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Hello and welcome to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Anthony Haugh, and this is our episode where we dive into a tech world trend with the help of industry experts.

We're going to be focusing this week on Mercor, a three-year-old startup that's become a $10 billion middleman in AI's data gold rush.

The company connects AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic

with former employees of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Whitechew law firms, paying them up to

$200 an hour to share their industry expertise and train the AI models that could eventually

automate their former employers out of business. But where does employee knowledge end and corporate secrets begin?

Today, we're bringing you a conversation with CEO Brendan Foodie from this year's

Disrupt, where he explained why companies won't give AI labs their data directly and how

Merckhor stepped in to fill that gap. Let's take a listen.

Thank you, everyone for being here.

And Brendan Foodie, the CEO of Mercor.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me, Max.

Of course.

So this is your first disrupt, right?

It is.

Yeah.

And this is a very interesting moment for Mercor as a business.

I've been covering them for a while.

I'm really excited to talk with you, Brendan.

...