Summary

Brendan Foody is the Founder and CEO @ Mercor, one of the leading data providers to the largest labs on the planet including OpenAI. In the last two years, Brendan has scaled the company to $1.5BN in ARR and a valuation of $10BN. AGENDA: True or False: Mercor lost Meta and OpenAI as a customer with the hack? Mercor has been poaching competitor talent, pay…

Key takeaways

• Macaw added $300M in net new ARR in 60 days post-security incident, is highly profitable, has never meaningfully burned cash, and is now spending more on AI agent tokens than on employee headcount—signaling a fundamental shift in enterprise cost structure.
• Brandon believes the application software layer has weak defensibility as frontier models rapidly replicate SaaS functionality, while infrastructure and data providers (like Macaw) compound network effects and data moats that are genuinely hard to displace.
• The emerging job category of 'agent trainer'—humans who codify tacit organizational knowledge to train AI agents—will be one of the largest new roles in the economy, as all knowledge work converges on training agents rather than performing repetitive tasks directly.

Why this matters

For B2B investors and enterprise leaders, Macaw's trajectory illustrates that the defensible value in the AI stack is concentrating at the data/infrastructure layer and in forward-deployed services, not in pure software products—forcing a fundamental reassessment of where durable margins and moats will exist as frontier models commoditize the application layer.

Entities

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Show notes

Brendan Foody is the Founder and CEO @ Mercor, one of the leading data providers to the largest labs on the planet including OpenAI. In the last two years, Brendan has scaled the company to $1.5BN in ARR and a valuation of $10BN. AGENDA: True or False: Mercor lost Meta and OpenAI as a customer with the hack? Mercor has been poaching competitor talent, paying them millions? Mercor revenue is not real revenue and is only GMV? 12:56 Would Brendan sell Mercor for $30 billion? 14:23 Why everyone is w

Themes

• openai
• investing