Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
00:00:01 · S0
[00:00:01] S0: This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Series brought to you by Stanford Econ.
00:00:07 · Emily Ma
[00:00:07] S1: Hello, everyone. My name is Emily Ma, and I'm an adjunct lecturer here for the Management Science and Engineering department. You are joining us for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, which is hosted by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford, and BASIS, which is the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. I am so excited. We are literally starting our second century for the School of Engineering with an amazing speaker, which I think sets the stage for the next century of engineering and entrepreneurship. So I'm going to quickly introduce Brendan Foudi, who co founded Merkor, a recruiting startup that helps Silicon Valley's biggest AI labs train their models to do professional level reasoning by matching skilled workers with enterprise projects. Earlier this year, Merkor announced that the company had hit $1,000,000,000 in annualized revenue, faster than any company, I suspect, that has ever done that in less than two years or something. Crazy. Brendan and his three co founders... Or two co founders, Surya Midna and Adarsh Haymath, became the world's three youngest self made billionaires. Kind of wild. When private investors valued Merkor at 10,000,000,000, Brendan founded a number of earlier ventures, including Ceros, a cloud consulting and cloud access business. Brendan was also selected as a field fellow in 2024. And before that, he studied business administration economics at Georgetown before dropping out to become an entrepreneur. It's kinda wild. I suspect you've known... I'm gonna dive right in. I suspect you've known you've wanted to be an entrepreneur for much longer than when you were a sophomore. So let's start with a question about doughnuts. I heard something about doughnuts and what you did with doughnuts in high school. Can you tell me a little bit more about that story?
00:01:50 · Brendan Foody
[00:01:50] S2: Yeah. Of course. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and talk with everyone. I think unlike probably a lot of the speakers, I am right around the same age as all of you. I recognize some high school friends, and I just turned 23. And so it's, I think, cool to be back in a classroom around it all. But one of my favorite entrepreneurial ventures was when... I I guess ventures is a strong word, but when I was in eighth grade when I saw that Safeway doughnuts were selling... Actually, at the Safeway... Because I grew up... I was born in Stanford Hospital. I grew up not far from here. And I saw that the Safeway on the Safeway on El Camino were selling for $5 a dozen. And I felt like all my friends would pay way more than that for buying doughnuts. And so I started biking to the Safeway every morning on Fridays, buying a couple dozen donuts, bringing them over to my middle school, selling them for $2 each, so running, call it, 60, 70% margins, and then scaling up really quickly from there. So, my mom would charge me $20 to drive me in her minivan to Safeway. I would buy 10 dozen, 20 dozen doughnuts, sell them to all my friends. I remember competition popped up, at my... Because margins invite competition, of course. Uh-huh. And so then I... But they were buying Chuck's doughnuts, which have a higher cost basis of just over a dollar. And so I dropped my costs or my prices to a dollar for... Per doughnut for two weeks to drive them out of business. And this was while I was in eighth grade, and so it was before before I learned about anticompetitive practices. And... Yeah. So I had, you know, I had a a half dozen of those stories growing up, but that was one of my favorites.
00:03:38 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody, S3
[00:03:38] S1: Remind me never to buy a donut from you. You gotta be careful. [00:03:42] S2: You have to be careful. Yeah. [00:03:44] S1: So let's let's keep moving and building on [00:03:47] S3: that story. So after all of these entrepreneurial experiences as a teenager, I heard that [00:03:54] S1: you actually didn't wanna go to college, but you went anyways. And then you you actually had some... You know, your co founders actually were with you during those university days. So what happened during freshman and sophomore year? We have a lot of freshmen and sophomores in this class. [00:04:09] S2: Totally. Well... And I'll give a little bit of the background as well for why I didn't wanna go to college, which is that I met Adarshan Suriya, my cofounders, when we were 14 in high school, and COVID happened our junior year. And I started, getting into sneaker reselling a lot. I saw many of my friends that were reselling sneakers were using AWS to run automated checkout software that would help them to buy and sell items online. And then I started a consulting business where I would help them get AWS credits through this program, AWS Activate, a lot of people know about. And then I scaled that up to a couple $100,000 in revenue, and I was telling my mom, like, why should I go college to make less money than I'm making right now? [00:04:53] S1: That's right. What did she say? What did she say in response?
00:04:53 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody
[00:04:53] S1: That's right. What did she say? What did she say in response? [00:04:56] S2: Well, is she she... I don't I don't remember exactly. There wasn't a lot of reasoning around it other than just frustration that I needed to go to school. And so I ended up going to college at Georgetown for two years. Surya was my roommate, and Adarsh was at Harvard. And when we were getting started, it was really just that we felt like there were these extraordinarily talented people internationally, particularly in India, that we wanted to hire to work on projects together. And we were excited about how we could build more efficient processes to make that happen and leverage AI throughout. [00:05:35] S1: That's wild. Okay. So, there was a point in time where you hit, like, a million dollars in run rate. Yeah. You're like, maybe we shouldn't go back to school. Okay. Tell me a little bit more about that time.
00:05:35 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody, S3
[00:05:35] S1: That's wild. Okay. So, there was a point in time where you hit, like, a million dollars in run rate. Yeah. You're like, maybe we shouldn't go back to school. Okay. Tell me a little bit more about that time. [00:05:45] S2: Yeah. So we got started, in, call it, mid to late twenty twenty two, just working on projects, with one another. And then Merkornet's current form was founded in 01/01/2023, where the premise was... This was, after Chattypity had come out and AI was just starting to work. The premise was that similar to how humans review resumes, conduct interviews, and decide who to hire, we could automate all of those processes using LMs to hire people for ourselves and our college friends. And so I would hustle sending out, like, contracts on PandaDoc to our friends charging them $500 a week, taking 20%, hiring a college student in India to help them coding up their side projects. And we hustled a lot scaling that to a million dollar run rate within eight months. And then from there, we... It it was a little bit complicated because I'm thinking again, like, my mom was really upset with me going back to school. [00:06:41] S3: How do you how [00:06:42] S1: do you talk to your mom? I I actually have probably students who are considering this. Like, what do you tell your parents?