Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody (CEO of Mercor)
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What is the “era of evals” and why is it the bottleneck for AI progress?
The wealthiest companies in the world are willing to spend whatever it takes to improve model capabilities.
We're entering the era of evals.
We started working with all the top AI labs. What the labs need is a labor marketplace. They actually need extraordinary professionals that can measure model capabilities. You found this pocket maybe the biggest business opportunity in history. We grew from one to four hundred million in revenue run rate in 16 months. Fastest ascent in history. Why is this so valuable? The market is bound by the amount of things. Where humans can do something that models can't. The lab's primary bottleneck to improve models is how they can effectively have some way of measuring what success looks like for the model.
There's a tweet that you retweeted. If you really think about it, we were put on Earth to create reinforcement learning training data.
For labs. It's highly likely that the entire economy will become an RL environment machine, building out all of these worlds and contexts. And I think the narrative in AI over the last three years has almost entirely been one of job displacement. But very few companies and people have talked about this new category of jobs that's being created. I talked to a lot of people about what should I be studying? Where should I be getting better? How can they leverage this technology? Technology to do so much more. We'll give people interviews where we say, use whatever tools are available to build a website and let's see what product you're able to build in an hour.
Today, my guest is Brendan Futi, CEO and co-founder of Mercor. Mercor is the fastest growing company in history to go from $100 to $500 million in revenue. They did this in 17 months, less than a year and a half. Brendan is also the youngest unicorn founder ever. They just raised $100 million at $2 billion valuation. Mercor, if you haven't heard of them, helps AI labs and AI companies. Hire experts to help them train their models using AI. They've never had a customer churn, their net retention is over 1600%, and they're on a nine-figure revenue run rate. In our conversation, we talk about the increasing value and importance of evals, the landscape of AI training companies like Mercore, and why they've become so important and valuable, how Brendan discovered this opportunity, his insights on what product market fit looks like, the quality
Core tenants he's instilled within his organization that have allowed him to build the fastest growing company in history, what people writing evals for labs are actually doing day-to-day, which skills and jobs are gonna last the longest with the rise of AI, why he doesn't think, we'll see AGI or super intelligence anytime soon, and so much more. This episode is incredible. You need to hear this. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 15 incredible products for free for one year, including Lovable, Replet, Bolt, N8, and Linear Superhuman, D Script, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Chappie RD, and Mobbin.
Check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Brendan Foodie. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features, like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered. By WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the “era of evals” and why is it the bottleneck for AI progress?
0:00–8:02
2
How did Brendan discover the massive opportunity in AI evaluation data?
8:02–16:41
3
What strategies did Mercor use to grow from $1 M to $500 M in just 17 months?
16:41–24:17
4
How do experts actually create evals and training data for AI labs?
24:17–32:58
5
Which jobs and skills will remain valuable as AI continues to advance?
32:58–41:31
6
Why does Brendan believe AGI and super‑intelligence are still far off?
41:31–49:16
7
What core values and culture drove Mercor’s rapid success?
49:16–56:50
8
How can listeners get involved with Mercor – hiring, referrals, and collaborations?
56:50–1:06:35
Speakers
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