Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
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?
00:06:48 · Brendan Foody
[00:06:48] S2: Well, so actually Georgetown notified her, which was a little bit of a miscommunication on my side, and so it didn't land the best. But I I was very, very stubborn. And so I I told her, like, no. It's gonna work. Just trust me. And then from there, a few months later, I actually met Sean. And who I didn't know would be the audience. But Sean was working at OpenAI. And what we realized was that there was this enormous transition happening in the human data market where it was shifting away from the crowdsourcing paradigm that companies like Scale AI pioneered of how do you get low and medium skilled people that can write barely grammatically correct sentences for their early versions of ChatGeBT. And it was moving super quickly towards the agentic data paradigm of how do we find super high skilled experts, the bankers, lawyers, doctors, FAANG software engineers that can work collaboratively with one another in teams to build frontier evals and oral environments to build the next generation models. And so I... It was funny. I remember Sean... Sean and I met in Bar Gemini ironically Woah. Which was across across the street from the OpenAI office. I was 20 years old at the time, so I was nervous about whether I'd have to use my fake ID because, like, the San Francisco bars are really strict on fakes. But for... Fortunately, we we just got deviled eggs, and we we shared this vision with Sean and scaled up really fast from there. We became OpenAI's largest data vendor within nine months back when o one was shaking the world and head and shoulders above everyone else and then quickly became a primary agentic data vendor to all of the top AI labs as well as all the top application layer companies.
00:08:38 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody, S4, S3
[00:08:38] S1: Wow. [00:08:39] S2: And scaled from the million in revenue run rate to over 1,000,000,000 in revenue run rate in twenty months Yep. Which is as of now the fastest growth trajectory in history. [00:08:48] S1: Yep. Wild. You're breaking records left, right, and center. I'm gonna go back a little bit to Darsh and Surya because you chose to cofound Barkhor. Talk about that. How did you divide and conquer? Because cofounding is very different than founding. You're not all just... You're... It's... You're not calling the shots entirely yourself. [00:09:05] S2: Totally. Well, it started when we were... Got to know each other really well in high school because we were on the speech and debate team together, and Adarsh and Surya were the winningest speech and debate team in history where there's three big national tournaments in policy debate, the most competitive event. They were the first team ever to win all three of the national tournaments. [00:09:24] S4: Mhmm. [00:09:24] S2: I'm dyslexic, and so I'm not nearly as good as them at debate, but I was always in awe of these, you know, legends that were shaping history and aspiring to find a way to work together. And and we were really good friends throughout. And so then Suri was my roommate for two years, and so we got to know each other in [00:09:43] S3: Very
00:09:43 · S3, Brendan Foody, Emily Ma
[00:09:43] S3: Very [00:09:44] S2: in very close proximity. But one thing that we've talked about a lot is that the debate days and being on a team together was sort of like a cofounding partnership in an initial version where we were all bought into one another's success. And and then I think it was just that I had the most fun working with them. Honestly, that's that's the most important thing is just being around the people that you're energized by is the key to sticking with it when things are difficult and doing your best work, when everything fits together. [00:10:21] S1: What was the most challenging moment you had while being together as friends that then you took to founding Record together?
00:10:21 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody
[00:10:21] S1: What was the most challenging moment you had while being together as friends that then you took to founding Record together? [00:10:32] S2: Interesting. There were a lot of moments when we would lose tournaments and debate, and it felt devastating. Like, where we would put ten hours a day into prepping for a tournament for weeks on end, and all of a sudden in, you know, one round in single elimination, like, felt like our debate careers are over. And so I think that we were always far more bought into debate than we were to anything academic, and so it was it was generally those experiences. And I think that that helped to, yeah, build build more grit throughout the way. I remember every round, Adarsh would always, like, freak out about whether he'd lost. And he'd win, like, 99% of rounds or something like that, but he always thought he lost. And I always thought that was a really good mindset to develop of, like, the paranoia of what is everything that we could have done differently and better to, have improved the probability of winning. [00:11:34] S1: Well, it's very clear to me that you are out there to win, and that's how you've grown the company so quickly, and that you know what to do after that 1% failure. Right? When it doesn't work out, it sounds like you pick yourself back up together.