Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
00:24:43 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody, S6
[00:24:43] S1: Yeah. [00:24:43] S2: Because I think it's easy to be in these, like, echo chambers in Silicon Valley where [00:24:48] S1: you think [00:24:49] S2: that, you know, AI has a 100% adoption when we talk with the average company in the Midwest. They, you know, just started using ChatGPT a few months ago. Mhmm. And I think that that getting, like, really permeated throughout every business workflow in addition to every consumer is gonna be really exciting. I think in the context of Merkur, that's expanding from just serving the frontier model companies to serving every enterprise in the world and helping them build, the evals that correspond to their value chain so that they're able to implement and apply agents throughout everything that they do. [00:25:31] S1: Alright. So final, final question, which is the classic question we always ask at the end of these chats, is from Tina Selig, who started the series about thirty years ago. She wrote a book called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. I know that wasn't that long ago for you. That was... You know, you just turned 23. Happy birthday. If you could go back to three years ago, I've actually... I have, like, two questions here. What would you tell yourself, and what would you tell your mom? [00:26:01] S6: What would
00:26:01 · S6, Brendan Foody, Emily Ma, S3
[00:26:01] S6: What would [00:26:02] S2: I tell my mom? I'll I'll think about that one, but I think one of the most important things people don't talk about is focusing on leading indicators when markets are moving really fast. Like, if I had to distill what we did strategically into one thing, it would be that. And that we saw, hey. The cutting edge Frontier Labs see this thing in the markets where we can learn from them about, you know, how the entire economy is gonna change shape. And if we just focus on those leading indicators, that gives us a window into the future. And so I I would encourage all of you to try to see, like, what are those leading indicators and how all of these markets, whether it's data or compute or modeling, are changing extremely quickly. And, how do you use that as a window into the future? In terms of what I would tell my mom, I'm not sure. I I think I would tell her probably something similar. Don't don't worry. It'll it'll all work out. [00:27:04] S1: Yeah. Truly, it has. Truly, it has. [00:27:06] S3: Okay. So we're going to organize ourselves to do Q and A. Maybe to add to the thing you said before about kind of automating jobs and automating tasks, what is something that you kind of saw or see that is not really easy to automate or what is something that makes, like, the human human and not... Cannot be automated through AI?
00:27:06 · S3, Brendan Foody, S7
[00:27:06] S3: Okay. So we're going to organize ourselves to do Q and A. Maybe to add to the thing you said before about kind of automating jobs and automating tasks, what is something that you kind of saw or see that is not really easy to automate or what is something that makes, like, the human human and not... Cannot be automated through AI? [00:27:27] S2: One thing that I think everyone is over... Overestimating progress on is the physical world. Like, the majority of work that happens in terms of dollars is in the physical world, whether it's electricians or mechanical engineers, or all of the physical world services. And I think building out the distribution of data for how agents will learn how to do all of that is gonna take an extremely long time. And so I think understanding, yeah, what are all the opportunities to accelerate that, what are the things that are gonna take a lot longer to do, and how that shapes markets is gonna be really important. [00:28:06] S7: Hi. Thanks for being here, Brendan. I have two quick questions. Firstly, how does it feel to be, the youngest billionaire in the world? And, secondly, I was curious, what are sort of the blocks of constancy throughout your day? What are the key habits you do every day that has made you into who you are today?
00:28:22 · Brendan Foody
[00:28:22] S2: So on the first one, I will say I really don't think about it too much. But if I had to choose two things, it would be, first of all, very surreal. Like, you know, my friends in college just graduated in June of last year. So, like, roughly the same age as most of you, and it's obviously beyond my wildest imaginations. And then second of all, it's very fortunate. Like, so much of what has happened has been a function of having incredible cofounders, an incredible team, having, you know, a degree of fortune associated with how we were positioned in the market, and I'm super grateful for all of those. And then your other question was habits, right? Yes. On habits, maybe if I had to choose one thing, it's that I think people try too hard to be disciplined to do things that they don't necessarily want to do when a lot of the key to success is finding the thing that you can be obsessive about. Like, I remember when I was in college, I I would have a hard time motivating myself to cover your ears, like, in homework on time, attend to class, all that kind of stuff. And it was really... The key was just, like, finding the thing that I couldn't stop thinking about, where whenever I'm, like, with my friends or trying to do something else, like, my mind comes back to Merkur because it's the place where I can have the most impact in the world and make a dent in the universe. And I I think that find... If you find that thing that you can be deeply obsessive about, everything else follows. And and that's also what the Teal fellowship looks for, actually, is they look for traits that someone is extremely obsessive because that's one of the largest predictors of the end outcome of the company.
00:30:10 · S7, Brendan Foody, S3
[00:30:10] S7: Thank you. [00:30:10] S2: Yeah. [00:30:14] S3: Thank you for being here, Brendan. So my question is when you were playing around with all these different projects, what was, like, the initial ideation process? Like, how did you decide which projects to pursue? And my second question is about the Thiel fellowship. Mhmm. How did they kind of support you in building what you built today? [00:30:34] S2: Yeah. So on the first one, I would say we were always very customer oriented with with all of them of how do we have our early design partners that can give us feedback on the product across each of the different initiatives, and that was certainly foundational to being intellectually honest for whether what we were doing was actually useful. And so I'd encourage everyone to always try to spend as much time with your users of any products you're building or the customers of any business because that is by far the most important thing, to get right. In terms of... Sorry. What was your second question? [00:31:14] S3: The fellowship? Yeah.
00:31:14 · S3, Brendan Foody, S8, Emily Ma
[00:31:14] S3: The fellowship? Yeah. [00:31:15] S2: Yeah. It's actually funny because it came later. It... We didn't get the TL fellowship until March 2024, and that was after things were... The company was at, like, 2,000,000 revenue, but we knew that we would be at 50 by the end of the year. And so things were real... Just, like, on the dawn of starting to work. And probably the largest value add was, I think, the credibility stamp to investors and hires is meaningful, but also the community. Like, I met, some of my best friends. My friend, Yash, who's on there, who's the CEO of Applied Compute and was previously our customer at OpenAI. And so those those are the two things, probably the credibility stamp and then the community. [00:32:01] S3: Thank you. Mhmm. [00:32:03] S8: Thank you so much for being here today, Brennan. When you started Merkor, it was around a time when Scale already owned a lot of the narrative around AI data and training. [00:32:12] S1: Yeah. [00:32:12] S8: And I'm curious what gave you and your team the conviction to kind of go for it and assume that the market's not fully taken as opposed to go and work for, say, Alexander Wang. Uh-huh.