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
