Brendan Falk
Co-founder & CEO, Hercules. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@brendanfalk ↗LinkedIn ↗brendanfalk.com ↗
Brendan Falk is the co-founder and CEO of Hercules, an AI app and website builder. He previously co-founded developer tool startup Fig, which was acquired by Amazon Web Services in 2023.
2shows
2appearances
26statements
5resolved
1supported
2contradicted
20%fully supported
Everything Brendan Falk said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Falk: AI cannot solve enterprise messy data because it is a people problem
“I could see a path to AI solving the integrations problem. I really couldn't see a path to AI solving this sort of messy data problem because it's more of a people process problem than it is like an AI software problem.”
Falk: Decagon and Sierra will always outperform generalist enterprise AI builders
“I can just guarantee that Decagon is always going to be better. Sierra is always going to be better because they spend all day, every day thinking about it.”
Falk: The Palantir deployment model fails in AI due to enterprise churn
“This sort of Palantir model really only works if you not, you do a lot of like, you have very low or even negative gross margins in the first year, but then once it's deployed into production, you take the head count off, the margins go up and you have this ni…”
Falk: Consumer AI app builders have better margin potential than developer CLIs
“And so I think that is what enables us to ultimately see a path to actually pretty high gross margins. Whereas the CLI based and the sort of engineering focused ones, I think you're in a tough position because everyone always wants the best model.”
Falk: Enterprise AI services only work at $5M-$10M scale or single-vertical focus
“One is you could keep doing the model, but only go after projects that go up to ten million dollars. I think that's really the only way this actually works or five million dollars, not even at the company level. It has to be the one project that can scale up t…”
Falk: ChatGPT will aggressively enter and replace design prototyping tools
“And candidly, I think that ChatGPT is going to come in and replace a lot of that because that's what they did in a GBT five demo. They were really showing that off. These things are not designed for production. It's just another reason to come to ChatGPT. So I…”
Falk: Hacker News drove 2x to 3x more users than Product Hunt
“Fig was at the top of hack and use basically all day. Like it was a really long day for my co-founder and me, but that got us, I would say double if not triple the number of users from hack and use as opposed to product time.”
Falk: Top VCs like Sequoia and a16z always take 20% equity
“If we go with a big VC, like a Sequoia, an Andreessen, I say goes, if we're fortunate enough to go with one of them, they, they're always taking 20%. Like that's the way they work. So they'll increase the valuation, but they will, no matter what, take 20%.”
Falk: Scoping large custom enterprise contracts requires only marginally more work than small ones
“It's the amount of work for like a 500 K contract versus a million dollar contract versus a five million dollar contract. It's not proportional. It is like, you know, a little bit more work to get a much larger contract. And so it's just far more optimal to go…”
Falk: GitHub stars are a vanity metric like Facebook likes
“GitHub stars is, it's sort of like a like on Facebook. It's a bit of a vanity metric to be honest”
Falk: Developer tool startups make most revenue from enterprise deals, not individuals
“I think a lot of developer, developer tools companies that have done really well have realized that most of their money comes from massive enterprise deals. It's not from, you know, making five dollars here or there from the individual user.”
Fig CEO pledges open-source contributions will remain free forever
“So we aren't selling that exact code. We like our model is some of our stuff is open source, meaning all of that code is public and anyone can contribute. Some of our code is closed. The stuff that we're going to sell is the closed stuff. And so any of the ope…”
Falk: Open-source projects require upfront decision rules to prevent chaos
“I think the most important thing is for you to say upfront, Here is, you know, who makes the final decision at the end of the day. Here are the rules. Cause we don't say that it just turns into chaos.”
Falk: Fig retains over 60% to 70% of seed capital
“We have still have more than 60% or 70% of our money in the bank.”
Falk: Top dev tools like Stripe took 2+ years between Seed and Series A
“You also look at Stripe and a bunch like Vercel, some of these other really big developer tools companies straight after YC, they raised the seed round, but then it took them a long time to raise their series A, raising going from series A to series B. That wa…”
Fig will remain free for individuals and charge teams over 10 people
“For individuals, figs always going to be free for teams after like 10 plus people, we're going to start charging.”
AWS has about 20,000 private equity-backed customers
“And what's interesting is Amazon has about AWS has about 20,000 customers that are backed by PE firms.”
Falk: Zeus originally targeted Global 2000 companies for $5M-$10M contracts
“And so ended up leaving Amazon, starting this company, Zeus, And, you know, the idea, pretty simple. Number one, we would only go after the global 2000. That was very, very deliberate. Two is we are, we were building very custom software. So the idea was we wa…”
Falk: Zeus pivoted away from enterprise AI transformations within six months
“And that's that was the key pitch that we started with. And obviously we pivoted away from it about six months later.”
AWS imposed a two-year non-compete clause during its Fig acquisition
“When we got acquired by AWS, we actually had a non-compete for our product for two years. And so I've got 12 days until that non-compete expires.”
Fig ranked top three in Q3 on the Ross Index
“And in Q three last year, I think we were number two or number three. And then Q four last year, we were like In the top 10, I think maybe 10th.”
Falk: Fig's entire team consists exclusively of engineers
“We're all engineers. We're a developer tool. So we have to be coding every day. And I think it will be like that for a while.”
Falk: Fig reaches tens of thousands of monthly active users
“We're in the tens of thousands, like our monthly active users are in the tens of thousands at this point, but it's growing super quickly. Like this time last year, we're almost at nothing.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Brendan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Hercules | 1 | 15 | 25% 1/4 | full record on Top Founders → |
 LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Hercules | 1 | 11 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Latent Space → |