Merge says it spent 9 months interviewing 100 companies before writing code
shensi · x · 2026-07-23
A long-form interview with Merge co-founder and CEO Shensi Ding argues that patience can be a startup advantage: Merge spent 9 months talking to roughly 100 companies before writing code, then built infrastructure that frontier labs now rely on in production.
The conversation also covers Merge's counterintuitive go-to-market path: enterprise first, then PLG. The company says it now has 400+ enterprise customers and 20,000+ self-serve orgs, and has raised $75M from Accel, NEA, and others.
Key themes from the episode include:
- Why she treats patience as strategy
- Hiring a finance lead at employee eight
- Staying disciplined on unit economics
- Refusing a race-to-the-bottom pricing model
More from Companies & People
- Companies are creating “workforce orchestrator” roles to split work between humans and AI — Polymarket · 2026-07-23
- Enterprise AI adoption is still mostly stuck in pilots, poster says — ZeroStateReflex · 2026-07-23
- a16z Speedrun adds a new investing partner focused on AI dev tools and infra — tkexpress11 · 2026-07-23
- Machine Earning AI Summit lands in San Francisco on Sept. 29 with early speaker lineup — astrange · 2026-07-23
- Tesla Robotaxi rollout draws an Idiocracy-style Elon Musk joke — MickeySteamboat · 2026-07-23
- CoRL early-career keynote nominations are due on July 30 — Majumdar_Ani · 2026-07-23