This Week in Startups
01:02:41 · Jonathan Siddarth, Alex Wilhelm, Brendan Foody
[01:02:41] S0: Great. Thank you, Alex. But If you're working on AGI research or in human data, come talk to us. We are hiring across the board. And if you're building a frontier foundation model and you need data to make the model smarter at coding, reasoning, STEM, etcetera, come talk to us. We're at Turing dot com and you can email me at, jonathanturing dot com. [01:03:02] S1: Perfect. All right, Jonathan, thank you so much. We'll have you back on in another six months when AI is twice as smart. And until then, this is Twist. Bye. Alright. So here on Twist, we have talked ad nauseam about AI and the job market, mostly about how AI might impact the job market, change who does what job, change what jobs are done. You get the idea. People have a lot of concerns that AI might take all the jobs. We'll have to see what happens. Today, though, I wanna talk to a company that wants to use AI to help people not just get jobs, but get the right jobs and also to have companies find the right people. Because as it turns out, and you know this if you've done any hiring in your career, finding the right people pretty much is terrible even with the modern tools we have today. So to help explain how this is gonna work, please welcome to the show. It's Merkur CEO and cofounder, Brendan Foody. Brendan, hey. How you doing? [01:03:48] S5: I'm doing great. It's awesome to be here, and I appreciate you having me, Alex.
01:03:48 · Brendan Foody, Alex Wilhelm
[01:03:48] S5: I'm doing great. It's awesome to be here, and I appreciate you having me, Alex. [01:03:52] S1: It's my pleasure, man. I love doing these. Talking to people who are building what's actually next for the economy literally never fails to give me a jolt like a good espresso, so thank you. Mhmm. Now one reason why I wanted to talk to your company is because you have this amazingly huge vision. You guys wrote that you founded the company because, and I quote, the labor market is the largest, most inefficient market in the world, which is a pretty big claim. So before we dive into how Merkur is gonna approach this and how you're gonna get into the market, tell me why you think that and what brought you to that as the problem you wanted to solve. [01:04:24] S5: Yeah. It really comes down to this matching problem, where when you were describing earlier, the reason that it's painful is that when a candidate is applying to a job, they can only apply to a couple dozen jobs. And when a company is considering candidates in the market, they can only consider a fraction of a percent of the people available that are looking for work because they need to solve this matching problem manually. They need to manually review resumes, manually conduct interviews, and manually decide who to hire. But when you're able to solve this matching problem at the cost of software, it makes way for this global, unified labor market that every candidate applies to and every company hires from. And so that's the end vision of the company and the North Star that we work backwards from.
01:04:24 · Brendan Foody, Alex Wilhelm
[01:04:24] S5: Yeah. It really comes down to this matching problem, where when you were describing earlier, the reason that it's painful is that when a candidate is applying to a job, they can only apply to a couple dozen jobs. And when a company is considering candidates in the market, they can only consider a fraction of a percent of the people available that are looking for work because they need to solve this matching problem manually. They need to manually review resumes, manually conduct interviews, and manually decide who to hire. But when you're able to solve this matching problem at the cost of software, it makes way for this global, unified labor market that every candidate applies to and every company hires from. And so that's the end vision of the company and the North Star that we work backwards from. [01:05:10] S1: Okay. So essentially, when I go out there to look for jobs, I might look at my local area. I might look at jobs that... Companies that I've heard of. But no matter how far I cast my net from my perspective, I'm still missing out on most of the gigs, and therefore, most of the companies aren't hearing from as broad a talent pool as they might. [01:05:26] S5: Exactly. Yeah. [01:05:28] S1: Okay. So in a world in which we're dealing with kind of the demise of remote work, isn't the labor market necessarily constrained by geography?
01:05:28 · Alex Wilhelm, Brendan Foody
[01:05:28] S1: Okay. So in a world in which we're dealing with kind of the demise of remote work, isn't the labor market necessarily constrained by geography? [01:05:37] S5: Well, not precisely. I don't think we're dealing with the demise of remote work. I just think that in many ways, work might actually become even more prevalent. And part of this is that if you automate 90% of what it means to do remote knowledge work, that means that the bottleneck to productivity is the other 10%. And so for all the domains like software engineering, where demand is extremely elastic, we'll just produce 10 or 100 times more. And so I think that humans and the role that we play in knowledge work both remotely as well as in person is going to become amplified with these huge increases in productivity that are starting to happen. [01:06:20] S1: So jisting that down for folks, do you think that in time remote work is not going to go away, and therefore, there will be kind of a global talent pool. And therefore, if you want to access the best people, you're not only going to have to have a much larger pool, but you're also going to look more broadly, at the corporate level. [01:06:37] S5: This is certainly the case. And most importantly, that I think it'll be centralized, right? Instead of all these decentralized, fragmented job searches and companies that are looking to hire, I think it'll be one place that everyone goes, that every company hires from, that can facilitate all of these job matches that people love and companies are finding a lot of value in.
01:06:37 · Brendan Foody, Alex Wilhelm
[01:06:37] S5: This is certainly the case. And most importantly, that I think it'll be centralized, right? Instead of all these decentralized, fragmented job searches and companies that are looking to hire, I think it'll be one place that everyone goes, that every company hires from, that can facilitate all of these job matches that people love and companies are finding a lot of value in. [01:07:02] S1: Okay. And I think you want that one place, that central hub to be, Merkur, your company. And if you succeed, this means that recruiters, as we know them today, are gonna have a hard time. Probably generic, unai enabled job boards like Indeed and similar are all gonna get hit. So that's the scale of what you guys are shooting for, essentially, a revolution of how people find and secure jobs around the world. Fantastic.
01:07:02 · Alex Wilhelm, Brendan Foody
[01:07:02] S1: Okay. And I think you want that one place, that central hub to be, Merkur, your company. And if you succeed, this means that recruiters, as we know them today, are gonna have a hard time. Probably generic, unai enabled job boards like Indeed and similar are all gonna get hit. So that's the scale of what you guys are shooting for, essentially, a revolution of how people find and secure jobs around the world. Fantastic. [01:07:28] S5: Well, one way of thinking about it is there's sort of these two ends of the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, there's companies like LinkedIn or Indeed, their job boards. And they have this very broad distribution, but they only aggregate this very thin layer of the person's resume. And so they capture about one thousandth of the value chain associated with facilitating a hire. On the other hand of the spectrum, there's the services companies, the recruiting agencies, the staffing agencies that do all the manual work and heavy lifting to get their 30% of first year or whatever their fee structure is. But no one has been able to combine the distribution of LinkedIn and Indeed with the value capture and value add of a recruiting and staffing firm. Because previously, it wasn't possible to automate services. But now that's all changing. Now it's becoming possible to automate everything that recruiters and staffing agencies would otherwise do in this unified way that has the same kind of distribution scale of consumer platform with hundreds of millions of people.