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Lenny's Podcast / episode intelligence

Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody (CEO of Mercor)

18 Sept 2025 19 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Brendan FoodyLenny Rachitsky

Claim mix

belief 7recommendation 6prediction 3evaluation 2commitment 1

Evidence policy

Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

Claim ledger

The useful parts, with receipts.

19 published records

01 / recommendation

Recommends In Order, High Output Management. Recommends Zero to One. Recommends Shoe Dog.

“Let's see. I would say In Order, High Output Management is a phenomenal book on running companies. Second is Zero to One, which of course is a classic. And then third is Shoe Dog, where I just find it to be a really inspirational story. What is a recent movie or TV show I've really enjoyed? I really liked Oppenheimer. My favorite TV show of all time is Suits. So I know not not recent, but if I had to choose a recent one, probably Oppenheimer.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

05 / belief

Daniel, who joined us, was previously scaled two consumer apps to over 100,000 users and all sorts of just like extraordinary backgrounds of our first 10 hires. And I think that that initial talent density shaped so much of what the rest of the org looks like as you scale it up.

“Daniel, who joined us, was previously scaled two consumer apps to over 100,000 users and all sorts of just like extraordinary backgrounds of our first 10 hires. And I think that that initial talent density shaped so much of what the rest of the org looks like as you scale it up.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

07 / belief

There's just it feels like there's unlimited demand for the industry. And I think Marc in recent read about this recently, that software is the most elastic industry of all, where when we increase productivity, there's so much more that will be built.

“There's just it feels like there's unlimited demand for the industry. And I think Marc in recent read about this recently, that software is the most elastic industry of all, where when we increase productivity, there's so much more that will be built.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

09 / belief

I think that previously it might have been more softer skills, but now a lot of the labs are focused on their business models of what are the economically valuable capabilities that drive revenue and leaning a lot into these professional domains.

“I think that previously it might have been more softer skills, but now a lot of the labs are focused on their business models of what are the economically valuable capabilities that drive revenue and leaning a lot into these professional domains.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

12 / recommendation

I think like if I had to distill it into advice for founders, one thing I've realized is that I spent a lot of time trying to force product market fit.

“I think like if I had to distill it into advice for founders, one thing I've realized is that I spent a lot of time trying to force product market fit.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

13 / recommendation

Tying to the point around initiative and that you can just do things, I encourage everyone, especially with AI and it being so much easier to build, just take the initiative to go out and build products and talk with customers and take that leap of faith because I think that that is in so many ways the largest barrier to more innovation in the economy in any way that we can support that.

“Tying to the point around initiative and that you can just do things, I encourage everyone, especially with AI and it being so much easier to build, just take the initiative to go out and build products and talk with customers and take that leap of faith because I think that that is in so many ways the largest barrier to more innovation in the economy in any way that we can support that.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

14 / prediction

skill, but it's being good with AI, using AI to become more, become better at what you're already doing. This reminds me of Elon's whole thing with Neuralink, which if I don't know if this is how he put it, but the way I've always heard it is he wanted to build Neuralink because in the future, when AGI and super intelligence is around, we need a way to compete.

“skill, but it's being good with AI, using AI to become more, become better at what you're already doing. This reminds me of Elon's whole thing with Neuralink, which if I don't know if this is how he put it, but the way I've always heard it is he wanted to build Neuralink because in the future, when AGI and super intelligence is around, we need a way to compete.”
Speaker
Lenny Rachitsky
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

15 / recommendation

um you know just getting word of mouth that the people that have worked with us at other businesses want to keep working with us um and leaning into creating those great experiences and so that's where i spend all my time and i think that some founders can get caught up and like how do they get really good at marketing before they've figured out the thing that really drives um a lot of customer love um and creates the six star experiences that um you're used to building

“um you know just getting word of mouth that the people that have worked with us at other businesses want to keep working with us um and leaning into creating those great experiences and so that's where i spend all my time and i think that some founders can get caught up and like how do they get really good at marketing before they've figured out the thing that really drives um a lot of customer love um and creates the six star experiences that um you're used to building”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

16 / prediction

We need evals for that to effectively reward it. And I think that That road to improving models will last for as long as there is anything in the economy that humans can do, which models can't, and be a huge portion of what the future of work looks like.

“We need evals for that to effectively reward it. And I think that That road to improving models will last for as long as there is anything in the economy that humans can do, which models can't, and be a huge portion of what the future of work looks like.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

17 / evaluation

We just knew from that point forward before we even dropped out that the market was about to change radically and we needed to be at the frontier of that. And so then fast forward a few months, one of the crowdsourcing players came to us and actually used our platform to hire over a thousand people where this is very interesting experience because we started getting flooded with support tickets about how those people weren't getting paid.

“We just knew from that point forward before we even dropped out that the market was about to change radically and we needed to be at the frontier of that. And so then fast forward a few months, one of the crowdsourcing players came to us and actually used our platform to hire over a thousand people where this is very interesting experience because we started getting flooded with support tickets about how those people weren't getting paid.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

18 / evaluation

And then I could talk more about my high school business as well, which was a more significant scale. But I think the takeaway from that was just like, you can just do things like so many people have ideas, but the barrier to more companies being built, I think is just initiative and taking the steps to build the product or experience that customers want and investing the time and the ambition to scale that up.

“And then I could talk more about my high school business as well, which was a more significant scale. But I think the takeaway from that was just like, you can just do things like so many people have ideas, but the barrier to more companies being built, I think is just initiative and taking the steps to build the product or experience that customers want and investing the time and the ambition to scale that up.”
Speaker
Brendan Foody
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast
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