Adarsh Hiremath
Appearances
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
The round was a hundred million. And the price was? It was at two billion. I think we'll live in a world with many, many models with different use cases. We're already seeing this with a lot of application layer companies where they all have these specialized use cases for how they want to leverage the models. I think being a recruiter is the highest prestige position in any company.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
I think a concrete example would be the AI interviewer. We've built the product in such a way that whenever the models improve, the experience for applicants on our platform also improves pretty significantly. In general, this is something that's been on our mind, right? There's like this huge wave of models getting better and better and better.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And can we ride that wave to make our product better and better and better? So to summarize, well, we leverage LLMs and all these models throughout our product. The whole product gets better as the models get better.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
The whole market is shifting to reinforcement learning. You're already seeing this with 01, 03, the deep seek models. As a result, I think we're going to see really, really powerful models. in specific domains that can reason extremely well. And I think that'll be really, really exciting and unlock just a huge number of use cases across a variety of different industries and domains.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
I think we'll live in a world with many, many models with different use cases, right? We're already seeing this with a lot of application layer companies, right? Where they all have these specialized use cases for how they want to leverage the models, right? For us, it's hiring and beating the expert hiring manager. For another company, it might be financial analysis in a specific domain.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
Across each of these use cases, I think these companies will need to make their models better for their own purposes.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
There will only be a couple of companies that are able to build these foundation models that everyone builds off of. That analogy roughly holds. I don't anticipate there being 20 companies trading foundation models that can all be leveraged in the same way someone might leverage OpenAI, for example.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
I think a lot of it will be human data going forward. I think a great example of this is evals. Evals for models definitionally have to be outside of model capability. In order to see whether a model is doing well at a particular task, you need to have an eval set created by humans that is better than the model at that particular task. And humans are going to play a huge role in that, for example.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And I think there are a whole set of other use cases, whether it be SFT, RLHF, RL environments, like how the models of tomorrow are being trained, that all require these expert humans to essentially teach the model how to get better.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
So the first thing is that it's not zero-sum. Even in a world where human data is super important for the next generation of models, it doesn't mean that synthetic data won't also be important. So synthetic data will certainly be a part of the equation.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
But in a lot of ways, the bottleneck to unlocking and unleashing the next level of intelligence will be expert humans, which brings me back to the question and phrase that you used, low-quality human data. Low-quality human data certainly won't push the models to be better at anything. High-quality human data will. Again, that's a talent assessment problem.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
The biggest lever on data quality for creating these post-training sets, for example, is finding the right people, which, again, is really, really hard to do.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
All of them are pieces of the same puzzle, but the era that we're entering requires really, really expert humans to make models better at very, very specific use cases. How long will that be the case for? For a very, very long time. There's this huge long tail of tasks that models can't do. Like what? Just help me understand. You're teaching me. Well, maybe we could take a step back.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
If we reach the point a couple of hundred years from now where the models are able to do every single job and humans no longer have any work to do, society is going to look really, really different. We're all going to be living on a UBI. We're all going to be playing video games all day, whatever it may be. But until that point comes...
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
There's going to be a whole set of tasks that the models cannot do, whether they be specific, you know, economically valuable tasks, like maybe the job that a consultant could do, or maybe a specific category of engineering, or even like more niche things, right? Maybe it's making the model better at like some specific hobby.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And we're always going to need to fill in the gaps, particularly in that long tail. And Harry, the other thing I'll say is I think people are really, really in this mindset of like this like unidirectional relationship between humans and AI, right? Where I can't do something, I give it to the AI, the AI takes it to completion.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
But I think the more realistic breakdown is the AI for a specific use case might be able to get us 60, 70, 80% of the way there. But for that remaining 40, 30, 20%, you're going to need a human to be able to take you all the way there. And the reality of the situation is finding that human will become harder and more valuable to do.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
That's a great question. And I think that begs the question of what do labor markets look like later on? I think the key thing is that the market will move towards specialty and sophistication, meaning the types of work that we see 50 years from now will be more specialized and oftentimes will require people with kind of like a higher level of sophistication in that specific thing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
When we're able to find exceptional people at the cost of software hundreds of times over.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
One interesting thing about Mercore, we don't have a sales team. There is not a single person who works on sales at Mercore outside of the founders. These days, what we're seeing is mostly customer inbound. Folks have heard great things about Mercore recently. from other people who have hired through Mercor and then reach out to us. And then we go from there.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
So right now it's more of a bandwidth thing than any like tactical or coordinated sales motion, I would say.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
On our end, the entire process is automated. This is everything from a candidate hearing about Mercore and going onto the Mercore platform via job listing, us pulling in their resume, their salary expectations and whatnot, administering a personalized interview based on both their background and the role, allowing them to get paid for their work.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
You know, I briefly talked about Uber and just going back to that example, right? When I get into an Uber, there isn't that much of a difference between the 4.8 star driver and the 4.9 star driver because the unit of work is not exponential. But with something like Mercor, there's a huge difference between the top 0.1% and then the 80th percentile person.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
So usually for customers, it's not a question of price. It's a question of quality. If we're able to find those 0.1% people reliably at the cost of software, what we take is often a second thought.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
It's on a case by case basis. For some customers, it can be, you know, over 30%.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
So the reason we started with India is because our parents immigrated from India, Suri and I. So they went to these amazing schools. So we started these recruiting campaigns from those schools specifically.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And actually, one of the things that got us really, really excited about labor markets in general and the inefficiencies associated with it was just because one of the best engineers I've ever worked with on our team, we found through a Facebook ad, and I manually interviewed him. Actually, he didn't pass the interview.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
But the reason that we ended up hiring him is he sent me a really, really long message about what exactly he got wrong in the interview and how to correct it. And I just felt like we got to work with him. It was sort of that that prompted us to start in India.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
But if you fast forward to today, actually, the number one place that workers on the Mercore platform who have jobs through us are from is actually the United States.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
My take is that programming is actually more important today. It's just going to happen at a different level of abstraction. One could argue that the leap from assembly to Python was actually maybe even a bigger leap than the leap from Python to natural language. My answer there is that the way we define programming will look very, very different.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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It may be a person who has like average skills by today's standards in computer science, who's orchestrating thousands of superhuman coding agents to achieve more than we thought was even possible. But that skill set, which, you know, we can define as programming at a different level of abstraction, programming in English is going to be super important.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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I definitely use a lot of the AI tools. They've gotten really, really good. A great example is cursor. A lot of members of our team use cursor and love it. It makes doing things that would take a lot of time just so simple and elegant, right? A great example is testing.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
With a couple of prompts, you can just generate a more thorough test suite than anyone could have imagined for your application, for example. And that just wasn't possible before. Maybe it's like bringing the same consistency from one part of the code base and refactoring it for another part of the code base. You can basically snap your fingers in Cursor and it'll get done.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And I think the implication for software is that software is going to get commoditized very, very quickly as these coding agents get really, really good. What does the world look like where software is commoditized?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
It means that people will be able to build applications much faster than was historically possible. It also means that the businesses that succeed in a world where software costs approach zero will be built on network effects. The companies that could even give away their entire code base and they'd still be alive.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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The marketplaces and companies like Meta and Airbnb that have built these really, really strong network effects will be the ones that thrive.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
I think what we consider SaaS will change. The next era of SaaS will be replacing entire services, whether it's the end-to-end process of a recruiting agency like Mercore or another different service that is incredibly manual and incredibly repeatable.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
The recruiter is the one who controls the talent inflows and outflows of every company. And pretty much you can gather all you need to know about a company from seeing the talent inflows and outflows. The businesses that succeed in a world where software costs approach zero will be built on network effects.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
It's a great question. And I would break it down in two categories.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
So one is the network effect of a marketplace that you might see in a labor marketplace like Uber, where every additional company that hire through Mercore strengthens the marketplace and every additional candidate on Mercore strengthens the marketplace as well, because there's like a higher pool of really, really exceptional people to choose from.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And the second network effect or like data flywheel is around this job prediction piece. We're able to see who is performing well on jobs and the specific reasons why they're performing well on jobs and use that end-to-end data on people's outcomes to make it really, really easy to surface the person that might be the best for a given role, even if they themselves don't know it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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It all starts with quality. A lot of the greatest products or companies of our generation have been usage-based. Stripe is a great example of this. The reason that that revenue is really, really sticky is because you're able to create these six-star experiences for customers and candidates. And I think that's one thing that has resulted in our very, very quick revenue ramp, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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Maybe running our entire internal hiring process for Mercor in a completely automated way, meaning Brendan, Surya and I don't even talk to someone when they come into the office. We walk in the conference room to meet them the first time and we're just like, wow, this person is awesome. We couldn't have found this person even if we spent all day, every day trying to find this person.
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20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
We're getting there. And that's just super, super exciting for us.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
Yep. And that's exactly why we do, you know, in person in San Francisco. Brendan, Surya and I all get super energized by being around people. A lot of our best ideas for Mercor have come when we weren't even in a meeting, right? We were just sitting around, chilling, discussing things. And then you have that aha moment. And I think there's something really, really special for in person.
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20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
What was the worst product decision you made? At one point, Brendan, Siri, and I all thought that chat was the future of all UI. So one of the initial iterations of the Mercore product was just built around a chat interface. Like there was no other way to hire people unless you use the Mercore chatbot because we were so bullish on chat. I think we've come around to that.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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We now mix chat with other things where applicable or leverage LLMs in other ways. But for a while, we thought the concept of a web app tomorrow would be dead. And the way you would interface with all web apps would just exclusively be with chat. So it wouldn't even be you clicking a button to hire someone. It would be you telling the chatbot to hire the person.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
I think it's possible down the line, but we may have mistimed a little bit.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
An interesting dynamic about all of our fundraising rounds is just that we didn't intend on doing the fundraising at the time. And it sort of just came to us. Going back to the example about Benchmark, someone introduced... Brendan to Victor. Brendan said we were heads down. And then Victor, you know, convinced Brendan to have a conversation with him.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
The way it went down was Brendan had the initial chat with Victor. And then afterwards, Brendan was like, OK, going to get back to work. Afterwards, Victor asked Brendan if he'd ever been on a helicopter. And Brendan said no. Before he knew it, Brendan was on a helicopter with Peter Fenton from Benchmark. And we knew that they were the firm that we wanted to work with very, very quickly.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And so Brendan comes back and goes, hey guys, they took me on the helicopter. Let's do it. Had a couple more conversations with Victor and the benchmark team. And it was clear that they were the best. We wanted to be in business with them and work with them. And they've just been phenomenal. Then how many months later is the next round?
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It's interesting because we, again, weren't focused on fundraising, right? We had built a business that was doing a lot in revenue. You know, we're paying out tens of millions. How much is it doing in revenue at this point? Eight figures in revenue, right? And we were just like, okay, let's be heads down.
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But just like we felt with Benchmark, we wanted to be in business with Sandeep and Felices and the amazing team there, which made it a no-brainer. Do you enjoy fundraising? Not really. Not really. Yeah. Do you have a board, Adarsh? We do. It's, you know, Brendan, Suri and I and Benchmark on the board. Is that it? That's it. Yeah. And yeah, we don't enjoy fundraising.
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I think the thing that we really, really enjoy is moving the business forward. That's always the thing that founders enjoy the most. So we've been, you know, laser focused on that. And sometimes it just makes sense to...
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We definitely had that moment. At the time we raised that round, we didn't realize how much... the growth was going to accelerate. We knew of it, we were confident in it, but just the fact that it even exceeded our expectations, you know, wrapping up Q1 of this year is something that we're all, you know, really, really excited by. And talk to me about this new fundraiser.
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Yep. So the new fundraiser was led by Felice's with, you know, other amazing investors, including GC, Benchmark and others participating as well. And how much was this round? The round was 100 million.
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Yeah, we're really, really excited to be in partnership with Sandeep and the Felicis team. They're amazing.
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I think it gets really dangerous when people raise the money and then think that they just have to spend it immediately because they raised the money. Our goal isn't to deploy $100 million tomorrow. But Harry, I think the thing about our business is that labor aggregation and building this unified labor market, it's going to take a long time.
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We just want to make sure that we have a balance sheet that is kind of commensurate with that long term.
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I think being a recruiter is the highest prestige position in any company. The recruiter is the one who controls the talent inflows and outflows of every company. Pretty much you can gather all you need to know about a company from seeing the talent inflows and outflows. The recruiting function of a company is is the most underrated and undervalued.
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Actually, it goes with it, right? Because efficiency is only possible if you find the right person. Solving that matching problem and finding the right person is really, really hard, especially with manual processes that don't scale.
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It's interesting. I've had this conversation with some members of the Mercor team before. I think one thing that we like to joke about is that company execs are a lot like athletes in a lot of ways, where there's like this drive and desire to win. Maybe, you know, I had dreams of being a basketball player a while ago. Definitely not what I do today.
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But, you know, one person who I think really embodies that winning mentality is LeBron. And I like him a lot. So...
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I think there's an element of pushing yourself to win and focus on the right things and getting better every day. And that's just something that I think about, right? How can I be the best version of myself tomorrow and be an even better version the next day and continue that and have that compound for 10, 20 years? What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?
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It's an interesting question. Part of it is the SaaS answer I gave you a little bit earlier, that over time it's become pretty obvious to me that the next generation of SaaS will replace entire services end-to-end. And I think that realization has sort of been part of the reason that we've built Mercor in this way.
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I have to be honest with you. I think probably my Lime ride to the office when I'm running late for morning stand-up. You know, we start at 9 a.m. every day, and sometimes it's like I'm leaving my apartment at 8.55, and I'll just take a Lime, go straight down the hills of San Francisco in the most unsafe way possible.
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I told you, you know, back when we decided to start Mercor, it was like a complete, you know, emotional decision where Suri just looked at me and said, hey, man, how hard could this be? You know, Brendan came in with his optimism and we just did it. And I'm thankful for that. But I didn't really have grasped my mind around how hard building a business like this would be.
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When we achieve AGI or sort of like think about AGI, it will certainly involve doing more economically valuable work, right? So when more and more and more of economically valuable work has been automated to some extent, you know, research has been automated to some extent, broadly put that in the bucket of AGI.
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I have to work backwards a little bit, right? So how many job seekers are there? You know, roughly put it in a couple billions. How many jobs does each person take on, right? People change their roles. You know, maybe we factor out all the jobs Mercore creates for AI agents and like, roughly focus on just the jobs for people, create a couple dozen jobs for each person.
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Mercore has created 100 billion jobs and has built the unified labor marketplace, meaning that anytime a company wants to hire a person for a specific job or task, they do it through Mercore. And anytime a candidate wants to consider a company for a specific job or task, they do it through Mercore. And Mercore is able to solve the matching problem across every role,
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across every company in a seamless way.
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Thank you for having me. It was really fun.
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Thank you for having me. Really, really a big fan of the pod.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
One thing about Brendan, Surya and I is that we actually go quite a ways back. So I actually first met Surya when I was 10 years old. And the reason we got along so well is because we were pretty much the only elementary schoolers who wanted to compete in a high school debate. And then we ended up at the same high school, which is also where I met Brendan.
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All three of us were on the debate team together. Surya and I decided to do policy. So we ended up being debate partners together and then going on and competing in all of these national tournaments. But debate is a lot like founding in a lot of ways, right?
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Like I like to think of my debate partnership with Surya as sort of my first startup, just because we had 50-50 equity in each other's success. If one of us were to mess up, it would tank the odds for both of us. There's like this constant feedback loop after every debate round about whether you won or lost. Picking the right debate partner is like
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the most important decision you can make in policy debate. And similarly, picking the right founding team is the most important decision you can make while starting a company. So there's that parallel. And then there's just the immense amount of ownership, right? You know, we both have a stake in each other's success.
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Actually, so Brendan Suri and I started working together without any business ambition. We just started a dev shop together. So we were like, cool, let's learn how to build software really, really quickly. Let's go to these startups. Let's figure out things they want built. Let's build it together.
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And what we ended up doing is recruiting these really, really exceptional folks from India to help us out with our dev shop. And then very, very quickly, we realized the software was one thing. But we had found some really, really exceptional people. And it was more about the people than the software. So then we were like, OK, we found these people in a completely manual way. Can we automate this?
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And that's how the automated candidate side of the platform was born.
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Well, it's funny that you say I was at Harvard. I was definitely there physically, not sure about mentally. I was pretty much doing everything I could to avoid going to classes. And I actually have a pretty funny story about this. So Brendan would visit me pretty frequently at Harvard. And my roommate at the time, Artemis, had this like really, really weird sleep schedule.
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He would just like go to the engineering building and pretty much be nocturnal. So the routine that we would typically follow is Brendan would visit me. He would just crash in Artemis's bed because he'd be in the engineering building just working on problem sets. And then he'd come back, wake Brendan up, and then we'd get to work together. And then he would go to sleep during the day.
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And then, you know, fast forward today, Artemis has joined the Mercora team. So it really was the typical dorm room story.
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At the time, it wasn't obvious at all that we should drop out. And I really, really sympathize with my parents at the time for not approving because here I was. We hadn't raised our seed round. We hadn't raised the Series A. There was no Teal Fellowship. There was one side of the marketplace that had a little bit of revenue. And I was telling them that I wanted to abandon my degree program.
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So it wasn't an obvious decision at all. But I think, you know, like most of these decisions, you just make them completely emotionally. And I just knew I wanted to work with my best friends.
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You can try to rationalize dropping out or starting a company or try to figure out the exact set of prerequisites that you have to do. But for me, for example... The moment I knew that I wanted to drop out was actually back when we had an office in Palo Alto. And the office had exactly three desks, one for Brendan, one for Surya, one for me. I was like, Surya, man, should we drop out?
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And then he just looked at me and he was just like, dude, how hard could this be? Wasn't a logical argument at all. But in that moment, I was just like, let's do this. Let's drop out of school.
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No seed round, a little bit of revenue, no Teal Fellowship, nothing. We were just three friends working in a small office in Palo Alto with our amazing team in India.
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We were 19 at the time. So that was just surreal. So what ended up happening is initially we thought we wanted to base the company in New York. So I'll take credit for making the wrong call there. I very, very quickly realized that it was the wrong decision. But what ended up happening is we had moved to New York before.
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Before raising the seed round, for me, actually, the more surreal moment wasn't actually when the money hit for the seed round. It was actually when we changed our salaries in Gusto to $500 a month. I felt like we made it at that time. I was like, amazing. We just moved to New York. We changed our salaries to $500 a month. And then afterwards, we closed our seed round.
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And then when the money was wired, we were just looking at the account in awe.
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So we raised over three million and it came very, very quickly. So General Catalyst led the round and really, really enjoy working with Max and Nico.
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It's really funny. A lot of people ask me this question about the 996 thing. The only reason we actually just floated those numbers out is because we didn't want our team working on Sundays. So I like to think of the 996 stuff as more of like a side effect than an objective. We've just really, really carefully selected for working with people who care deeply about the mission.
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The side effect about that is they don't want to wait until Monday to move the company forward. So people really do it just because they enjoy being in each other's presence. They enjoy what they're working on.
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This is not something unique to Mercor. It's like all the successful companies have had pretty intense cultures historically. And it's just a function of the startup, right? You got to work harder than everyone else. The one thing I will say about that is that momentum is very, very energizing. I think when we select for people to work at Mercor, one realization that we've come to is that you can
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teach people a lot of things, whether it be, you know, technically or going to market or whatever. But the one thing that you can't quite teach people is to care. And that's one thing that we index on pretty heavily in our hiring process and something that we really look for.
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The way I like to think about that level of growth is it's basically a perpetual stress test on the business. Things are constantly breaking, whether it be process or you might need to hire people to fill in gaps quicker than you might ordinarily need to do or whatever. But I think the main thing is everyone in the company needs to keep outgrowing themselves, right?
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Redefining what's possible for them, taking on new roles. What does no one tell you about scaling that you wish they'd told you? Scaling culture is harder than scaling software. When you're adding people to the team very, very quickly, there's this dynamic that the culture that you create with the first 20 people is in some ways the strongest the culture is ever going to be.
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Ensuring that that culture stays strong as the company grows, does new things, and new people enter the company is really, really challenging, but in some ways the most important part of building a legendary company.
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Actually, our insight about the market is that human data and talent assessment have actually become the same thing, where I can take you back five years, where when we think of this data labeling or human data stuff, it's essentially a crowdsourcing problem. Let's say Waymo wants a bunch of their images labeled.
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You get a bunch of people across the world to draw boxes around stop signs to make the model better at classifying stop signs. Fast forward to today, and the nature of human data work has changed a lot. Now it's GPT-4.0 or whatever model is not good in a particular domain. So we actually need an expert to make the model better in that domain.
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20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And figuring out who that expert should be is 100% a talent assessment problem and is a perfect application of the platform. With a lot of the labs that we work with, we're able to figure out who are the exceptional people in very, very specific domains and have those people work with the labs.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And the interesting thing about this is that it's essentially a forcing function on our long-term objectives, right? When you think about Mercor building this global, unified labor market, what do we need to make this happen? We need tons of smart people on the platform, right?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
And we need the ability to predict job performance and figure out what those people should be doing, which happens to be the exact set of problems that a lot of AI labs are having.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
It looks exactly the same as placing someone to work at any company. So just like Mercor might work with startups making their first hires or companies hiring in a more traditional full-time capacity, it's the exact same thing for a lot of the large AI labs. They'll hire people through the Mercor platform to essentially help with post-training models.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
Customers keep growing their relationships with us. Net retention is over 100% by a large margin. As long as they keep expanding, it means that we're doing a good job at finding the right people.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC Exclusive: Mercor Raises $100M at a $2BN Valuation: Scaling to $70M in ARR in 24 Months | 9-9-6: 9AM-9PM - 6 Days Per Week: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley | The Future of Programming, Models and Data with Adarsh Hiremath
It's interesting because the model landscape is just changing so quickly. But we leverage a variety of models and have been particularly thrilled with the OpenAI models. Have we always been on OpenAI predominantly?