YouSaid · the spoken record

Adarsh Hiremath

lines on the record: 59
first: 2025-02-20
most recent: 2025-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 More Corps creates for AI agents and roughly focus on just the jobs for people, create a couple dozen jobs for each person. Mercoris created 100 billion jobs and has built the unified labor marketplace, meaning that Anytime company wants to hire a person for a specific job or task, they do it through Mercor. And anytime a candidate wants to consider a company for a specific job or task, they do it through Mercor. And Mercor is able to solve the matching problem across every role, across every company in a seamless way.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we achieve AGI or sort of 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, research has been automated to some extent. I broadly put that in the bucket of AGI.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say just how hard it would be to build a business like this. I told you, you know, back when we decided to start McCorps, it was like a complete emotional decision where Suri just looked at me and said, hey man, how hard could this be? 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 started 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. So I should probably stop that”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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?”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting. I've had this conversation with some members of the record 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 I had dreams of being a basketball player a while ago. Definitely not what I do today. But one person who I think really embodies that winning mentality is LeBron. And I like him a lot.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the most underrated and undervalued.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it gets really dangerous when people raise the money and then think that they just have to spend it immediately because they raise 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. We just want to make sure that we have a balance sheet that is kind of commensurate with that long term.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep. So the new fundraise was led by Felisas with other amazing investors, including GC, Benchmark, and others participating as well.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 really, really excited by.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's it, yeah. And yeah, we don't enjoy fundraising. 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 laser focused on that. And sometimes it just makes sense to do the rest.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eight figures in revenue, right? And we were just like, okay, let's be heads down. But just like we felt with benchmark, we wanted to be in business with Sindhip and Felice and the amazing team there, which made it a no-brainer.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting because we again weren't focused on fundraising. We had built a business that was doing a lot in revenue. We're paying out tens of millions to”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way it went down was Brendan had the initial chat with Victor, and then afterwards Brendan was like, okay, gonna get back to work. Afterwards, Victor asked Brendan if he'd ever been on a helicopter. And Brendan said, no. Before you 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. You know, going back to the example about benchmark, someone introduced Brendan to Victor. Brendan said we were heads down. And then Victor convinced Brendan to have a conversation with him. And then the rest was history from there.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At one point, Brendan Surrey and I all thought that chat was the future of all UI. So one of the initial iterations of the Mercor product was just built around a chat interface. Like there was no other way to hire people unless you use the Mercord chatbot because we were so bullish on chat. I think we've come around to that. 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 know, you clicking a button to hire someone. It would be you telling the chat bot to hire the person. I think it's possible down the line, but we may have mistimed a little bit.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, and that's exactly why we do in person in San Francisco. Brendan Surrey and I all get super energized by being around people. A lot of our best ideas from McCorps 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe running our entire internal hiring process for McCor 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. We're getting there. And that's just super, super exciting for us.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like 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?”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question, and I would break it down in two categories. So, one is the network effect of a marketplace that you might see in a labor marketplace like Uber, where every additional company that hired Through Mercer Core strengthens the marketplace and every additional candidate on Mercor strengthens the marketplace as well because there's like a higher pool of really, really exceptional people to choose from. And the second network effect or like data flywheel is around this job.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what we consider SAS will change. The next era of SAS will be replacing entire services, whether it's the end-to-end process of a recruiting agency like Mercor or another different service that is incredibly manual and incredibly repeatable.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 marketplaces and companies like Meta and Airbnb that have built these really, really strong network effects will be the ones that thrive.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 like 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. 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 we can define as programming at a different level of abstraction, programming in English is going to be super important.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the reason we started with India is because our parents immigrated from India, Surrey and I. So they went to these amazing schools. So we started these recruiting campaigns from those schools specifically. 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. 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. But if you fast forward today, actually the number one place that workers on the Mercor platform who have jobs through us are from is actually the United States.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It all comes back to quality. 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 Mercore, there's a huge difference between the top 0.1% and then the 80th percentile person. 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On our end, the entire process is automated. This is everything from a candidate hearing about Mercor and going on to the Mercor 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. That entire process is automated.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One interesting thing about Mercourt, 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 Mercor from other people who have hired through Mercor and then reach out to us. And then we go from there. So right now it's more of a bandwidth thing than any tactical or coordinated sales motion, I would say.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I give it to the AI, the AI takes it to completion. 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe we could take a step back. If we reach the point a couple 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, 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 some specific hobby. And we're always going to need to fill in the gaps, particularly in that long till. And Harry, the other thing I'll say is I think people are really, really in this mindset of like this Unidecirectional relationship between humans and AI, right? Where I can't do something.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of it will be human data going forward. I think a great example of this is EVALS. EVALS remodels definitionally have to be outside of model capability. In order to see whether 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. 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Across each of these use cases, I think these companies will need to make their models better for their own purposes.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Mercore platform to essentially help with post training models.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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 the AI labs are having.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 today and the nature of human data work has changed a lot. Now it's GPT 40 or whatever model is not good in a particular domain. So we actually need an expert to make the model better in that domain 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 know, 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? Redefining what's possible for them, taking on new roles.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not something unique to Mercor. It's like all the success 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 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, 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.”
2025-02-20 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source