HOW MERCOR BUILT A $20B MARKETPLACE WITH $71 AND A GOOGLE FORM

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Mercor says it crossed a $2 billion annualized revenue run rate after doubling in four months, making it one of the fastest-growing AI companies. It's always good to see what a company like that actually looked like in the beginning. In this case, it was a software agency finding engineers through IIT coding clubs, Facebook ads, and hackathons with a $71 prize pool. When clients asked to hire those engineers, the founders ran the marketplace through WhatsApp, Google Sheets, and PandaDoc. GPT-4 scoring and the AI interviewer came later, once that manual process started to break.