In early December last year, executives at Mercor, the data-labeling startup valued at $10 billion, sent out an anonymous talent survey to their entire US-based staff, approximately 200 people. One question asked employees to throw their colleagues under the bus: “Who on the team do you think lowers the bar?”
The survey, which was viewed at the time by Gazetteer SF, sent a new wave of despair through Mercor’s staff. By then, the company culture had been rapidly deteriorating.
Hours had become untenable; some teams were at their desks until 2 a.m., racing to finish strategically incoherent projects under unrealistic deadlines. Teams and priorities were being restructured constantly. Scores of employees had been fired without notice or severance, some of them stiffed on their final bonuses on their way out the door.
“Mercor makes employment decisions based on performance, business, and customer needs, consistent with applicable law and each person's employment terms,” said Mercor spokesperson Heidi Hagberg. “As we have scaled, we have updated our compensation and performance management practices, including tying bonus structures directly to individual performance. High performers earn more and lower performers earn less. This is standard industry practice and fair to all involved.”
One former employee told Gazetteer SF that they knew of one early hire who quit just weeks before their equity vested, effectively leaving millions of dollars on the table, because it just wasn’t worth it to them to stay. That same former employee also said they knew of at least three new hires who quit within their first week, with one of them citing “inhumane working conditions.”
“That Google form was insane,” another former employee told Gazetteer SF. But according to three former staffers, who all spoke to Gazetteer SF anonymously to avoid legal and reputational retaliation from Mercor, the survey was just one expression of a deeper rot within the company.
All sources suggested that much of the trouble can be attributed to Mercor’s 23-year-old billionaire CEO Brendan Foody, who they described as motivated by money and almost nothing else.
“I think the fundamental issue is that there is a belief that money solves all problems,” one person said. “And I just don’t think money solves all problems.”
Do you work at Mercor? Message me securely on Signal at cyd.01. Anonymity assured.
Mercor was founded in 2023 by Foody and his two friends, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha. Their origin story, extensively covered by the press, made them industry darlings: Hiremath and Midha had grown up together, having met when they were 10 years old. Four years later, they met Foody on the debate team at Bellarmine College Preparatory, a prestigious all-boys private school in San Jose. They quickly grew close, traveling the country to compete at tournaments.
Foody and Midha later enrolled at Georgetown and Hiremath at Harvard in 2021. A startup idea quickly started to take shape: an AI hiring marketplace that matched software engineers in India with US companies looking for contractors. In 2023, they took academic leave to focus on Mercor, and by 2024 the three were named Thiel Fellows, receiving $250,000 from the conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel to formally drop out of college and work on the company full-time. They split up executive functions: Foody, CEO; Hiremath, CTO; and Midha, COO.
Mercor’s business has since shifted into what's known as “human data.” Mercor now contracts massive fleets of knowledge workers — biologists, software engineers, math PhDs — to label data for AI firms, including OpenAI and Google. Earlier this year, Mercor reported it was bringing in $83.3 million in monthly revenue, crossing $1 billion in annual revenue run rate, according to Forbes, which first reported on the anonymous employee survey.
Mercor’s crowning achievement is minting the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Following a $350 million Series C funding round led by Felicis Ventures in October 2025, the company announced a $10 billion valuation. The three babyfaced college dropouts, all 22 at the time, each held a roughly 22 percent stake in the company; with the new valuation, they stripped the illustrious title from Mark Zuckerberg, who made his first billion at 23. Mercor shot to fame.
Up until then, “the company had no policies around expense authorization or payments or HR or, honestly, legal,” one former employee said. But the company grew aggressively after the Series C, and Mercor’s internal processes shocked new hires. (Hagsberg responded, “Like any company that has grown quickly, we’ve scaled our internal teams and processes. Scaling at our pace requires continuously reviewing, revising, and building policies to match the business.”)
This led to a messy episode earlier this year where Mercor leadership accused an early employee of embezzling funds. The employee, who was managing a project for Anthropic, had sent his father and brother “hundreds of thousands of dollars in so-called bonus payments,” Forbes reported last month.
One former employee familiar with the situation told Gazetteer that the accused employee was 23 years old at the time, and was running a project that required PhD-level computer science expertise: “The only CS [expert] he knows is his father, so he has his dad do most of the project for him.” Mercor also “didn’t have a payroll system that could do daily payouts” for the contractors on that project and others, so the employee would often send them via Venmo and log them as “special bonuses.”
Hagberg said the co-founders were not aware of this practice, but the former employee said it was an open secret among most early employees and went on for most of 2025. “We all knew about it. We all joked about it,” the former employee said.
A new hire eventually discovered and reported the suspicious bonuses, although by that time late December, the former employee said Mercor had put more formalized systems in place. The employee accused of embezzlement was fired. That person declined to comment on the situation.
Being 22 and the youngest billionaire, I think he probably has a general feeling that there aren’t consequences for his actions.”
A former Mercor employee, referring to 23-year-old CEO Brendan Foody
New hires also found they had joined a company where few agreements with leadership could be trusted. “There was this systematic pattern of lying to new grads to get them to join,” one former staffer said, explaining that leadership would lie about work-life balance, what team the candidate would be joining, and how much they would be compensated. The long hours and the “ridiculously stress-inducing” culture, as one employee put it, that were ratcheting up by the fall of 2025 took an even bigger toll on new hires with families. “The company is extremely inhospitable for people with kids,” one person said.
“Mercor is a high-ownership, fast-moving environment. We are transparent about that with every candidate,” Hagberg said. “That intensity is not for everyone, and we recognize that. But we do not misrepresent what it is like to work here.”
One former employee said Mercor’s investors must have already had suspicions about the maturity of the staff. In May 2025, Sundeep Jain, the former chief product officer at Uber, joined the company. “It pretty clearly seems like he was installed by [venture firm] Benchmark,” the employee said. “I think they clearly recognized the company needed an adult.”
But was Jain the right adult? The former employees said no. They told Gazetteer that Jain took charge of staffing projects, to disastrous results. “His incompetence is inexplicable to me as somebody who ran Uber,” one former staffer said.
Benchmark did not respond to Gazetteer’s multiple requests for comment.
According to people who experienced it, Jain’s focus on operations pushed Midha, then COO, to the periphery. In October 2025, Midha announced that he was “stepping away” from his role as COO and transitioning to a board chairman role.
Hiremath posted a heartfelt letter to Midha, writing, “Surya has been my role model, thought partner, and most importantly, best friend… Surya, I will miss you deeply.” Foody shared a short reply to Midha’s announcement, saying, “There would be no Mercor without you. As your friend, I’m so proud of you for making this bittersweet decision to explore what’s next.”
The former employees said Midha was always the most thoughtful of the co-founders. “He generally cares about people and has a strong sense of morals,” one said. Another added that after Midha left, they heard he was thinking about going to Walden Pond in Massachusetts, the tranquil place that famously inspired transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.
The former employees said it was around October — when the Series C closed, the co-founders became billionaires, Midha left, and headcount exploded — that Foody’s leadership style became more hostile. Foody began expecting workers to be at their desks deep into the night, what one former employee called “face time slavery.” If they shrugged him off, he could be “a bit vindictive.”
The former staffer gave an example: Last year, one account manager on an OpenAI project had passed his year mark, had vested some equity, and had started leaving the office earlier. The day before he was due to get a bonus of “several hundred thousand dollars” across cash and equity grants, Jain and Foody fired him.
That employee, who has still not received the bonus, declined to comment for this story.
Another former employee agreed Jain and Foody have “a pattern of being quite stingy” with bonuses owed to the account managers, “not paying them out on time and using them almost as leverage.” They also described a trend of jawboning employees who wanted to quit into non-compete agreements. “It’s all verbal, of course, but they’d subtly threaten you, like, if you did something competitive, your life would be difficult,” they said.
Despite the internal chaos, Mercor’s public reputation had remained more or less untarnished until a barrage of bad press earlier this year. In March, a string of reports detailed the bleak reality of Mercor’s white-collar contractors, who compete for poorly paid gigs just to train technology that’s poised to replace them. In April, a major data breach caused Meta to pause its contracts with the company. Mercor is currently facing at least seven class-action lawsuits related to the breach.
One former employee implied Mercor’s culture had put it in this position, claiming its “culture of speed over security” was as much to blame for the attack as the hacked gateway.
What motivated such intense pressure for speed, at almost everyone’s expense? “Brendan wants to be Elon Musk. It’s literally just that,” one former employee said.
“Being 22 and the youngest billionaire, I think he probably has a general feeling that there aren’t consequences for his actions,” another former employee speculated.
One consequence appears to be Foody’s friendships with Hiremath and Midha, whom he’s known since they were 14. One former employee said they had not seen Foody and Hiremath talk since Midha “was pushed out-slash-left.” The former employee told Gazetteer they believe Foody also wants to expel Hiremath from Mercor: “Brendan wants him out. It’s pretty clear.”
Hiremath was recently placed in a new role as co-CEO (Foody’s CEO title does not include the prefix), and a second former employee said he seemed “sad” and “not motivated at all.”
The former employees say Hiremath and Midha remain friends. On the high school debate team, the two won three major national championships as a team. Foody did not win any titles.
