The Draft
The founders Brendan, Adarsh, and Surya learned their first lesson in high school debate.
They spent their youth traveling the country, arguing at 400 words per minute, winning national titles. In that world, arguments weren't won on merit or truth alone. They were won on technicalities, speed, and sheer force of will. They learned that truth is malleable. They learned that victory is technical. Nothing was handed to you by the judge; you had to seize it from your opponent.
The lesson repeated when they started Mercor.
Most Boston VCs ignored them. They were college freshman with no particular background or pedigree. They were pitching a manual, unsexy dev shop for Indian engineering talent. The establishment didn't invite them in.
These experiences sowed the seeds of the company's philosophy: Nothing is given. Everything is taken.
David vs Goliath
January 2024. Mercor is a dev shop. Scale AI offers them a contract for Indian engineers to label coding data. Most companies would celebrate. Revenue & Validation!
But the founders looked at the deal and saw a weakness. Scale was just arbitrage. Mercor owned the supply (talent). The labs owned the demand (models). Scale was just a tax in the middle.
The realization was dangerous. To act on it meant attacking a $5 billion incumbent. Scale had the brand, the war chest, the army. Mercor had nothing to lose.
They declared war on Goliath.
Total War
To fight a giant, you mobilize everything.
True to their roots, they designed a machine that defied the sun. A massive engineering operation in India handled the volume. A lean, elite US team handled the command. When the US slept, India fought. When India slept, the US commanded.
In a war, you rarely discuss the details of the plan. You focus on the end result. They didn't pitch "Data Labeling." They pitched a Talent Marketplace. "Powering the next billion jobs."
Whether it was a mask or a belief, it worked. Mercor marketed themselves as a miracle of efficiency: one of the fastest growing startups ever, with only 30 full-time employees.
A unit of Spartans. They filtered for people who wanted to solve global unemployment but were willing to grind on data pipelines to do it.
In a commodity war, you do not win on tech. You win on throughput. If you stop grinding, you lose the contract.
996 wasn't a culture choice. It was a market necessity.
The General
Napoleon once said, "A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon."
He understood that men do not die for a paycheck. They die for a story.
Brendan Foody, the 21-year-old CEO, understood this just as clearly.
He framed the work as a crusade. He dropped screenshots of Scale churning. He quoted researchers raving about our data. He shared a Blind post where Alexandr Wang himself praised Mercor's intensity.
Every single message, podcast appearance, and tweet was designed to send the message that we were winning the war.
I realized then that leadership is not management. It is myth-making. He convinced a room of 20-somethings that they weren't just working late; they were out-executing an empire. They were part of history.
The Trenches
But glory has a tax.
Inside the bunker, you are ammo. We fire you at the enemy. When you are spent, we load the next round.
The churn was visceral. The roster was reinvented every quarter. If the mission changed — Talent Marketplace to Evals to RL economy - there was a revolving door of employees coming in and going out.
Politics ran the office. 9 AM standups. Weekly performance reviews. A paranoid, toxic internal market where you were either killing it or you were dying.
Then the spell broke. After a board meeting, the "Marketplace" mission was shelved. A chilling realization washed over the eng org. We weren't changing history. We were building internal tools for 30 operations people. The killers realized they were cogs. The fire turned to "vesting and resting."
But it worked. Mercor went from $1M to $100M run rate in 12 months. A $2 billion valuation. Later, $500M. A $10 billion valuation, making the founders the youngest self-made billionaires in history.
The Spoils of War
Mercor is a case study in the effectiveness of War.
If you want to build a decacorn in 18 months, this is the playbook. You mobilize. You radicalize. You execute.
But War is a mechanism that benefits the Generals. The Founders walked away with the spoils.
War works. It burns everything you have to give, but it burns brighter than anything else.