Merge

“I felt like it after we hit a million.”

“It doesn't matter if you're a rockstar engineer, because you wouldn't be a rockstar engineer at Merge.”

“So I don't really believe in doing that. I actually think it's unethical, but there's a lot of things online. And if you're a really good stalker, which I am, you can find anything. You really find it. Everything's on YouTube. Everything is on a podcast. You c…”

“They didn't pay us for the first two months because we wanted to prove ourselves to them. We wanted to show them we would do whatever they wanted and we would really make sure that they were happy.”

“There have been some situations where we've talked to companies where they're like, no, like our founder believes in like we build this in house and we can be uniquely good at it. And obviously I'm biased, but that is just fundamentally not true. There's no on…”

“I think you should not collect revenue and not onboard customers until you know that you are going to get a million of revenue as quickly as possible.”

“If they're totally unengaged, that means it's not a good fit. And that means that you are not solving the problem that they have. And then you should find out what is the problem? Like, why am I not solving that? What is the gap between, like, what you need an…”

“It's a lot of games and marketing. And I thought I understood that, but it's so, so, so, so true. And it's basically a proxy for how good you are at sales.”

“I really view this seed as the debutante ball and you meet with everyone that you can. So you're introducing yourself to the industry as a new founder, as a new company.”

“Like, anyone who is too lazy to outbound, you're just not gonna make it. Like, that's just not, you just gotta get over that. Like, you have to be embarrassed. You have to do, like, all these, like, really awkward things.”

“Yes, exactly 74.5, but”

“So I do nine to nine. I'm in the office, and after I'll, like, hang off my husband, maybe for like an hour, and then I'll, like, code again, like, check my Slack. Weekends, like, I'm definitely online. Some weekends I'm working a lot more, some weekends work a…”

“I think it was like seven months.”

“We had a hundred conversations. So I would cold message random people. I would look for people in products. Design, customer success, founders, I would really reach out to anyone I could try to, literally anyone that had an integrations page and see if they wo…”

“We, and then I think by the time we raised our Series A, we had gone to like, 12 or 13 people.”

“I don't even remember the exact number of engineers that I outbound, but I think it was like 50,000 or so.”

“My co-founder and I, we still think like to get to ten million, you just have to work really hard. That's really it. It really, it sucks. And it's like a lot of paid, but you can just work your way to ten million.”