Brendan Foody

ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry wrote in October 2025 that he and his two co-founders are Bay Area natives who grew up around tech and are all children of software engineers; his mother worked on MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry’s real estate team, and his father founded a graphics interface company in the 1990s before turning to advising startups.⁠[1]

A profile published in July 2026 by FelicisFelicisFelicis (whose funds and earlier brand use the name Felicis Ventures) is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded in 2006 by former Google product manager Aydin Senkut; it has invested in companies including Shopify, Canva and Adyen.Open the full entry, an investor in Mercor, writes that as a child he was always on the hunt for business opportunities: he resold Safeway donuts that cost $5 a dozen for $2 apiece, and at middle school dances he bought popular items and sold them at a markup. “I called them my little startups,” he says. “My parents called them my schemes.”⁠[2]

He attended Bellarmine College Preparatory, an all-boys school in San Jose, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, where on the speech and debate team he got to know Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha, with whom he later co-founded Mercor. The Felicis profile writes that he and Adarsh Hiremath met in a rhetoric class in their freshman year; Forbes writes that Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath met at age 10 competing in elementary school debate tournaments and met him on the high school debate team.⁠[2][1][3][4]

Contrary Research’s report writes that the three were teammates on the school’s nationally ranked speech and debate team; KTVU wrote in March 2025 that the principal, Rod Jemison, said the three had been captains of the team. Gazetteer SF wrote in May 2026 that Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha won three major national championships as a team, while he did not win any titles. The Felicis profile writes that he enjoyed the verbal parts of debate and was a natural talker. KTVU wrote in November 2025 that the school’s principal said the three had kept volunteering as debate coaches after leaving the school.⁠[3][4][5][2][6]

Forbes writes that one of his first ventures, at 16 and in high school, was a company that got his friends promotions on Amazon Web ServicesAmazon Web ServicesAmazon Web Services (AWS) is the cloud computing business of Amazon. Launched in July 2002, it made its public debut with the Amazon S3 storage service on March 14, 2006, and has since added hundreds of services, including Amazon EC2; its segment net sales were about $46.0 billion in the third quarter of 2026.Open the full entry, charging them $500 each. The page of TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry’s Equity (TechCrunch podcast)Equity (TechCrunch podcast)Equity is a TechCrunch podcast launched in 2017, covering startups, venture capital and the business of technology through reporter discussions and guest interviews.Open the full entry episode describes this as “AWS credit consulting in high school”; his bio on TechCrunch’s author page says he pursued entrepreneurship by starting a cloud consulting business in high school.⁠[1][7][8]

The Felicis profile writes that during Covid he launched a company that built software interfaces for startups so they could better interact with AWS servers; Adarsh Hiremath joined the effort and says, “I got drawn to startups in part because Brendan roped me in.”⁠[2]

After graduating from high school in 2021, he and Surya Midha enrolled at Georgetown University, while Adarsh Hiremath went to Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[3][6]

An article published by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in March 2023 writes that he founded Seros in November 2021 with the aim of “building the next generation of personal computer infrastructure in the cloud,” and that he wanted to build the first consumer-facing virtual machine; the article writes that Seros had lowered the cost of accessing a powerful computer by 90%. It also writes that in 2015 he visited Myanmar and was struck that many people there had smartphones but no access to personal computers.⁠[9]

The article writes that Seros had earlier won the $5,000 top prize of the Georgetown Ventures and Values Competition.⁠[9]

The Hoya wrote in April 2022 that Mercor was co-founded in January 2022 by him, Surya Midha (SFS ’25) and Adarsh Hiremath, then a first-year at Harvard University, listing him as “MSB ’25” and noting that the three had attended the same high school in San Jose; Contrary Research’s report writes that Mercor was founded in January 2023 by him, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha; Forbes writes that the three founded Mercor in 2023. Contrary Research’s report writes that as 19-year-old sophomores the three noticed the inefficiency of global hiring, especially of technical talent outside the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, and that he attended a hackathon in São Paulo, Brazil, where he realized that they could match companies with skilled engineers abroad, handle the logistics and take a cut of the fees companies pay the engineers. The Felicis profile writes that the hackathon lasted three weeks and that there they developed the idea of contracting highly skilled software engineers in India by the hour.⁠[10][3][1][2]

Speaking to KTVU in March 2025, he said that the idea grew out of seeing talented people, particularly in India, who lacked job opportunities; KTVU writes that the company began as an idea in the founders’ dorm rooms when they were 19. Fortune wrote in November 2025 that the first client agreed to pay $500 a week for a developer, with the engineer receiving roughly 70%, and Contrary Research’s report writes that the company kept roughly 30%; Fortune writes that Mercor reached a $1 million revenue run rate within nine months.⁠[4][11][3]

An article published by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in July 2022 writes that the finals of the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Challenge, Georgetown’s largest pitch competition series, were held on April 8, with more than $35,000 in cash prizes available; the list of winners gives the $10,000 Undergraduate Grand Prize to “Mercor by Brendan Foody (B’25),” listing him as class of 2025. The Hoya wrote on April 22, 2022 that Mercor was chosen out of 60 teams to win the April 7 Entrepreneurship Challenge and a $10,000 prize. The school’s 2023 article describes Mercor at that time as “a data driven recruiting platform for software engineers in India.”⁠[12][10][9]

The Hoya writes that Mercor pairs teams of skilled engineers with start-ups to meet their development needs; he said that Mercor is the first business to combine software contracting and software recruiting: “We’re the only software contractor that allows them the predictability and efficiency associated with contracting.” The article adds that Mercor hoped to partner with venture capital firms to receive referrals for early-stage investments. The Georgetown student Chris Delaney (MSB ’25) said that for Hoyadle, his spin-off of Wordle, Brendan Foody accessed the domain for him, uploaded the code to the website and got it running within a few hours, and helped by advertising it on Instagram.⁠[10]

On March 16, 2023, Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business wrote that he had won the 2023 BIG EAST Startup Challenge with his pitch for Seros, competing against teams from 11 BIG EAST Conference institutions, the second year in a row that a Georgetown student had placed first. He said that Benjamin Zimmerman, managing director of Georgetown Entrepreneurship, had reached out to him and encouraged him to join the competition; Benjamin Zimmerman said that he “exemplifies the best in being a student entrepreneur at Georgetown University.” He said, “I have been thinking of Seros for the past three years and working on it for over a year.”⁠[9]

Fortune writes that in spring 2023, while his classmates at Georgetown were cramming for finals, he decided to leave: “I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year,” he said. “I just didn't go to finals.” The Felicis profile writes that he effectively dropped out of Georgetown by missing his finals because he was too busy with Mercor. KTVU writes that he left during his sophomore year, in 2023, together with his two co-founders to start Mercor.⁠[11][2][4]

His bio on TechCrunch’s author page says that, as a Thiel Fellow, he dropped out of Georgetown to focus on Mercor full-time in 2023; the education field of his Forbes profile reads “Drop Out, Georgetown University.”⁠[8][13]

The Felicis profile writes that in August 2023, when it says the three were second-year college students, two days after a Mercor customer introduced them to xAI over Zoom, they sat across from the entire co-founding team of xAI, without Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry, at TeslaTeslaTesla is an American electric vehicle and energy company whose businesses span automobiles, solar energy, and battery energy storage. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, its shares are listed on Nasdaq under the ticker TSLA.Open the full entry’s offices in the San Francisco Bay Area; xAI wanted to know more, but it was still pre-training its model and was not ready to bring in human data. He recalled thinking, “This can’t be normal,” and said, “That’s when we knew there was something in the market we had to chase down.” The September 2025 episode notes of Lenny’s Newsletter list “Brendan’s meeting with xAI that changed his company’s trajectory.”⁠[2][14]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced its new class of 20 Thiel Fellows; he was selected for the Thiel Fellowship together with Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha. The announcement states that the Thiel Fellowship, established in 2011, provides each fellow with $100,000 and access to a network of tech founders, investors, scientists and former fellows, and that fellows commit to working full-time on their projects. The list of fellows gives him as from Menlo Park, California, with the project Mercor, which it describes as creating a unified global labor market capable of facilitating interviews and evaluations of everyone on Earth, adding, “Labor aggregation is the most impactful opportunity in history.”⁠[15]

The Harvard Crimson wrote in March 2025 that the three founders received $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship in March 2024 and that he and Surya Midha officially withdrew from Georgetown University at the same time that Adarsh Hiremath dropped out of Harvard University. Forbes writes that all three founders are Thiel Fellows. His bio on TechCrunch’s author page says that Mercor is backed by investors including Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, Jack Dorsey and Larry Summers.⁠[16][1][8]

On February 20, 2025, TechCrunch wrote that Mercor had raised a $100 million Series B led by Felicis at a $2 billion valuation, describing the company as founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows with an annual revenue run rate of $75 million and the three founders as some of the youngest founders of a billion-dollar startup. In the article he said, “We collect performance data on candidates and use it to refine our predictions on who will perform best in the future.”⁠[17]

On March 18, 2025, KTVU published a story on the three founders; he was then 21 and appeared on the station’s program The Four to describe Mercor: its revenue run rate had just passed $100 million, it had averaged 59% month-over-month growth for six months, and it was “extremely profitable”; the platform uses large language models to automate steps such as résumé review and interviews, with candidates taking a 20-minute AI interview. He said that school is just a place where people can practice skills and that more and more people will jump right into building companies.⁠[4]

On September 15, 2025, 20VC released an interview with him; the episode description calls him the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, says the company scaled from $1 million to $500 million in revenue in 17 months, and names its investors as Benchmark, Felicis, Emergence and 20VC. The topics listed include “Why My Mother Thought I Was Selling Drugs as a Kid,” “In The Time My Peers Graduated, I Created a $10BN Business; Is College Worth it?,” “You Cannot Create a $10BN Company without 9-9-6 Work Culture,” and lessons from Peter Fenton and Jack Dorsey.⁠[18]

On September 18, 2025, Lenny’s Newsletter released the Lenny’s Podcast interview with him; the episode notes describe him at 22 as the youngest American unicorn founder ever and say that Mercor works with 6 of the Magnificent 7 and all top 5 AI labs to help them hire experts to create evaluations and training data. The conversation covers why evals have become the primary bottleneck for AI progress, why he believes AGI and superintelligence are not happening anytime soon, Mercor’s three core values, and lessons from his past ventures.⁠[14]

In October 2025 Mercor announced a $350 million funding round led by Felicis at a $10 billion valuation, and Forbes named him, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, estimating that each owns roughly 22% of Mercor. Forbes wrote that all three were then 22, younger than Mark ZuckerbergMark ZuckerbergMark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook, Chairman and CEO of Meta, and a co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. His work spans social networking, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry was when he first became a billionaire at 23; the previous holder of the title, Shayne CoplanShayne CoplanShayne Coplan is the founder and chief executive officer of Polymarket, the prediction market platform he founded in 2020, and advocates using market prices to aggregate people’s judgments about the probability of events. He attended New York University before leaving to start a company, and has led Polymarket’s fundraising, its return to the U.S. market, and its product expansion.Open the full entry of Polymarket, 27, had held it for just 20 days, and before him Scale AI’s Alexandr WangAlexandr WangAlexandr Wang is an artificial intelligence entrepreneur, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Scale AI. He joined Meta in June 2025 as the company’s first chief AI officer and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. His work spans AI training data, model evaluation, government applications, and personal agents.Open the full entry, 28, had held it for roughly 18 months; Forbes writes that the only self-made entrepreneur with an earlier debut was Kylie Jenner, at 21, whose fortune Forbes later knocked down. His Forbes profile notes that Surya Midha is the youngest of the three by roughly two months.⁠[1][13][6]

Forbes writes that all three appeared on the Forbes 2025 Under 30 list and that in September 2025 he announced that Mercor’s annualized revenue run rate had reached $500 million, up from $100 million in March. On becoming a billionaire he said, “It's definitely crazy,” and “It feels very surreal.” Asked about Scale AI’s lawsuit against Mercor, filed that September and alleging trade secret theft, he said, “It's not something we spend a lot of time thinking about.”⁠[1]

His Forbes profile states that in October 2025 Surya Midha moved from chief operating officer to chairman of Mercor; Gazetteer SF writes that after Surya Midha announced the change, he replied publicly, “There would be no Mercor without you.”⁠[13][5]

KTVU wrote on November 4, 2025 that he had posted on X, “Just 2 years after starting, Mercor is paying $1.5 million per day to experts in our marketplace,” comparing this with Uber and Airbnb, which in their first two years paid out just over $1 million to drivers and $10 million to hosts respectively.⁠[6]

TechCrunch wrote on October 29, 2025 that on stage at TechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch DisruptTechCrunch Disrupt is a technology and startup conference organized by TechCrunch, combining interviews, product demonstrations, startup competitions and industry networking for founders and investors.Open the full entry 2025 that Tuesday he said AI labs were turning to companies’ former senior employees for industry knowledge instead of signing expensive data contracts, because “Their customers don't want to give them data to automate large portions of their value chains.” Using Goldman SachsGoldman SachsGoldman Sachs is an American financial services group headquartered in New York whose businesses include investment banking, securities trading, asset management, and wealth management. It traces its origins to the commercial paper business Marcus Goldman founded in 1869; it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999 under the ticker GS and became a bank holding company in 2008. David Solomon serves as chairman and chief executive officer.Open the full entry as an example, he suggested that such companies may not welcome models that could automate their value chains, and said that this was part of the reason the labs needed Mercor.⁠[19]

He said on stage that Mercor tells contractors not to upload documents from former workplaces and tries to stop them from passing on proprietary information or trade secrets, while conceding that at the company’s scale “there are things that happen”; he argued that the knowledge in an employee’s head belongs to the employee rather than the company, and predicted, “Over time, ChatGPTChatGPTChatGPT is a generative AI assistant launched by OpenAI on November 30, 2022. Through websites and applications, it provides conversation, writing, coding, search, file analysis, and image and voice interaction. It evolved from a free research preview into personal, enterprise and education plans, gradually adding deep research, Study mode and cross-application task execution. Its use has prompted continuing discussions about factual accuracy, personal privacy, copyright, education and teen safety.Open the full entry will be better than the best consulting firm.”⁠[19]

On January 2, 2026, Equity (TechCrunch podcast) released this conversation from Disrupt; the episode page says it covers how he went from AWS credit consulting in high school to a $10 billion valuation, how Scale AI’s troubles accelerated Mercor’s rise, why the top 10–20% of contractors drive most model improvement, and his belief that all knowledge work will eventually become training data for AI agents.⁠[7]

Fortune published an interview with him on November 12, 2025, describing him at 22 as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. He said that the real opportunity is teaching AI models “what only humans know—judgment, nuance, and taste”; he predicted, “We'll automate maybe two-thirds of knowledge work,” which would let us “cure cancer and go to Mars,” and said that “every major technical revolution has ultimately made life better.”⁠[11]

On March 3, 2026, writing as co-founder and CEO, he published the essay “Organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy” on Mercor’s blog. He argued that although models are advancing quickly, the massive economic promises of AI have not materialized because “models are smart, but they’re not trained to do the job”; he wrote that there are more than 800 distinct occupations in the United States alone, that most knowledge work outside software engineering has no equivalent benchmark, that many labs were 10x-ing their environments budgets that year, some already spending over $1 billion each, and that human expertise will become the limiting factor in deploying AI. He likened the expert network Mercor is building to UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry’s driver network and Airbnb’s host network.⁠[20]

Forbes wrote on April 15, 2026 that earlier that year, at an all-hands meeting, he had shown his staff of more than 200 a slide bearing the single word “fraud,” informed them that an employee had embezzled company funds and had been fired, and said there would be no tolerance for this behavior; four people familiar with the meeting said he did not name the employee or disclose the amount. Forbes writes that the employee was an early hire and lead manager on the Anthropic account; Mercor spokesperson Heidi Hagberg said the company eventually recovered the fraudulent bonus payments and that it did not cost customers any money.⁠[21]

The same Forbes article writes that Mercor’s leadership sent employees an anonymous survey asking, “Who on the team do you think lowers the bar?,” a copy of which Forbes viewed; the answers would be seen only by “ABS”—Adarsh Hiremath, him and Sundeep Jain, Mercor’s first president, hired in May 2025 and previously Uber’s chief product officer. The article gives no response from Mercor on the survey.⁠[21][22]

Forbes writes that chief technology officer Adarsh Hiremath had been promoted to co-CEO to lead a newly established offering that helps companies build agents for internal workflows; two former employees said that he and Adarsh Hiremath had many disagreements, were rarely seen speaking and worked on different floors. Mercor spokesperson Heidi Hagberg responded that the two had been best friends since high school: “They talk every day. They have a shared vision and a shared purpose.”⁠[21]

On April 15, 2026, StanfordStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry eCorner at Stanford University published his 47-minute conversation with adjunct lecturer Emily Ma in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series (season 27, episode 1), “Brendan Foody (Mercor) - Agentic Data and the Future of AI,” covering how he and his co-founders identified agentic data as the next leap in AI training and benchmarking and built Mercor around it, his predictions for how AI will reshape work and the economy, and his advice to entrepreneurs seeking a way into the AI market.⁠[23]

On May 5, 2026, the San Francisco local news outlet Gazetteer SF published an article by its business and technology reporter Cydney Hayes whose claims about him come from three former employees who spoke anonymously to avoid retaliation: they said that from around October 2025, when Mercor’s Series C closed, his leadership grew more hostile, that he expected staff to stay at their desks late into the night (one former employee called it “face time slavery”), and that he could be “a bit vindictive” toward employees who pushed back. Responding to accounts of long hours and stress, Mercor spokesperson Heidi Hagberg said that Mercor is a high-ownership, fast-moving environment, that the company is transparent about this with every candidate, and that “That intensity is not for everyone, and we recognize that.”⁠[5]

One anonymous former employee alleged that he and Sundeep Jain fired an account manager on an OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry project the day before the account manager was due a bonus of “several hundred thousand dollars” in cash and equity; the account manager declined to comment. Responding to accounts of employees fired without notice and denied final bonuses, Heidi Hagberg said, “Mercor makes employment decisions based on performance, business, and customer needs,” and that bonus structures are tied to individual performance.⁠[5]

Another anonymous former employee said they had not seen him and Adarsh Hiremath talk since Surya Midha left the chief operating officer role and believed that he wanted Adarsh Hiremath out of the company; the article carries no response from Mercor or from him to this claim. The article also writes that Gazetteer SF viewed the anonymous talent survey containing the question “Who on the team do you think lowers the bar?,” which executives sent in early December 2025 to about 200 US-based staff.⁠[5]

On June 1, 2026, 20VC released a second interview with him; the episode description says that over the previous two years he had scaled Mercor to $1.5 billion in ARR and a $10 billion valuation. The topics listed include “Would Brendan sell Mercor for $30 billion?,” “Why we should have increased capital gains tax,” “How a 1 million ARR company secured one of the best investors in the world with a helicopter ride,” “How Felicis secured the deal of the decade with a race track and a set of Ferraris,” and “Will Mercor go public and when?”⁠[24]

The profile Felicis published on July 21, 2026 describes him as “the enthusiastic ideas man” and as customer- and ROI-obsessed. It writes that Mercor initially struck a deal with the data-labeling company Scale AI to hire more than 1,000 engineers for frontier-lab work, and later cut out the middleman after engineers complained about missed pay and a poorly managed platform; he said, “We thought it would be more efficient to partner with a company that works directly with the labs.”⁠[2]

The article writes that Mercor was already a customer of Deeptune, and he had backed the company as an angel investor, before Mercor announced its acquisition in July 2026. Speaking about the March 2026 security incident, he said that “Having a complete understanding of what actually happened” and strong relationships with customers gave the company confidence that it would recover. He called LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry “the worst product I use every day.”⁠[2]

On August 27, 2026, TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry named him to the 2026 TIME100 AI; Mercor’s mission page lists him on that list as an “Innovator.” TIME’s profile describes him as 23 and as having founded Mercor with two friends from high school, a company that, by its own account, pays out tens of millions of dollars a week to tens of thousands of experts, and which TIME says has more than 500 staff; he says, “We are creating the largest new job category in history.” He says the hardest part of his job is “how to scale culture when you're scaling headcount really quickly,” and of colleagues, including the company’s president, who are more than twice his age: “I think I'm starting to earn their respect.”⁠[22][25]

As of November 2026, Mercor’s mission page is signed “Brendan Foody & Adarsh Hiremath, Co-founders & Co-CEOs”: he and Adarsh Hiremath are co-founders and co-CEOs.⁠[25]

His Forbes profile shows a real-time net worth of $2.2 billion as of November 3, 2026, a real-time rank of No. 1851 in the world, his age as 23 and his source of wealth as AI software, self-made; the profile’s description ranks him No. 1913 on Forbes’ 2026 Billionaires list.⁠[13]

KTVU wrote in March 2025 that his parents had predicted he would return to the Bay Area after college, though “nobody anticipated it would be so soon.” He said to Fortune that work stays on his mind even when he is having dinner with his parents.⁠[4][26]

His Forbes profile lists his residence as San Francisco, California, his citizenship as the United States and his marital status as single. Forbes wrote in October 2025 that the three founders had not gone out and bought anything flashy after becoming billionaires because they did not have the time.⁠[13][1]

He said in October 2025, “I leave the office around like 10:30 [p.m.], on an average day, six days a week,” leaving little time to be distracted by things outside the business. Fortune wrote in November 2025 that he had not taken a day off in three years; he said, “I've worked every day for the last three years,” and that he “can’t really take a day off, because I just have this impulsive drive to go back to it.”⁠[1][26]

He said that in college work was something he had to be disciplined to do, but “When I started Mercor, it became something I couldn't stop thinking about.” He holds that people burn out when they work hard on things that do not feel compounding, while “I see the ROI of my time every day.” He says he likes days without too many meetings, and that a good day is spent writing documents or curating ideas; he advises people to find “the thing that they’re obsessed with and can really pour their lives into.”⁠[11][26]

He said in February 2025, “If AI automates 90% of the economy, then humans become the bottleneck for the remaining 10%.” He believes the way people work is moving toward a more fractional, gig-like model: “Every project should be handled by the best person for the job, not just whoever is available on staff.” He said that software engineers remain the most in-demand talent on Mercor, while AI labs increasingly seek consultants, PhDs, bankers, doctors and lawyers.⁠[17]

He said to Fortune, “It's like we have this bottleneck of only so much human labor in the economy.” The Felicis profile records him saying, “The bottleneck to applying agents to every workflow in the economy is, how do we build evals for everything?” and “It feels like there will be enormous demand for human labor and human jobs for many decades to come.”⁠[11][2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/BrendanFoody (opens in a new window).⁠[8][14]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-foody-2995ab10b/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8][14]

Mercor: Official website: https://www.mercor.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[27]