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Brendan Foody

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2026-06-01
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2026-06-01
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  1. “If I had to choose any, the series B priced in the most, like the furthest ahead of our growth or that or the series A, I think it was probably the series B because both were 100 times revenue, but it's very different to be 100 times revenue when you're at 2.5 million in revenue versus 20 million in revenue. So that was probably the largest one. But obviously both were great investments in hindsight.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “So here's the thing we'd been growing 50% month over month for the prior six months, and I think what none of them really realized was that it would continue for the subsequent 12 plus months. And so then that compounded more and more by September of 2025, or say October, we were at call at 400 million in revenue run rate. And then Felice was like, we want to invest more. And so they gave us a term sheet of $10 billion valuation. We didn't really want to spend much time on a financing because the business was growing 50% month over month. And so we were very preoccupied. And so that was about 25 times. And, you know, the business has almost forex since then.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It just doesn't happen often. Yeah, yeah. Then four months later we met Felisa's and we never would make a slide deck or take investor meetings. And so Felisa sent us an email saying, hey, we know your co-founder Surya really likes Ferraris. So do you want to go racing Ferraris with us? Then I replied and I said, you caught my eye. Tell me more. And they said, we'll meet at the airport in Hayward and go on Iden's private jet to Las Vegas to race Ferrari's around the F1 track. And so I was like, we're available in three weeks on a Sunday. And so we do this. We race Ferrari's. We're at 20 million in revenue. They ask us what valuation do we think makes most sense. And I say one to two billion dollars. So they give us a term sheet at a $2 billion valuation. And at the time, you know, that's 100 times revenue. And everyone thinks that that's a high valuation. Meanwhile, it was an incredible.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “This was Max and Nico. And then at our Series A, the business didn't grow that much from the seed to the Series A, but we found the market was a key differentiation. And we met Victor when we were at one and a half million in revenue run rate in May of 2024. And Victor got super excited initially, I refused to take a second meeting, but then he said, oh, have you ever been in a helicopter? And so Peter took us on the helicopter flight. And benchmark really wanted to work with us. And so by the time that they gave us a term sheet, we were at call at 2.5 million in revenue. And they gave us 250 million dollar post-money valuation.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “That was Siri's eye. So, our seed rod was in September of 2023. We were at Called A Million in Revenue Run Rate, or just shy of that. And I initially didn't want to raise because I wanted to bootstrap the company, but Adarshan Surya's condition on dropping out was that we needed to raise money. And so we met General Catalyst 8 a.m. on his Sunday morning. They gave us term sheet within 36 hours for 2.3 million dollars at a $23 million post-money valuation. So that was pretty reasonable in so far as price went.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Everything that you can do in, say, Google Workspace is how do we cover the full distribution of all of the context, i.e. messages, slacks, slides, Excel sheets, and all of the tasks, prompts, and outputs that correspond to everything that you do in your job. And that applies to every individual and every domain throughout the economy. And so there's this enormous mobilization of hundreds of thousands and soon millions of people to build out the full distribution of everything that you could pass into Google Workspace and everything that you could want out on the other side in every job category throughout the economy.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Well, I would say maybe I'll give it from Mercore's perspective, and then I'll give it from the lab's perspective. Like we tend to be now so good at mobilizing experts that we're able to access pretty much any domain. There's always going to be some degree of like these niche pockets of oncologists or whatever it is that have a particular background, but generally we can fill those fairly quickly. And it's more about people that actually are very acclimated to the frontier of AI because it's the people that both have the expertise in oncology, but also are power users of ChatGPT or Claude that are able to find where the model makes mistakes and help the model learn from those mistakes. And so that's from the Mercore perspective. From the perspective of the labs, it seems like it's all encompassing. It's just like the barrier to automating every”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “It corresponds extremely closely to economic value. So think if you go through the top five domains that we serve, it would be software engineering, it would be finance, medicine, law, consulting, et cetera. And the super long horizon tasks within those. And so I think we're moving away from the paradigm of how do we get an investment banker to prepare a financial model. And moving towards the paradigm of how do we get a banker that can talk with five different colleagues and wait to hear back their responses and prepare an entire slide deck with a deliverable that includes the financial model, the analysis in a multi-week long project. Those are the kinds of tasks that we need to be building to push the frontier of research and evaluation so that those are the capabilities that people are able to use in the models in six to 12 months.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Exactly, very vertically integrated. Well, because so many parts of the downstream signal and form the upstream signal, right? Like we can use the quality checks on how high calibers each of the individual data points to understand exactly what are the types of experts that we should be onboarding to achieve the data that drives the most model improvement. And there's oftentimes this very power law nature of data that drives model improvement and that out of a data set of 10,000 tasks, the top 2,000 tasks will create majority of the value. And so it allows vendors that are extremely high quality to be super differentiated insofar as pricing power because quality is the x factor that becomes dramatically more valuable than any other dimension.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So the revenue is between a 30 and 40 percent gross margin, but the key distinction and why it's not GMV but is revenue is that the experts are actually only one part of the broader value chain that we deliver to customers. So when a customer comes to us, they're generally buying tasks where they would say, hey, they'll pay $1,000 for this task that delivers model improvement. And then we do the end-to-end process associated with how do we find the experts, how do we hire the experts, how do we build the platform that the experts work on so the experts can do the work? How do we have our AI project manager manage the experts to automate all of the coordination of helping to produce this data? How do we have automated quality checks, et cetera, to produce the end product of the tasks that we're delivering for a customer? And so that's the large distinction of how we're powered by a talent network in the same way that Uber.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think there will. I think in most markets, when the markets are so frothy and anyone can get funding and run negative margins, of course, there's going to be this proliferation of companies that pop up. And when markets come back to Earth and there are natural corrections, that's when there's periods of consolidation. And so we view having over 500 million in cash in a super profitable business as a significant asset in allowing us to be prepared for when there is a market correction to make sure that we consolidate market share.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Build is very, very cross applicable, and that's the way that most labs have been scaling out their data quite horizontally. And so for that reason, we are finding that the labs tend to prefer partnering with a very horizontally capable vendor that is able to flex across all of the different verticals and scale extremely quickly rather than working with 100 different vendors that they have to train for the same data shape in a hundred different domains.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's interesting. We're doing a ton of data collection in the physical world as well, especially across skilled domains where you have electricians and mechanics and scientists dropping cameras to their head to record things. I think that there's always going to be some degree of value in some of these like niche vendors that are able to go really deep in a specific vertical. But what we're finding is that there's enormous value to aggregation and economies of scale and that when we have this talent network of over 5 million people that are able to refer their friends, it's just so much easier for us to find the marginal doctor because we have that enormous taunt network that can refer us to their friends. And even more importantly that the kind of data shapes that we would build for a lawyer are often very similar to the kinds of data shapes that we would build for a doctor. And so all of the tooling that we”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The reason is that if a model is able to, for example, read through every message written in Slack over the last six months, the model can presumably structure a table of here all the different customer conversations that happened in the CRM, et cetera. And so I don't expect humans to be doing that type of stuff of how do we structure data, how do we classify it, et cetera. But I do think that humans will do the things that models inherently can't do, such as the TASA knowledge.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Light green part, I think that certainly the models need to have access to data to perform their jobs effectively, but the caveat is that they'll be able to clean the data themselves fairly effectively as reasoning capabilities go up. The thing that humans will need to contribute to is all of the tacit knowledge within the organization that isn't written down because I found that when I try to get agents to do all of these workflows throughout Mercor, there's just an enormous amount of context that lives in people's heads that the agents need to have access to to perform effectively. And so much of that is going to be the new job of employees of how do we codify all this knowledge? How do we train agents so that they're able to perform these tasks effectively across every function in the organization?”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And so I think that there's going to be this enormous paradigm shift as agents enter the workforce and everyone begins to manage them.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “One of the largest things that people underestimate, both in the context of AI labs as well as within the enterprise, is how significant of a job category it is going to be to train agents. Like what we're seeing is that all knowledge work is converging on training agents because it is structurally more efficient to do something once instead of having a customer support representative that is redundantly responding to hundreds of tickets, they're going to train an agent how to do that once instead of having a lawyer that is redundantly doing dozens of similar red lines on commercial contracts. They're going to train an agent how to automate that. And even probably when you're playing around with Claude, you see that there's so many repetitive workflows of how you prepare for a meeting or draft emails or whatever it is where it's just much more efficient for you to train the agent how to do that activity so that you can amortize that over the entire useful life cycle rather than doing it redundantly yourself.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Maybe it's quadruple that we have internal projections that are always much more aggressive that are external projections, but we almost doubled our projections last year.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, the thing I agree with you is about displacement. I agree there's going to be a very significant amount of displacement. But I also think that the economy is becoming much more effective at creating new job categories and allocating new labor. Like a great example is what we do in that now we're paying out over $3 million a day in the fastest job category ever created in history. And I expect that's going to continue growing exponentially from here. And I think that there's going to be so many new job categories created across everything within AI such as training agents for deployed engineering, building data centers, all the way to all of the problems that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to address as a society. Like how do we build solutions to climate change? How do we have more people working on rockets to explore space, et cetera?”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Definitely. Well, even another example on that is on Apex, the Frontier model right now is at about 40% and 12 months ago, the frontier model was 01, which was scoring 1%. And so that's been the progress of the last 12 months. And obviously we expect it to continue and be fairly significant. But I think that the key thing is that everyone underestimates the elasticity for demand and increased productivity in the economy. Ultimately, over the last 250 years, we've increased productivity by 25x, equivalent to automating about 96% of someone's job. And during every technology revolution,”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “To some extent, I believe there's certainly going to be many more jobs in 10 years than there are today, but there's also going to be a lot of job displacement along the way amidst all of these layoffs. I think the most important question is understanding what jobs is AI able to do and what jobs is AI not able to do. And so we're building a ton of initiatives such as the AI productivity index or APEX that are becoming the industry standard and answering that question of measuring across all the different popular job categories that people talking about ranging from consultants to investment in bankers to lawyers to software engineers. What are the actual tasks within those that AI can automate and what are the tasks that it can't?”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “That one is false. I obviously can't speak too much to other acquisition kind of stuff, so I'll reserve any comments on future acquisition questions, though. No, I wouldn't. I mean, ultimately, we've gotten a lot of acquisition interest and we could walk away with, like I could walk away with billions of dollars in cash. The thing is, that's just not what motivates me. Like I'm very motivated by how do we solve this incredibly important problem in the world of how humans fit into the economy. I feel like we have the opportunity to build a legendary company in creating this new category of work and our probability of executing on that vision wouldn't be as high if we weren't an independent company.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So the reason for the article was that someone on our team sent an outbound to some people at Micro One saying that we were hiring a variety of people with these very high signing bonuses. I think one of them said $500,000 is a potential signing bonus. And they took first meetings, but we didn't move forward with offers in anyone. And obviously, the way that gets framed to the press is, oh, these are offers that are going out when there's a giant distinction from one of our employees sending a message to one of their employees versus actually sending out a legal offer letter.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Well, there's other things happening there. Like, obviously, I think that Meta's a unique customer because of the scale acquisition. And so naturally, they're going to work with Scale more. But I don't want to speak too much to the specifics of a customer.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Course. I mean, I think that Meta, currently the relationship is still paused. Every other one of the Frontier Labs has grown their relationship with us since, and the company has been crushing it, but they're the only one that is.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Our relationship with OpenAI is stronger than ever. Obviously, I can't speak too much to specific customer relationships, though.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “When a normal attacker is trying to find vulnerabilities, they can only review so much code and go through a certain portion of it at a human speed bound by the amount of people in their team versus when they're using swarms of agents, they're able to be very exhaustive in reviewing the entire code base, looking at the entire front end, all the different things that they've accessed. And so that has allowed a lot of these attackers to just move much more quickly. And so we've been exploring various collaborations with customers and how we can strengthen their cyber defensive capabilities to hedge against exactly this type of attack as well.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I think so. I mean, we're even seeing this on the customer side where our customers obviously are very focused on how do we improve the model cyber defensive capabilities so that we can have the best AI security engineer that is able to defend every enterprise from all of these attacks. Because in our incident, it was the attacker that used a swarm of coding agents to help get access to the system, as is happening in a lot of these. And so I think there's going to be an enormous boom in AI security engineering tools and various forms of defense that are able to help protect companies against all of the increasing waves of cyber incidents that are just getting started.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “That is exactly what happened. Like, I can even think of one person that's very prominent who's invested in multiple competitors and just like made this tweet about how all of our data was getting accessed by China when it was totally untrue.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Definitely. I mean, I think founders need to pay attention to it. Like, we had an all hands with a company where we just laid out here's exactly what's happening, here's the trajectory of the business, and I think that was very helpful to the entire team. It was definitely annoying that there were all of these people saying things that didn't actually happen. And we couldn't quite speak out against them.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Well, it's interesting because I feel like throughout the lifetime of the business, I have been through a lot of very stressful moments. That was definitely stressful, but it definitely wasn't close to the most stressful one. Seriously. Yeah. I mean, there's been times when, you know, I'm freaking out about making sure we get something right with a customer or whatever it is. But part of it is that there was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business. And so having a thorough understanding of what actually happened and having really strong relationships with customers gave us a lot of confidence that we would get through it, be on the other side, even stronger. And we used to have six values as a company, but we added a seventh value as security to make sure it's very ingrained in the culture. But I think that, yeah, just that confidence that we know what's going on and that there's sort of this.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “What was a Saturday, so I was in the office, and I was talking with our engineering team. And I think the initial thing is, of course, like how are we communicating this to customers and trying to be very proactive about understanding exactly what happened, what was accessed, et cetera, and then how do we communicate this to the experts and just containing it, moving quickly on the comms. And then from there, of course, making sure that we put in place all the right things so that it never happens again.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “So there was an incident. All of the other parts are false, and that we obviously handled it very quickly. We were in touch with customers. We moved incredibly fast at engaging Mandian and a bunch of other security consulting firms. And the company's been crushing it ever since. We've expanded our relationships with all of the frontier labs and added 300 million in net new ARR in the last 60 days.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “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. We have the demand to double overnight. We just don't have the capacity. Like right now, we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee headcount. I think we're seeing in real time that services are getting automated. I could definitely see one of them being a $10 trillion company, maybe even significantly higher.”

    2026-06-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Mercor CEO on Why Application Layer Companies Have No Defensibility, The Model is the Product | Token Spend Will Exceed Headcount Spend in 5 Years | The True Cost of Hiring AI Researchers in the Valley Today with Brendan Foody · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source