamics I’m unpacking about the evolving world of venture are a big part of my work at Contrary. I’ve written before about how Contrary is setup as a firm. And in September 2022, I wrote about the launch of Contrary Research.
The goal of building Contrary Research was to build the world’s best starting place to understand any private tech company. Since launching, we’ve covered 300+ different companies, a dozen industries, and built out market maps and podcasts. But what you may not know is that Contrary Research isn’t the only publication from Contrary. In December 2022, we launched Foundations & Frontiers. Where Contrary Research focuses on breaking down specific private tech companies and markets, Foundations & Frontiers (F&F) unpacks broad areas of technology.
While each week, I focus on my writing and random ideas, I wanted to reflect on some of the exceptional research that is coming out of F&F. In a recent piece, Anna-Sofia Lesiv, the author of F&F, dives into the technology at the cutting edge of mining. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
A new era of mining is upon us. The global push toward electrification is changing more than just the cars we drive and the way our electric grids are configured. It is re-orienting the global economy around a new set of commodities critical to building the electric storage and essential components that will drive the electric economy.
Those commodities, also known as critical minerals, will be to the twenty-first century what fossil fuels were to the twentieth: a resource that plays a major role in global trade and geopolitics. This is why commentators like Teddy Feldman, a writer who covers contemporary mining, are calling critical minerals the “new oil”.
If minerals are the new oil, then their production will become an increasing economic and geopolitical priority. However, the US is not producing nearly enough of them to meet the lofty electrification goals it has committed to, and has become reliant on foreign countries like China to supply the gap. In 2023, the United States was import-reliant for 95 percent of rare earth minerals, essential for batteries and electric motors.
Although stores of critical minerals are actually abundant in the United States, there are only a handful of operational mines in the US. Meanwhile, proposed mines are finding it nearly impossible to compete on price with the abundant and cheap supply of materials flooding the market from China.
This puts the United States in a kind of Catch-22, which only innovation or firm government action may be able to resolve. However, such efforts will take years to fully implement, which only makes greater attention and directed technological progress toward prospecting, extracting, and processing critical minerals all the more urgent.
To read the full piece, check out The New Era of Mining here.
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