Brendan Foody

“Brendan Foody, CEO of the AI-training startup Mercor, stirred the pot on the issue on X last month, writing: 'in the last 6 mo's ive seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation,' and calling the tactic 'deceptive.'”

“In the last 6 mo's I've seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation...calling the tactic 'deceptive.'”

“in the last 6 [months] ive seen a half dozen rounds where sequoia invests in 2 tranches. everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation. founders misrepresent this to their employees & then shop it to angels too.”

“Co-founder of Mercor (AI talent platform, $10B valuation)”

“Mercor CEO Brendan Foody disclosed that his company 'already spends more on AI tokens for internal agents than on employee salaries, a pattern he predicts will spread across corporate America as companies deploy AI agents across more business functions.'”

“If I had to distill what we did strategically into one thing, it's focusing on leading indicators when markets move really fast. The cutting-edge frontier labs see things in the markets where we can learn how the entire economy will change shape.”

“We've expanded our relationships with all of the Frontier Labs and added $300 million in net new ARR in the last 60 days.”

“We have an AI project manager that just completed its first project, managing that entire thing end to end, where it's able to hire the experts. It's able to answer their questions. It's able to build the annotation tool using its coding tools within our platform and produce the end data type.”

“When I saw Ethan Thornton from Mock raising $70 million as a 19-year-old, I'm like, wait, Ethan is like a chill guy and a good friend. And like, maybe I could do something like that one day.”

“Building defensibility in the software layer on top of the models is going to be incredibly difficult. I think over the last two years, everyone has increasingly realized that the model is the product.”

“I really like Jensen...the jacket, his style, he's always on point. I would say Jensen is probably one of the coolest.”

“Participants: Brendan Foody, Harry Stebbings”