Listen to the First Block podcast on Spotify. To learn more about how Notion is supporting startups, please visit notion.com/startups.
The TL;DR
Find the problem you can't stop thinking about—obsession beats discipline when building for the long haul.
Hire with the highest possible bar for your first 10 people. Those early hires will shape your next hundred employees and are the most important decisions you'll make while scaling. Be incredibly patient and don't compromise.
Focus on building valuable products, not fundraising outcomes. Treat fundraising as an input to creating better user experiences, not as the end goal. Spend as little time as possible on fundraising and get back to customers quickly.
Now is the most exciting time in history to build a company. The gap between what's possible with AI and what's been actualized in the economy is enormous—if there's ever a time to bet on yourself, it's now.
Welcome to First Block, a Notion series where founders from the world’s leading companies tell us about the many “firsts” of their startup journeys. We explore the ups and downs that founders face as they build, and what they’ve learned along the way.
In this episode, we spoke with Brendan Foody, Co-founder and CEO of Mercor. Mercor is an AI-powered recruiting platform that scaled from $1 million to $100 million in revenue run rate in just 11 months, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley.
Brendan shares his journey from selling donuts in eighth grade to building automated hiring solutions, the decision to drop out of college, and how he positioned himself perfectly for the AI talent revolution.
What’s in this episode:
Download Mercor's Hiring Tracker template to streamline your hiring process with candidate tracking, interview management, and essential hiring documents all in one place.
Thought starters for founders
After listening to Brendan's insights, ask yourself:
What problem keeps you up at night thinking about solutions?
Are you compromising on your first 10 hires?
How much time are you spending on fundraising versus customer value?
Read the full transcript
