The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 114 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Nitski: Mercor adds millions of dollars in cash to bank weekly
“It doesn't annoy me, no, because the, you know, we end every week with millions more in the bank, right? So it's funny how you can have, I've been at other Companies where I've seen, you know, interesting financial engineering and accounting, and people can ha…”
Meta Offered an AI Candidate $20 Million Per Year in Cash
“There was someone I was hiring the other day, and he had an offer for twenty million dollars in cash per year from TBD, and like that's the kind of stuff we run into on a regular basis.”
Foody: Investor Spread False Rumors of China Accessing Mercor Data
“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.”
Stebbings: Mercor hit $500M revenue run rate in 17 months
“Now this company has gone to five hundred million in revenue, faster than anyone else, I believe, in history. I think it was 17 months.”
Mercor scaled from $1M to $500M run rate in 17 months
“We scaled the business from one to five hundred million in the last 17 months, which is the fastest revenue growth of all time. One month faster than Cursor's time.”
Reyes: AI data companies like Mercor are undervalued by venture investors
“These data companies, like you mentioned Mercore, yes, they sell data, but every person at that company gets how AI is going to look much clearer than the average human, and that makes them worth significantly more than, you know, even what investors will say.”
Lemkin: VC funding accounting and law firms will not produce tech-scale outcomes
“I just don't believe you can throw a bunch of venture money into accounting firms or law firms. And magically turn them into the next Mercur or hugging face or any of these things.”
Stebbings: AI data providers Handshake, Mercor, and Surge each surpass $1B revenue
“There's so many providers at a billion dollars plus in revenue. Handshake's over a billion. McCaw's over a billion. Serge is over a billion.”
Nitski: Specialized AI models will require custom enterprise training data
“I buy it. I think it's also self-serving towards Mercore, in that we think that every specialized model will need enterprise specific eval and training data to show the model how it's performing in its setting, and I think it depends on I think the diversity a…”
Nitski: Mercor shifts to senior hires as AI obsoletes junior skills
“We've biased towards more senior hires. Who are better at understanding what drives the business forward, finding, kind of, like, really crocking how we operate, how we make more revenue, how we deliver better services to our customers, how we keep our custome…”
Nitski: Teams must never delegate core decision-making to AI
“I want very careful never to delegate judgment or decision making to models because it's, they make you think that it's doing the right thing, but You have to be paranoid with them still, right? You still have to, like, double check everything, and that's what…”
Nitski: Robotics adoption will scale like driverless cars, not ChatGPT
“Yeah, I think so, but I think it might play out similar to driverless cars, where it's really hard to scale physical things as opposed to software, so it might be more of a, more of like a Waymo robo-taxi-cruise type moment than a ChatGPT moment, but I think t…”
Nitski: Open-source AI does not cannibalize frontier data demand
“I wouldn't say that open source model improvements cannibalize our core business because data is most valuable on the frontier of model performance, so each of our customers has their own unique goals and is purchasing eval and training data sets To fill gaps …”
Nitski: AI is driving higher PM-to-engineer headcount ratios
“So the trend that we see is we're, as a product team, constantly fighting to reduce surface area and simplify things, and we also see a higher ratio of PMs to ENG because engineering is less bottlenecked.”
Foody: Mercor operates at 30% to 40% gross margin
“So the revenue is between a 30 and 40% gross margin, but the key distinction and why it's not GMV, but it's revenue, is that the experts are actually only one part of the broader value chain that we deliver to customers.”
Foody Rejects $30B Sale Despite Receiving Significant Acquisition Interest
“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.”
Foody discloses Mercor holds over $500M in cash and is highly profitable
“And so we view having over five hundred million in cash and a super profitable business as a significant asset and allowing us to be prepared for when there is a market correction to make sure that we consolidate market share.”
Mercor Attacker Used Swarm of AI Coding Agents to Breach Systems
“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.”
Meta Paused Mercor Relationship After Hack While Other Labs Expanded
“I mean, I think that Meta you know, like, 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 paused, which is public.”
Mercor spends more on AI agent tokens than employee headcount
“Right now, we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee headcount.”
Foody: Top 20 Percent of AI Tasks Generate Majority of Model Value
“And there's oftentimes this very power law nature of data that drives model improvement in that out of a data set of 10,000 tasks, the top 2000 tasks will create majority of the value.”
Foody: Millions of people will soon be hired to train AI on workplace tasks
“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 cate…”
Foody: Mercor did not lose OpenAI as a customer after hack
“False. Our relationship with OpenAI is stronger than ever.”
Felicis Offered Mercor $10B Valuation at $400M ARR
“By September of 20, 25 or say October, we were at called four hundred million in revenue run rate. And then Felisa's was like, we want to invest more. And so they gave us a term sheet at a ten billion dollar valuation.”
Mercor hit a nine-figure run rate and quadrupled post-Scale deal
“We were already at a nine-figure revenue run rate, and the company quadrupled since the scale acquisition.”
Academic AI benchmarks are wholly disconnected from enterprise needs
“One of the largest inefficiencies in all of AI research is that the evals that people have been going on Of humanity's last exam and PhD level reasoning or Olympiad math are wholly disconnected from the outcomes that consumers and enterprises actually care abo…”
Human AI data TAM is bounded by human-model capability gaps
“The total addressable market is limited by the amount of things that humans are better at than models.”
AI data value follows a power law driven by top contributors
“The outcomes of data and the people that contribute to it are extremely power lot, similar to a company where if you have a hundred people on a project, oftentimes majority of the model improvement is coming from the top 10 to 20% of people, right? Just like s…”
Mercor's customer concentration breakdown is similar to Nvidia's
“Our largest customer, I can't share the exact percentage, but the breakdown is relatively similar to Nvidia.”
AI labs eventually consolidate almost all human data spend to Mercor
“We've definitely found those stories of customers where I think they start out multi-vendoring, working with a bunch of different customers, with different vendors, but ultimately get to the point where they realize that they're going to be making a trade-off …”
Mercor pays $95 per hour compared to $30 at Scale and Surge
“Our average marketplace pay rate is 95 dollars an hour to put that in frame of reference, scale and search generally pay about 30 dollars an hour.”
Lazarte: Mercor grew from $1M to $100M revenue in 11 months
“Brex went from like zero to a hundred million dollars in revenue in like in 18 months after launch, and Mercor went from like a million dollars in revenue when I invested to like over a hundred million, like in 11 months.”
Hiremath: Mercor has no sales team outside the co-founders
“One interesting thing about Mercore is we don't have a sales team. There is not a single person who works on sales at Mercore outside of, you know, the founders.”
Hiremath: Mercor Promoted 996 Schedule to Protect Sundays from Work
“The only reason we actually just floated those numbers out is because we didn't want our team working on Sundays.”
Hiremath: Mercor aims to significantly outperform expert human hiring managers
“For us, it's hiring and Beating the expert hiring manager by a large margin.”
Hiremath: Human data labeling and talent assessment are now the same problem
“Actually, our insight about the market is that human data and talent assessment have actually become the same thing, right?”
Hiremath: Learning Programming Is Still Essential, Shifting to Natural Language Abstraction
“My take is that programming is actually more important today And 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 lan…”
Hiremath: Next era of SaaS will replace entire manual services end-to-end
“I think what we consider SaaS will change, right? In the sense that the next era of SaaS will be replacing entire services, right? You know, whether it's the end-to-end process of a recruiting agency like Mercor or another, you know, different service or that,…”
Hiremath: Mercor's entire recruitment and payout pipeline is completely automated
“So on our end, the entire process is automated. So 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 in…”
Stebbings backed Mercor at a $2B-$3B valuation but passed at $20B
“I'm in McCaw and I think we did it at, like, two or three billion. My memory should be better, but I'm older than you. And I didn't do the latest round at, you know, whatever, twenty billion dollars”
Nitski: Mercor team is shifting away from Figma to Claude
“To be honest, I let the team do whatever is best for them, and this is a trend I've just observed amongst almost everybody, is that cloud design has done a great job. People really like using it, it's easy to use, and we've just had a natural movement towards …”
Nitski: Robotics is the most underhyped tech opportunity three years out
“Probably the same answer as before in that, like, the three years out opportunity of robotics.”
Nitski: Mercor cannot spend money fast enough to meet customer demand
“We can't spend money fast enough to service all of the demand that we have.”
Nitski: Evals and training data are AI's primary bottleneck
“Evals and training data are the primary bottleneck to model performance right now.”
Foody: Mercor has demand to double overnight but lacks capacity
“Like we have the demand to Double overnight. We just don't have the capacity.”
Foody: Mercor daily payouts will triple to $9M in 12 months
“In 12 months time, that's probably about triple that.”