



Alison💡
374 posts

@0xAxC
AI Product Manager @ Bytedance 🔎📖 // ride the wave 🌊 // prev: PayPal, INSEAD, Tsinghua






How a 22-year-old dyslexic dropout created the fastest revenue-growing business in history—$1M to $500M in just 17 months. @BrendanFoody discovered that AI labs were facing a critical bottleneck: they needed human experts to create "evals"—tests that teach models what correct looks like. His company @mercor_ai began connecting labs with lawyers, doctors, engineers, and other specialists to create evals and training data for models (for $95-500/hour). Today, @mercor_ai works with 6 of the Magnificent 7, all top 5 AI labs, has never had a customer churn, and has a net revenue retention of 1,600%. In my conversation with Brendan, we discuss: 🔸 Why evals have become the primary bottleneck for AI progress 🔸 How exactly Mercor grew to $500M revenue in 17 months 🔸 Brendan’s meeting with xAI that changed his company’s trajectory 🔸 Which skills and jobs will be most valuable as AI continues to advance (hint: jobs with “elastic” demand) 🔸 Why Brendan believes AGI and superintelligence are not happening anytime soon 🔸 The three unique core values that drove Mercor’s success 🔸 How Harvard Lampoon writers are making Claude funnier Listen now 👇 • YouTube: youtu.be/ja6fWTDPQl4 • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3whvAE… • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/why… Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for supporting the podcast: 🏆 @WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs: workos.com/lenny 🏆 @Jira Product Discovery—Atlassian's new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams: atlassian.com/lenny 🏆 @enterpret_ai—Transform customer feedback into product growth: enterpret.com/lenny







people think “branding” is just fonts & color palettes. elon’s whole career is littered with high leverage naming & narrative framing moves. - tesla: evokes innovation, history, electricity in a single word - spacex: futuristic but grounded in aerospace tradition - boring company: self aware af - neuralink: says exactly what it is, but with sci fi allure & now of course open ai which only seems obvious in hindsight. what a ridiculous streak. once you’re good, twice you’re great but like 5+ times??


Nobody knew Zeit until it became Vercel. Nobody cared about Codeium until it became Windsurf. Nobody loved mopping until P&G created the Swiffer. Nobody cared about processors until Intel chose Pentium over "ProChip." The wrong name kills products. The right name creates billion-dollar companies. Over the past 40 years, @LexiconBranding has named nearly 4,000 products and companies, including Azure, PowerBook, Sonos, BlackBerry, Dasani, and Febreze. For the first time, their CEO David Placek breaks down their proprietary "Diamond Framework" naming process, including a simple framework you can use with your team to find the perfect name for your product or company. The difference between a good-enough name and the right name is the difference between solid performance and breakthrough success. The right name is a competitive advantage that no one can take away from you. Link to playbook in comment below 👇


12 out of 50 top gen AI apps in the world are AI companions and "spicy" chat.


Why are AI researchers so hard to find? Why are they so highly paid? To try to answer this, let’s rewind back to something from the Carnegie Mellon PhD program. At Carnegie Mellon's PhD program, there's a legendary oral exam question that's deceptively simple: "What happens when you type google.com into a browser?" It's a masterpiece of pedagogical design. You can spend hours traversing the stack—from keypress interrupts to browser event loops, DNS resolution to TCP handshakes, TLS negotiation to HTTP parsing, CDN routing to datacenter load balancing, all the way down to electrons moving through silicon. The beauty is its fractal nature. Each layer reveals another universe of complexity. A strong engineer can navigate these depths, moving fluidly between abstraction levels. Now consider the equivalent question for our current moment: "What happens when you type a prompt into GPT-5?" I estimate fewer than 500 people globally can answer this with comparable depth. Think about what comprehensive understanding requires: transformer architecture internals, attention mechanisms at scale, distributed training orchestration across thousands of GPUs, RLHF implementation details, constitutional AI approaches, inference optimization, quantization trade-offs, not to mention the labyrinthine data pipelines and evaluation frameworks. Unlike traditional systems—which evolved over decades with extensive documentation, courses, and industry knowledge transfer—the modern LLM stack emerged in just a few years within a handful of organizations. The field is simultaneously too new and too vertically integrated. The people who truly understand these systems end-to-end are essentially the early engineers at a small set of frontier labs: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta's FAIR, and a few others. This explains the talent market dynamics. When the total addressable pool of people who can architect and debug these systems is smaller than a single Bay Area high school, the economics become inevitable.



I made $42,359 in July 2025 🚜 ReelFarm – $42.3k


I am excited to announce that Arcarae has $2.5M in funding and I am finally hiring. Arcarae’s mission is to help humanity remember and unlock the power each individual holds within themself so they can bring into reality their unique, authentic expression of self without fear or compromise. Our research endeavors are designed to support this mission via computationally modeling higher-order cognition and subjective internal world models. Specifically, we are building the computational models of the other side of intelligence that everyone has neglected: Intuition. Our evolution is anchored in our current product, an immersive universe for self-discovery, and MIRROR, our AI research implementing cognitive inner-monologue in LLMs, reducing sycophancy by 21% on avg. & up to 156% vs. SOTA models. This marks Arcarae’s transition from a solo endeavor into a full-fledged consumer product and AI research company. I am seeking three very specific people to join me on this mission and help scale Arcarae to its next phase. I am hiring one researcher, one marketer, and one engineer as my founding team. These are far from normal roles; the application and hiring process even reflects this. If you think you are one of these three people, please apply right away. There is much to be done <3 And with that being said, Welcome to the era of Arcarae. And as always, I am excited for what’s to come <3





