The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David, 1787
In some ways, I feel like I leapfrogged 50 years of career development and slightly regressed personally. An excellent trade overall.
There’s a certain violence to velocity. The world doesn’t always notice, but your body does. You gain 30 pounds in six months. Your relationships become elliptical. You wake up and realize you’ve gained a title but misplaced some fundamental center of gravity.
It’s hard to explain what Mercor feels like unless you’ve lived inside it. “9 to 5” becomes not a schedule, but a slur—used to describe those who don’t believe enough in what they’re doing to bleed for it. Everyone is young. Everyone is brilliant. No one sleeps. There’s a messianic intensity to the work that is polarizing and beautiful.
In the last two years, Mercor went from three guys in a dorm room to fifty people in an office, with fifty more scattered across time zones. I’m almost twenty-two. Each day feels a shade more surreal, walking into an office that used to be a group chat. Yet, the unreality persists.
I think the two most impactful decisions people make in their lives are who they choose to marry and what they choose to do. Mercor is a company fixated on work—not just the mechanics of employment but the moral weight of what people do with their lives.
If you can understand what people are good at, and care about where they do it, you can be the impetus behind profound societal change. Maybe a mediocre SDR would excel as a physician’s assistant. Maybe the overlooked are overlooked for the wrong reasons.
Universities were once our filtering mechanism—the algorithm we trusted to identify exceptional. Go to Stanford. Study CS. But the signal has begun to erode. A degree feels less like a distinction than a delay. The autodidact is the new alumnus.
Still, beyond questions of work and worth, there’s the quieter challenge of becoming someone you recognize.
I think most kids should stay in school. There’s a kind of magic to living half a mile from everyone you care about, where friendships form not through effort, but proximity. You can’t really recreate the feeling of trying to absorb Beyond Good and Evil with a hangover and a final in six hours. College teaches you how to sound interesting at dinner parties and, when the guests leave, how to carry that performance into life.
Outside that bubble, connection starts to feel more earned than inherited.
I’ve made some great friends in SF, but I still consider myself a recluse. People reflect you back, but they do it in funhouse mirrors. Praise has a way of distorting as much as it affirms. So you retreat—not out of misanthropy, but self-preservation. A spiritual concussion.
The last three years have been the most rewarding time of my life.
The world really doesn’t owe you kindness. It just owes you character development.
May 15, 2025
San Francisco, CA