Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
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.
00:11:34 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody
[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. [00:11:49] S2: Yeah. Absolutely. And I will say, like, obviously, I talk so much more about the things that have gone well. There's been so many periods throughout the company where the future has been very uncertain. And, you know, of, like, when we're dropping out and we only have a couple of our, like, college friends that are customers and their businesses go under and all that kind of stuff. And I think that especially before strong product market fit, there's this very natural roller coaster of emotions where the highs feel like the best day on earth and the lows feel like the worst. And so I think having them, by my side was certainly incredibly informative for that. [00:12:29] S1: Okay. How did you guys divide and conquer? You did go to market. Adarsh was very close to India. Sounds like Surya took care of sort of internal functions. How did you decide on that, how to divide and conquer based on, you know, all the things that needed to get done?
00:12:29 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody, S5
[00:12:29] S1: Okay. How did you guys divide and conquer? You did go to market. Adarsh was very close to India. Sounds like Surya took care of sort of internal functions. How did you decide on that, how to divide and conquer based on, you know, all the things that needed to get done? [00:12:42] S2: Well, it's interesting. I actually coded our initial product. Oh. And I... Or I would code the front ends and then work with some Indian engineers on the back ends. It's just fun to, like, spin up the coding tools today. And then, eventually, once I started getting contracts, we figured a cleaner structure would be that Adarsh would be CTO at the time to manage engineering since he was studying CS and had spent the most time coding Yeah. Out of all of us. [00:13:14] S5: Mhmm. [00:13:15] S2: Surya was... Is very well connected to the IITs in India. Ah. And so he set up a lot of our initial recruiting functions. And I don't know. It just felt like a natural way that things panned out. [00:13:30] S1: And is it still that way? How has it evolved since?
00:13:30 · Emily Ma, Brendan Foody
[00:13:30] S1: And is it still that way? How has it evolved since? [00:13:33] S2: Not really. It's, it's taken many different forms because I feel like it's always about working on whatever the most important problem is at any given time so it's more dynamic. But the rough split right now is that I focus on the AI labs and really our frontier customers that are, you know, building the best agents in the world that everyone uses every day. And then Adarsh is focused more so on enterprises. Mhmm. How do we take all of the processes, know how, technology, etcetera, that we've built for the AI labs over the last two years and apply that to the rest of the Fortune 500. [00:14:11] S1: Got it. Okay. You know, we've kind of putz around a little bit about exactly what Merkor does, and not everybody in this room is a computer scientist or working on AI. We have an incredible, like, breadth and diversity of students here. Could you maybe start from, like, square one for somebody who is a layman, a layperson, a student who isn't familiar with, you know, the AI labs, like, building models? Like, could you tell us a little bit about, you know, what Merkor does? And then I wanna then tie that to benchmarking. Right? So defining benchmarking as the most basic definition.