"Turpentine VC" | Venture Capital and Investing
00:41:49 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:41:49] S1: Yeah, that's really powerful. And touch on that a little bit more. What were these projects that you had them doing? [00:41:55] S2: I mean, that's really what Merkur grew out of is that we were hiring people to build products ourselves. Like I launched this other company, Ceros, which was a browser based virtual machine and had been working on various cloud gooey's because I launched a business that I scaled in high school. And with hiring development talent, it was a pain, it was wildly inefficient. And so we built the product for ourselves trying to make that process more efficient. And that that went pretty far. [00:42:30] S1: Oh, wow. So Merkur came out of a problem that you were personally facing.
00:42:30 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:42:30] S1: Oh, wow. So Merkur came out of a problem that you were personally facing. [00:42:35] S2: Yeah, exactly. And another interesting thing is we've used the product to hire over 20 people of our internal team. So we're and like actively hire tons of people using the product. And so we're huge believers in this just being an efficient way to build out a company. And while I still think it's good for Silicon Valley startups to have an in person product team, in particular, where leadership is having those, you know, late night conversations and bouncing ideas off of each other with super low latency. I think supplementing each person in The US with one or two contractors internationally, is extremely high leverage from a price, a performance perspective, as well as culture. And just like people we found internationally care so much and want to work so hard, that it's really unbelievable how inefficient the market is around not giving them opportunities. [00:43:29] S1: Yeah. And so a lot of the folks who you guys have on as full time or part time, I'm assuming are overseas. How how has what have been sort of the learnings and sort of getting that to work? I mean, for starters, the most obvious, like time difference, right? How do you sort of balance stuff like that?
00:43:29 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:43:29] S1: Yeah. And so a lot of the folks who you guys have on as full time or part time, I'm assuming are overseas. How how has what have been sort of the learnings and sort of getting that to work? I mean, for starters, the most obvious, like time difference, right? How do you sort of balance stuff like that? [00:43:45] S2: Yeah, so it's predominantly in India, where there is, you know, the 12.5 gap. The thing I found fascinating about the time difference point is, for sales kind of roles, this could be a problem, but we're mainly hiring engineers in India. And for engineers, it's actually a feature, not a bug to have all of this independent contributor time. So we have overlap in the mornings until about noon. And then for the rest of the day, people are able to just focus code work on the tasks and projects that are assigned. And so it allows them to actually be a lot more productive in many ways. And we've had cases, you know, where we fly engineers back and forth. And, and I think it's it's a fun experience to get to know everyone. But it's, it's funny, it's, it's oftentimes less productive, and people being at home able to really focus on the work that's happening.
00:43:45 · Brendan Foody, Usman Hanif
[00:43:45] S2: Yeah, so it's predominantly in India, where there is, you know, the 12.5 gap. The thing I found fascinating about the time difference point is, for sales kind of roles, this could be a problem, but we're mainly hiring engineers in India. And for engineers, it's actually a feature, not a bug to have all of this independent contributor time. So we have overlap in the mornings until about noon. And then for the rest of the day, people are able to just focus code work on the tasks and projects that are assigned. And so it allows them to actually be a lot more productive in many ways. And we've had cases, you know, where we fly engineers back and forth. And, and I think it's it's a fun experience to get to know everyone. But it's, it's funny, it's, it's oftentimes less productive, and people being at home able to really focus on the work that's happening. [00:44:36] S1: We've skipped over this so far, but I want to absolutely touch upon it. You guys have quite the founding team, the three of you yourself, Adarsh, Hirma. You guys went to high school together, if I if I'm remembering correctly, our policy debate champions. Touch on that background a little bit. Plus, you guys are so young. I mean, it's honestly amazing. I'd love to kinda hear about the background. How'd you guys decide to work together? I know you mentioned you were working on something. Were you working on that with them?
00:44:36 · Usman Hanif, Brendan Foody
[00:44:36] S1: We've skipped over this so far, but I want to absolutely touch upon it. You guys have quite the founding team, the three of you yourself, Adarsh, Hirma. You guys went to high school together, if I if I'm remembering correctly, our policy debate champions. Touch on that background a little bit. Plus, you guys are so young. I mean, it's honestly amazing. I'd love to kinda hear about the background. How'd you guys decide to work together? I know you mentioned you were working on something. Were you working on that with them? [00:45:03] S2: Yeah, yeah. Well, so I wasn't a policy debate champion, but I grew up in the Bay Area met them at Bellarmine San Jose for high school, Adarshan Suriya were the winningest debate team of all time. [00:45:14] S1: Wow. I saw one who did debate. Mean, that that's crazy. These guys were killing me. Yeah. And I'm defining
00:45:21 · Brendan Foody
[00:45:21] S2: that by they did policy debate the most competitive event, and we're the first team ever to win all three of the largest national tournaments, which is challenging, because they're all very different styles of debate. And they were incredible debate. I'm dyslexic, though. So I'm not very good at debate. I wasn't nearly as good as them. But I was always building startups in one form or another. So I bootstrapped a company doing cloud consulting. I, in high school, I found that with this AWS activate program to get cloud credits, there were a lot of startups that were eligible for the program, but we're not applying and getting their cloud credits. So I would charge startups $995 to, you know, be a consultant for them, get them the cloud credits, get them like, why it's 25 ks in cloud credits. And I did this a bunch. So I made I made a lot of money in high school, and I wanted to build software. So I put some of the cash into working with a Darsh at the time to build better user interfaces for AWS, just like GUIs, they didn't work very well. So that that didn't go very far. But I was super interested in in like cloud interfaces being super inefficient. And so I started this company, Sarah's that they were helping out a little bit with, which was like a browser based virtual machine, we were hiring people at the IITs in India to help do this. And so we that was cool. And it won some awards, but I think we were much more excited about our core. And that was really where our heart slides. So started decided to go full time on the business over the summer in 2023. I remember, a Darsh was stressed about whether he should turn down his offer from Bridgewater and, and all that kind of stuff. And so I think he's glad he did it at this point. And we bootstrapped the business to a 7 figure run rate. And it's funny, like, even after doing that, my parents were like, Oh, you should still go back to school. And I was like, No way. And then we raise a little bit of money from general catalyst. And all of a sudden, they're like, Oh, well, good that you dropped out. Right? So yeah, we drop out all at 20 years old. And then it's been all up from there, we all got the Teal fellowship after dropping out. And so we were one of the Us and edge were some of the first teams in history were all three co founders have received the Teal fellowship.