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.

 

(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

Jacob is an AI investor at Redpoint Ventures. He's led Redpoint's investments in companies like Abridge, Physical Intelligence & Legora. Follow Jacob on Twitter (@jacobeffron).

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