About this episode
Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, a company building the infrastructure for AI-native labor markets. Mercor’s platform is already used by top AI labs to label data, evaluate human and AI candidates, and make performance-driven hiring decisions. They’re operating at the intersection of recruiting, evals, and foundation model development—helping companies shift from intuition to measurable prediction. Brendan and his team recently raised $100M and are working with some of the most advanced players in the AI ecosystem today. (0:00) Intro(1:17) State of AI in Talent Evaluation(1:54) Improvements in AI Models(4:07) Mercor Background and Mission(5:09) AI Use Cases in Hiring(13:43) Data Labeling Landscape(16:48) Expanding Beyond Coding(18:39) Company Vision and Market Strategy(21:11) Meeting with xAI(23:47) Does Mercor Use Their Own Product?(25:41) Exploring Multimodal Capabilities(28:03) Skills for the Future: Embracing AI(29:29) The Demand for Software Engineers(34:55) Foundation Model Landscape(38:42) AI Regulations(39:57) Quickfire With your co-hosts: @jacobeffron - Partner at Redpoint, Former PM Flatiron Health @patrickachase - Partner at Redpoint, Former ML Engineer LinkedIn @ericabrescia - Former COO Github, Founder Bitnami (acq’d by VMWare) @jordan_segall - Partner at Redpoint
