Silicon Valley says move fast and break things. Shensi Ding built Merge by doing the opposite: nine months of building with zero users, obsessing over margins while everyone else chased growth at any cost. Today the fastest-moving AI companies in the world, including Mistral and Perplexity, run on the infrastructure she refused to rush.

Brennan sits down with the co-founder and CEO of Merge ($75M from Accel, NEA, and Addition) to talk about the unfashionable choices behind the connective layer of production AI. Shensi gets candid about the post-Series B hiring spree that felt like "an organ getting rejected," why she studies competitors like Sherlock Holmes, the stigma around Chinese open-source models, and the fertility numbers that made her rethink founder stress.


Highlights:

  • Why building for nine months with zero users meant launching with zero bugs
  • The over-hiring mistake, and the "fewer, better people" rule that came out of it
  • How one rogue AI agent can delete your entire Salesforce, and how to stop it
  • Chinese open-source models, and how American routers put a "surface" on top of them
  • Why model access based on citizenship is coming to your company
  • "You can't fake margins forever": her case against AI financial engineering
  • 20 eggs, one embryo: the honest math of founder stress and fertility


Subscribe to Not Another Podcast for more unfiltered conversations with founders building through the hype.
Watch on YouTube, listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Find Shensi on LinkedIn and X (@shensi) · merge.dev

Rss Apple Podcaster
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör Infinity Constellation. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Infinity Constellation och inte av, eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.