00:00:00 · Brendan Foody, S1
[00:00:00] S0: Now is the most exciting time in history to build a company. Like, the difference between what's possible with AI and what's been actualized in the economy is so large, there's so much to do that it would... If there's any time to do it, it would be now. And I think that many more people should chase after that, choose the thing that they love doing and wanna do for the next ten years and commit to it. [00:00:26] S1: Welcome to First Block, a notion series where founders from the world's leading companies tell us what it was like to navigate the many firsts of their journey and what they learned from that experience. Our guest today is Brendan Futi, cofounder and CEO of Mercor. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. We're so excited to have Brendan here, the CEO and cofounder of Merkor. We'll jump right in. So when you were young, told me backstage that you had some really interesting first jobs that I thought would be helpful in providing context for the team here about how you got to where you are. Mhmm. What was, some of those first jobs for you?
00:01:06 · Brendan Foody
[00:01:06] S0: Well, so I had a dozen different side hustles in one form or another growing up. But one of my favorite memories was selling donuts in eighth grade, where I noticed that Safeway donuts sold for $5 a dozen and that my friends would pay $2 for each doughnut. So I would bike to Safeway, buy Safeway doughnuts for $5 a dozen, sell them to my friends. And then I started... I wanna scale it up. So I started paying my mom, $20 to drive me in her minivan to Safeway, then selling tens of dozens of donuts each week. I had competition pop up and so they were selling Chuck's donuts, which if anyone doesn't know are on the Peninsula, this like, you know, higher end donut, but they had a higher cost basis. So I dropped my prices to $1 for two weeks, to drive them out of business. Didn't know about anti competitive practices at the time. In high school, I started this business doing AWS consulting where I realized that a lot of my friends were eligible for AWS startup credits. And they're, like, small businesses or startups that they're running, but they weren't applying to claim those credits. A lot of them didn't have websites to fill out the application, all this kind of stuff. So I started charging $495 to build a website for them, help them apply, get their AWS credits. And then I did that a few 100 times, when I was in high school. And so was I making a bunch of money. I didn't wanna go to college. I was like, this is awesome. I'll just do this full time. But eventually my mom persuaded me to go to college, first employee. Circle. Yeah. Exactly. And so, yeah, that was that was another fun escapade.
00:02:46 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:02:46] S1: And how did you land in the land of software for recruiting? [00:02:51] S0: Yeah. I mean, it it grew out of a lot of those experiences early on. I think as with many people in this room, early stage founders, a lot of... The hardest problem in scaling is always how do you build your team. Right? Like this problem of processing so many different people, finding people that are interested in doing it. And it just felt like all of the processes for how people find candidates and assess them and match them with jobs are enormously antiquated. And we could build far more efficient processes to automate everything, with Merkor. [00:03:25] S1: And walk us through some of your metrics so that we understand the scale of what you're building. What can you share with us? [00:03:31] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's been pretty wild. In so far as what's public, we scaled from 1 to a 100,000,000 in revenue run rate in eleven months. So... That's pretty strong. Yeah. Fastest growing out of pretty much, you know, any company in Silicon Valley. Haven't shared other updates in terms of top line from there, but we're well over half a million users. We have done many hundreds of thousands of interviews across all kinds of roles ranging from software engineering to medicine, law, finance, HR. And so it's been an exciting time. We work with... Let's see. Other ones are we work with six out of the magnificent seven. We work with all of the top five, AI labs. And so it's all all happened very quickly.
00:03:31 · Brendan Foody, S1
[00:03:31] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's been pretty wild. In so far as what's public, we scaled from 1 to a 100,000,000 in revenue run rate in eleven months. So... That's pretty strong. Yeah. Fastest growing out of pretty much, you know, any company in Silicon Valley. Haven't shared other updates in terms of top line from there, but we're well over half a million users. We have done many hundreds of thousands of interviews across all kinds of roles ranging from software engineering to medicine, law, finance, HR. And so it's been an exciting time. We work with... Let's see. Other ones are we work with six out of the magnificent seven. We work with all of the top five, AI labs. And so it's all all happened very quickly. [00:04:24] S1: That's amazing. So walk us through kind of your founding story. I think so many of us in the room have that aspiration. Like, how did you... Everything kinda clicked together for you?
00:04:24 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:04:24] S1: That's amazing. So walk us through kind of your founding story. I think so many of us in the room have that aspiration. Like, how did you... Everything kinda clicked together for you? [00:04:34] S0: Absolutely. So it ties to the question earlier of thinking a lot about hiring growing up in companies I was building. And initially, I was working with my best friends from high school who I met when I was 14, and we were building a lot of software for fun. And so we wanted to do that faster, and we would hire engineers internationally in India. We partnered with the Code Club at IIT Kharagpur, to hire people, build projects, and match them with our friends because our friends asked to, hire engineers as well. And as we saw ChatGPT taking off, we realized that there were all of these processes that we were doing manually and how we would manually review resumes, manually decide who to hire, and manually conduct all of the interviews that went into that, that we could automate with LLMs. And so we did that iteratively, while we were scaling the business, dropped out of college, and then, scaled up from there. [00:05:31] S1: If you have any advice for people who are maybe... They have some product market fit, there's some semblance that things could work out, and they're considering, should I bet at all?
00:05:31 · S1, Brendan Foody
[00:05:31] S1: If you have any advice for people who are maybe... They have some product market fit, there's some semblance that things could work out, and they're considering, should I bet at all? [00:05:42] S0: I think go for it. I mean, maybe I'm a little biased because I didn't wanna go to college in the first place. So that's why I tend to be very against a lot of the well defined career tracks. But I just think that what framed it for me and I think should for many people here is that now is the most exciting time in history to build a company. Like, the difference between what's possible with AI and what's been actualized in the economy is so large, there's so much to do that it would... If there's any time to do it, it would be now. And I think that many more people should chase after that, choose the thing that they love doing and wanna do for the next ten years and commit to it. [00:06:24] S1: It's that level of obsession. [00:06:26] S0: Absolutely. Right. And in fact, one thing that I always felt is I've never been super disciplined. Like, I was I was not great at, like, you know, always doing my, like, college homework on time and all of that or holding myself accountable to whatever exams I need to study for. It was much more about obsession, about, like, find the problem that you can't stop thinking about, where even when you're, like, hanging out with your friends, your mind just, like, comes back to it because you need that level of commitment and longing to spend the next ten years on it. And so it's all about finding that.