Mercor

WIP Writeup.

Mercor is the combination of when you get a few founders with insane pedigrees, who know how to leverage them, and insane talent density.

Admittedly, a lot of Mercor's rocketship success owes itself to tailwinds nobody saw - the explosion of data infrastructure spending in 2023 far outpaced Scale AI's capacity and models themselves found PMF without significant investment was needed in vertical specific tooling. Nevertheless, being able to capture a lot of this spend, "consulting-ish" and "non-recurring" as it seemed at first, was a way to build a reputation as a trusted vendor for these "hyperspender" labs.

Those that are looking for traditional tech moats in the original mission of early 2000s venture are probably the most bearish on Mercor today. Mercor is just the quintessential example of an AI-native killer team with access to insane talent pipelines, who were building a product and suddenly had access to pivot into one of the largest infrastructure spend tailwinds in history.