Mercor

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We can't spend money fast enough to service all of the demand that we have.”

“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 …”

“Well, in our Apex benchmarks, we're getting closer to around 50% of Long Horizon workflows. Top models are scoring around around that much.”

“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…”

“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.”

“We made a tool that's maximally flexible, has all sorts of, we had, like, hundreds of different projects running on it. That's just chaos to manage, and what we needed to do sooner was to put guardrails on the type of services that we support, and work closer …”

“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 …”

“I'm proud that of the people I work closest with on my teams, I've only had attrition to founding. And we've had quite a bit of it.”

“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…”

“We've moved away from take-home assignments. We do one take-home assignment, which is, like, can you just, like, use an agent to go, you're on your own for a bit of time, go use an agent, you know, give, produce this artifact for me, and we'll look at it.”

“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…”

“As the headcounts increased, you know, like more than 10 X in the last year, we just want to be careful not to grow one faster than the other.”

“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…”

“It's the direction we have been heading, which has reduced concentration, and it's the direction that we'll continue to head as every enterprise begins to have human data work for their proprietary use cases.”

“The data types also change very frequently. So we're, we've moved from supervised fine tuning to preference ranking to Rubric based annotation to now RL environments across a whole bunch of different modalities.”

“The data type that's growing the fastest for us is environments.”

“We see very Rapidly increasing demand for cyber defensive capabilities via data, and very interesting data types”

“Evals and training data are the primary bottleneck to model performance right now.”

“I think that real world, like physical data is going to grow significantly over the next three years.”

“Probably the same answer as before in that, like, the three years out opportunity of robotics.”

“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…”

“The top expert contractors at every data company, they're all making seven figures a year. Which is pretty crazy since people thought of data labeling as a 10 dollar an hour task, and now you have people making millions of dollars a year, because they're actua…”

“Right now, we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee headcount.”

“There was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business.”

“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.”

“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.”

“False. Our relationship with OpenAI is stronger than ever.”

“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.”

“That's not true.”

“That one is false.”

“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.”

“On Apex, the Frontier model right now is at about 40%, and 12 months ago the Frontier model was a one, which was scoring one percent.”

“Now we're paying out over three million dollars a day and the fastest job category ever created in history.”

“In 12 months time, that's probably about triple that.”

“When I try to get agents to do all of these workflows throughout Mercure, there's just an enormous amount of context that lives in people's heads that the agents need to have access to perform effectively.”

“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 strapping cameras to their head to record things.”

“When we have this talent network of over five 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 talent network that can refer us to their friends.”

“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 a hundred different vendors that they have to train f…”

“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.”

“The, we burnt a half a million dollars after our seed round. And then from there, we've pretty much been profitable ever since. We have more cash than we've ever raised.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And so it allows vendors that are extremely high quality to be super differentiated in so far as pricing power, because quality is the X factor that becomes dramatically more valuable than any other dimension.”

“And it's more about people that actually are very acclimated to the frontier of AI, because it's the people that understand, 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 mis…”

“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…”

“They gave us a term sheet within 36 hours for 2.3 million dollars at a twenty three million dollar post-money valuation.”

“We're at twenty 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 two billion dollar valuation.”

“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.”

“Like we have the demand to Double overnight. We just don't have the capacity.”

“We maybe can't double prices. We could double capacity. We could probably increase prices by 30% without much of an impact.”

“We're building out an eval set that measures how effectively agents can build end-to-end SaaS applications, where twenty-twenty-five was the year of how do you get a model to make a PR and a code base, and twenty-twenty-six is the year of how do you get the mo…”

“Now we have an AI project manager that just completed its first project managing that entire thing end to end, where it's able to hire the experts. It's able to answer their questions. It's able to build the annotation tool using its coding tools within our pl…”

“We have our interview question agent that where we've done over five million interviews and ask all the questions in the interviews.”

“We've had Three employees that have founded companies worth in excess of a hundred million dollars.”

“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.”

“I genuinely think that most B to B companies are going to get hit worse than Merkur.”