"Turpentine VC" | Venture Capital and Investing
00:44:36 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:44:36] S1: We've skipped over this so far, but I want to absolutely touch upon it. You guys have quite the founding team, the three of you yourself, Adarsh, Hirma. You guys went to high school together, if I if I'm remembering correctly, our policy debate champions. Touch on that background a little bit. Plus, you guys are so young. I mean, it's honestly amazing. I'd love to kinda hear about the background. How'd you guys decide to work together? I know you mentioned you were working on something. Were you working on that with them? [00:45:03] S2: Yeah, yeah. Well, so I wasn't a policy debate champion, but I grew up in the Bay Area met them at Bellarmine San Jose for high school, Adarshan Suriya were the winningest debate team of all time. [00:45:14] S1: Wow. I saw one who did debate. Mean, that that's crazy. These guys were killing me. Yeah. And I'm defining
00:45:21 · Brendan Foody
[00:45:21] S2: that by they did policy debate the most competitive event, and we're the first team ever to win all three of the largest national tournaments, which is challenging, because they're all very different styles of debate. And they were incredible debate. I'm dyslexic, though. So I'm not very good at debate. I wasn't nearly as good as them. But I was always building startups in one form or another. So I bootstrapped a company doing cloud consulting. I, in high school, I found that with this AWS activate program to get cloud credits, there were a lot of startups that were eligible for the program, but we're not applying and getting their cloud credits. So I would charge startups $995 to, you know, be a consultant for them, get them the cloud credits, get them like, why it's 25 ks in cloud credits. And I did this a bunch. So I made I made a lot of money in high school, and I wanted to build software. So I put some of the cash into working with a Darsh at the time to build better user interfaces for AWS, just like GUIs, they didn't work very well. So that that didn't go very far. But I was super interested in in like cloud interfaces being super inefficient. And so I started this company, Sarah's that they were helping out a little bit with, which was like a browser based virtual machine, we were hiring people at the IITs in India to help do this. And so we that was cool. And it won some awards, but I think we were much more excited about our core. And that was really where our heart slides. So started decided to go full time on the business over the summer in 2023. I remember, a Darsh was stressed about whether he should turn down his offer from Bridgewater and, and all that kind of stuff. And so I think he's glad he did it at this point. And we bootstrapped the business to a 7 figure run rate. And it's funny, like, even after doing that, my parents were like, Oh, you should still go back to school. And I was like, No way. And then we raise a little bit of money from general catalyst. And all of a sudden, they're like, Oh, well, good that you dropped out. Right? So yeah, we drop out all at 20 years old. And then it's been all up from there, we all got the Teal fellowship after dropping out. And so we were one of the Us and edge were some of the first teams in history were all three co founders have received the Teal fellowship.
00:47:40 · Brendan Foody, Usman Hanif
So working with that team has been incredible. And it's it's been a fun ride since. [00:47:45] S1: So in high school, you're working with cloud interfaces, as every average high schooler does, right? And send you went to college, you guys went to college together and then dropped out or and sort of what is your kind of background? Is it more of a technical one? Are all three of you sort of technical? Or what is it? [00:48:02] S2: Yeah, I would say all three of us are technical to varying degrees. Was at Georgetown with Suria. I was studying finance and econ. So he was studying international econ. But like, I started coding when I was in third grade, so very young. And then a Darsh was at Harvard saying CS. And I've mainly was doing like front end development for the lifecycle or for the early stages of the business. And I don't do much coding now. But Adarshan Surya do in a significant way. And so yeah, I actually never originally wanted to go to college, I refused to apply to schools, and my parents were not excited about that. And so I appeased them and applied at the last minute. I told them I would drop out the entire time. They didn't believe me until until I actually did it. But I think now they finally come around on the decision.
00:48:02 · Brendan Foody, Usman Hanif
[00:48:02] S2: Yeah, I would say all three of us are technical to varying degrees. Was at Georgetown with Suria. I was studying finance and econ. So he was studying international econ. But like, I started coding when I was in third grade, so very young. And then a Darsh was at Harvard saying CS. And I've mainly was doing like front end development for the lifecycle or for the early stages of the business. And I don't do much coding now. But Adarshan Surya do in a significant way. And so yeah, I actually never originally wanted to go to college, I refused to apply to schools, and my parents were not excited about that. And so I appeased them and applied at the last minute. I told them I would drop out the entire time. They didn't believe me until until I actually did it. But I think now they finally come around on the decision. [00:48:53] S1: Yeah, yeah. Well, man, coding at three, mid seven figure business at twenty. I hope my parents never sort of hear about you and Manu. Let's get those feet rough for me. But that's that's honestly very impressive. And congratulations on Teal fellowship. Saw that alongside the Esh team. That's amazing. And I guess, you know, sort of the final questions here. In terms of the building the team, how many people are you at right now? Are you guys hiring? And if so, who are the types of people you're looking for? What's sort of the culture that people can expect, and and what can they be working on when they join?
00:48:53 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:48:53] S1: Yeah, yeah. Well, man, coding at three, mid seven figure business at twenty. I hope my parents never sort of hear about you and Manu. Let's get those feet rough for me. But that's that's honestly very impressive. And congratulations on Teal fellowship. Saw that alongside the Esh team. That's amazing. And I guess, you know, sort of the final questions here. In terms of the building the team, how many people are you at right now? Are you guys hiring? And if so, who are the types of people you're looking for? What's sort of the culture that people can expect, and and what can they be working on when they join? [00:49:28] S2: Absolutely. So we're at 11 full time employees in The US as well as about 20 contractors internationally in India, And we're hiring hugely, we have big things to announce soon, not yet on the fundraising front, and are are really stepping on the gas with full stack engineer hires, machine learning engineer hires, as well as operations people to help out with managing engagements with clients, particularly large foundation model customers. So there's a lot of interesting aspects on that. And I think anyone who's looking for a really intense environment of working super hard, that has an exceptional background, not per se on the resume, but just having worked on very cool things. It is certainly someone we'd love to talk to. So feel free to just shoot me an email at brendanmccord dot com. And I would love to chat and hopefully explore adding you to the team.
00:49:28 · Brendan Foody, Usman Hanif
[00:49:28] S2: Absolutely. So we're at 11 full time employees in The US as well as about 20 contractors internationally in India, And we're hiring hugely, we have big things to announce soon, not yet on the fundraising front, and are are really stepping on the gas with full stack engineer hires, machine learning engineer hires, as well as operations people to help out with managing engagements with clients, particularly large foundation model customers. So there's a lot of interesting aspects on that. And I think anyone who's looking for a really intense environment of working super hard, that has an exceptional background, not per se on the resume, but just having worked on very cool things. It is certainly someone we'd love to talk to. So feel free to just shoot me an email at brendanmccord dot com. And I would love to chat and hopefully explore adding you to the team. [00:50:25] S1: And they can also just join Merkur and perhaps get recruited from there. [00:50:29] S2: That's true. That's true. That's another way that that we hire. [00:50:33] S1: Exactly. And I guess sort of, you know, some of the final things here, you know, looking into the future, what sort of next for you guys? What is the big problem you're trying to solve right now? What can folks expect as updates on the product in the coming year or two?