This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.

Brought to you by Stanford Ecorner.

Hello everyone. My name is Emily Ma and I'm an adjunct lecturer here for the Management Science and Engineering Department.

You are joining us for the Entrepreneur Thought Leaders series, which is hosted by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program,

the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford, and Basis, which is the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurals

students.

I am so excited.

We are literally starting our second century for the School of Engineering with an amazing

speaker, which I think sets the stage for the next century of engineering and entrepreneurship.

So I'm going to quickly introduce Brendan Foody, who co-founded Merckor, a recruiting startup that

helped Silicon Valley's biggest AI labs train their models to do professional-level reasoning

by matching skilled workers with enterprise projects.

Earlier this year, Merckor announced that the company had hit $1 billion in annualized revenue,

faster than any company, I suspect, that has ever done that in less than two years or something.

Crazy.

Brendan as three co-founders, or two co-founders,

Surya Midya and Adarsh Harmath became the world's three youngest self-made

billionaires. Kind of wild. When private investors valued Merckor at 10 billion, Brendan founded

a number of earlier ventures, including Seros, a cloud consulting and cloud access business.

Brendan was also selected as a field fellow in 2024, and before that, he studied business administration and economics at Georgetown before dropping out to become an entrepreneur.

It's kind of wild. I suspect you've known, I'm going to die right in, I suspect you've known you've wanted to be an entrepreneur for much longer than when you were a sophomore.

So let's start with a question about donuts. I heard

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