Ep 68: CEO of Mercor Brendan Foody on Evals Replacing Knowledge Work, AI x Hiring Today & the Future of Data Labeling
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.
Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron · Brendan Foody, Patrick Chase, Jacob Effron
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Show Notes
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