Most founders get one founding story. Shensi Ding thinks Merge has three.
Shensi started Merge in 2020 with her Co-founder Gil, watched their first customers die off, then rebuilt themselves twice for the AI era.
I had Shensi walk me through the playbook behind their night shift 5-11pm AI transformation. Not many founders talk this honestly about tearing up their company. There’s lots of lessons here for others trying to do the same.
We get into why integrations turned out to be so important in AI, almost hiring a foreign spy, why founders with an EA are moving too slow, going straight for enterprise customers on day one, the Embarrassment Framework, vibe coding a dinner bot that 10x’d their customer events, and why 6% of Merge employees get married.
Whether you’re looking for ARR or love, this conversation has it all.
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Timestamps to jump in:
0:00 Something broke every year since 2020
2:22 How Merge went all-in on AI on nights and weekends
5:40 New launches got faster
8:32 Building connective infrastructure for AI
10:51 The dinner where Merge started
13:11 Six months of research before a line of code
19:00 Almost hiring a foreign spy
20:48 Merge’s 6% marriage rate
22:50 Hiring enthusiastic, nice, smart people
28:02 Early stage founders don’t need an EA
31:27 Shortcuts are a mentality
33:01 The AI tool that 10x'd their customer dinners
38:33 Marketing became an engineering function
40:51 Starting with SMB and climbing the logo ladder
42:07 How the product went cross-category
44:16 Launching Agent Handler and a new pricing model
46:47 Every product should be multi-model
49:58 Why most MCP servers don’t work
53:31 Startups should go all-in on enterprise
57:00 The hardest things are most defensible
1:00:26 Say "psycho shit" to be memorable
1:05:47 The Embarrassment Framework
1:10:23 Frank Slootman and being okay with being disliked
1:12:48 Giving feedback got scarier at 100 people
1:14:01 What only the CEO can do
1:19:44 The best marketing is not doing what everyone else does
Referenced:
Find Shensi on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
👉 Stream on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Shensi, welcome to the show.
Shensi Ding:
Thanks for having me.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thanks for being on. I think probably the coolest, most interesting thing we could talk about right now is that Merge feels like it’s had multiple founding stories. Most founders don’t get multiple founding stories. So what’s the second founding story of Merge?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. We started in 2020, which was probably... I know everyone says whenever they started was the worst time, but every single year something bad and crazy has happened since 2020.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, I know.
Turner Novak:
What have been the bad things?
Shensi Ding:
Like COVID. We had to fundraise on Zoom. It’s weird to think about now, but at the time people weren’t used to fundraising on Zoom. So when we would do calls it was very, very awkward, and people weren’t quite used to having that kind of interaction. Now it’s whatever, but back then everyone was like, “Oh, this is weird.” I think we were one of the first fundraises to happen over Zoom.
Turner Novak:
Really? So when was this?
Shensi Ding:
Like June 2020.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So what made it so awkward? Did VC’s... Was it that you don’t know who should talk, you don’t know how to build a rapport with people?
Shensi Ding:
I think it was partially that. Zoom was still new. A lot of people we hadn’t met yet in person. So our first interaction was doing that. I think people felt like there was a different human component that was really missing over Zoom. And it is true, but now I think people are so used to it that it doesn’t really impact things.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And then 2021 was probably just way too much money sloshing around.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, exactly. Everyone had so much money. Everyone was so competitive. It was so aggressive. You had a ton of companies just randomly buying and changing ideas all the time. And then 2022, a lot of our customers were starting to die. Not yet, but starting to. And then 2023 they just all died. All the companies that were our initial customers, except for a few. Obviously Ramp, I think they’re okay. Same with Drift.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, they seem to be doing pretty well.
Shensi Ding:
I think they’re doing okay, yeah. And same with a few of the other logos that we ended up closing back then, like Brex, Drata, Vanta. But yeah, it was just a lot of ups and downs, and us having to figure out, okay, where is the industry going? What’s happening right now?
In the beginning, when ChatGPT came out, we started having a few AI companies onboard, but none of them were really production ready, and none of them were getting a lot of traction or a lot of customers, just a lot of signups. So we didn’t have enough conviction on which direction we could go in to support these companies, because a lot of them just looked like SaaS companies with a little bit of AI on top.
Turner Novak:
Hmm.
Shensi Ding:
But then in 2024 we started realizing there was a really big opportunity, and the market might be a little bit too early, but the market needed integrations. AI agents are really useless without context. At the time people were really just thinking they could do it themselves, and they just needed a few core integrations in order to have an offering that was enough. But yeah, end of 2024, beginning of 2025 was really when all of it started hitting, which was really exciting for us.
Turner Novak:
So what was that like when you’re making the decision of, we have to go all in on something that didn’t exist when you first started the company?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, it was definitely scary. I was really confident that it was the direction the industry was moving in, but the product roadmaps weren’t reflecting it. So I was kind of like, when is this gonna happen for us? When are we gonna start getting all the hyperscalers? When are all the large AI companies going to realize that they need some help with these integrations? And it did require a lot of networking. We had to continue meeting with these companies, really sharing why we were the right partner to work with. It was a lot.
We also had to actively invest in areas that weren’t quite ready yet or mature enough, and take resourcing away from some other industries that were definitely slower growth, or were probably not going to do super well over the next few years. That was very, very painful for us, because I want all of our customers to always love us. But especially when there’s a potential market opportunity and you’re the first to do it, you have to do it. Otherwise it’s really irresponsible.
Turner Novak:
What was the hardest part about making that transition?
Shensi Ding:
I think it was just finding the resourcing, because we had a lot of customers that were very dependent on our product, and taking resources away from that product just felt like you were screwing your customers over. But we wanted to also launch our own AI products at the same time, while adjusting our core product to serve a lot of AI use cases. So figuring out how to make the resourcing work, how to move this engineer here for a few weeks and do that.
And then, let alone building an entirely new product. I was like, “I don’t even know how we’ll find the resourcing for it.” So what we ended up doing, which actually became a blessing, was we had myself, my co-founder, and one engineer focus on building the new product. That was it. And my co-founder and I would only be coding at night, so it would be like 5 to 11:00 PM. After all of our meetings were over, we’d be coding. And then on weekends too. But because we were building zero to one, we learned so much about AI and what was possible.
When you’re building AI into an already existing product, what you feel like is possible is just significantly lower than doing zero to one.
Turner Novak:
And it’s probably helpful that you were actually doing it yourself, because it’s really easy to just see an article about AI and be like, “All right, guys, let’s do AI.”
Shensi Ding:
100%. We learned so much during that time period, and it forced our team. Because we knew so much and we got fully AI-pilled, it made us really force our entire team to invest in it. So I think if we hadn’t done that, we probably wouldn’t have the kind of AI fluency that we have in our organization now.
Turner Novak:
Was it harder to build this product and scale it the first time, or the second time that you went back and redid things?
Shensi Ding:
Oh, my gosh. So the first time, we were in stealth for nine months before a single customer onboarded. And we were doing research for like six months before that. So it took a long time. Our second product, from day one to launch, was around six months. And the third product that we launched was three months. So AI is just getting better and better, and I also think it’s a skill set for a company to learn how to launch new products. So we’re getting better at that too. It’s so much easier to launch new things now, and the ROI of doing so is really high. But there is opportunity cost. There’s so many different ideas. Like, what do I end up doing?
Turner Novak:
So I know you have a lot of customers that use it, like Netflix, Uber, OpenAI, Perplexity, JP Morgan, BCG. I’m probably missing some. So what is Merge, for someone who’s five minutes in and they’re like, “What are these people talking about?”
Shensi Ding:
So we provide connective infrastructure for AI. We have connectors for products and agents, so if you want to connect to G Suite, Microsoft Suite, Linear, all the productivity tools, instead of having to build these integrations one by one, we have synced connectors. We also have live tool calls available via MCP, and we have a smart LLM router as well.
So now a lot of companies want to have model sovereignty, they want to integrate with all the different models. Every day there’s a hot new model coming out. Maintaining and connecting to all of them in-house is a lot of pain. So we end up having this layer that makes it really easy for people to build next-generation AI products.
Turner Novak:
Is it really that hard? Because you could just argue, “Hey, Claude, just go do all this stuff for me.” Why do you need to use something for integrations?
Shensi Ding:
Oh my God, we try doing that all the time with our own product. It’s just not good enough. There’s always the edge cases.
Turner Novak:
So what’s so hard?
Shensi Ding:
For connectors and integrations, there’s just so many edge cases for what could go wrong. There’s also a lot of context that is just not online and not available anywhere. It’s only available if you have industry knowledge, and if you have the data points from your customers for what could happen. And again, it’s just not online anywhere, so an agent could try to do it on their own, but unless you have real-world experience, it’s just hard to replicate.
So one thing that is also very human about connectors is that increasingly a lot of access to sandboxes, which you need, which is basically an instance where you can test against and start building your connector, you can only get access to it from a partnership. And a lot of these partnership conversations require meeting with someone, having some kind of agreement, them knowing who you are and making sure that you’re not sketchy. An agent can’t really do that.
Turner Novak:
So in a sense you are that partnerships layer for your customers. So it’s, all right, we want to use this thing, we don’t have to go talk to a million people and spend all this time. We just use Merge, and it spins up really quick, and we can get going right away.
Shensi Ding:
Yes. And especially when there’s API changes, there’s new things that update, or one customer has a crazy instance that’s a little bit different from everyone else. We’re able to account for all those edge cases too.
Turner Novak:
The interesting thing is that you guys actually came across this originally because you were building these integrations yourself, back when it was you and Gil when you first started. So I think you were getting dinner one night. What happened at dinner?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, so we were getting dinner and just talking about work. At the time I was working with a cybersecurity company that needed a lot of ticketing integrations, and we actually didn’t have any. We were losing a lot of deals to our competitors purely based off of the number of integrations that we did not have and they did have.
So we ended up trying to avoid building these integrations as much as possible, having CSV upload, or sorry, download and upload, launching our own API, hiring contractors to build out these integrations. And it was just not successful. We ended up having to hire a full team of engineers purely to focus on these integrations.
But I have an engineering background, and I was like, “This can’t be that hard. Come on. Let mama go after it. I will do this much, much better than you guys can.” But my co-founder, Gil, was head of engineering at a startup in the recruiting space, so very different from cybersecurity. And he was like, “No, this is much, much harder than you expect, because there’s so much data that we have to sync. We can’t even get started without getting partnership access, or having an established partnership and sandbox account from these different ATS providers. And there’s just a lot of edge cases that can go wrong that are not documented in the API docs.”
So what ends up happening is customer support and customer success don’t know what the answers are. They always have to get engineering involved. So we build these integrations after a lot of effort and a lot of hard work and a lot of partnership time, but our engineers have to keep babysitting them, and we can’t really move on.
Turner Novak:
So then that comes into what we talked about a couple minutes ago, where you almost have this... You’re almost like a partnerships team in a sense.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, we are.
Turner Novak:
So it’s almost like you’re a forward-deployed partnerships team maybe.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. It’s actually one component of the product that was always a nice benefit, where, especially if you wanted to immediately get started, you end up having to go figure out, okay, how do I get a client ID, client secret? Where in the UI do I find this? Who do I reach out to? Originally with our unified API, it was a helpful part. But now, especially because AI is so good, it’s increasingly a more and more important part.
And a lot of these SaaS platforms and sources of truth are increasingly becoming a little bit more protective of who has access to their data and how. So we’ve been able to help facilitate a lot of that too.
Turner Novak:
And how long did it take to get all this going? Because you just said before it took nine months the first time you built it. Did you start coding on day one and it just takes forever to build, or was it a research project? How long did all this take?
Shensi Ding:
So we had six months of research before we started writing any code.
Turner Novak:
What was so hard about the research? Why did it take you six months?
Shensi Ding:
Because back then it was in San Francisco. This is like the olden days, but back then people didn’t meet on Zoom. So we had to meet with people in San Francisco for coffee. Each meeting had to be in person. I also needed to find the people to meet with, so I had to do cold outbound and beg people to meet with me. A lot of these were people we’d never met with before, so we had to ask them questions, just to validate that it was a product they’d be willing to spend money on in the future.
But also, in retrospect, I’m like, wow, it was very generous of those people to spend this time with us, because we had nothing. It’s not even like we had a product that we could demo at the time.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
But yeah, it just took a lot of time, to make sure we weren’t going to be quitting jobs that we really liked for something that was just going to flop.
Turner Novak:
How did you convince people to talk to you? Because to your point, you were nobody, some random person, you probably didn’t even have a startup yet. You had this idea. So what was the general framework you used for reaching out to people and convincing them to talk to you? What kind of questions did you ask?
Shensi Ding:
Honestly, I probably should’ve done a better job. I just did a shit ton of outbound. A ton of pipeline generation, being like, “Please meet with me. Please meet with me. Please meet with me.” So it wasn’t strategic, and very bad compared to what we end up doing now.
But yeah, it was just like, “Oh, we have this idea. Your background’s really interesting. We’d love to get your feedback and advice on what we’re building. We’ll meet you anywhere.”
Turner Novak:
That’s probably a secret though, that you have to go to them. Like, “I’ll go to your office. The meeting room beside your desk, we will meet there.” The minimum possible effort from you to do this, we’ll do that for you.
Shensi Ding:
100%. There’s no way. These people are already doing us a favor, and then we have to make it harder for them? No way. I think that’s something people don’t really understand. This person is actively doing you a favor, so you have to make it easy for them.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
But yeah, if the meeting went well, or we really had chemistry with them, then we’d ask for an introduction to someone else after. So that way we were able to expand our network.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It’s always a good cheat code. Every time, I always ask, when people come on the podcast, “Hey, this was great, here’s all the links, it’s published. By the way, anyone else who you’d recommend to come on?” I feel like that’s a good way too. The guy I’m recording with right after this, Michael Tannenbaum.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, he’s sick. I love him.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, he’s great. I’d heard a couple people mention him over the years. Like, oh, this guy’s the best non-founder CEO operator. And I had Sam Blond at Monaco on, and he’s like, “Oh, you gotta get this guy on.” I was like, “Huh, I’ve heard of him multiple times.” He’d be a good guest.
Shensi Ding:
You should ask him about... So we had this event at the Warriors game. Michael went to Columbia, and then Geoff Charles from Ramp also went to Columbia. And I am so stupid. We had an event, and I try to not have competitors at the same event that we organize, because I’ve been there before, and it’s fucking weird. It just makes it so you can’t be as relaxed as when there’s a competitor there.
So we hosted this Warriors versus Knicks box suite, and I invited both of them. And I was like, “Fuck, I can’t believe I messed this up.” So I gave both of them a heads-up, and Michael’s like, “I don’t care,” because Michael was about to go to Vigor anyway. And Geoff was so excited. Geoff was like, “Oh, I really want to meet him.”
Turner Novak:
This is when they were Ramp and Brex?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. And Michael was so fucking scary in this meeting with Geoff. He was like, “Where are you from? Okay, I’ve heard about you.”
Turner Novak:
I’ve heard of Ramp before. And it’s so weird.
Shensi Ding:
Because Geoff is also scary as fuck, right? But Michael’s the GOAT. He created the billboard, basically. He revived the billboard in San Francisco.
Turner Novak:
He revived the billboard.
Shensi Ding:
Sorry, not created. So it’s his fault. He revived it.
Turner Novak:
It is his fault.
Shensi Ding:
It’s his fault, yeah. But he’s just brilliant.
Turner Novak:
Anything I should ask him?
Shensi Ding:
You should ask him about that interaction.
Turner Novak:
The interaction, what happened when you went to the Warriors and Knicks game...
Shensi Ding:
Hosted by Merge.
Turner Novak:
Hosted by Merge, and you met the Ramp guys.
Shensi Ding:
He has a secret friend at Ramp, he told us.
Turner Novak:
A secret friend?
Shensi Ding:
At Ramp. But he won’t tell us who it is.
Turner Novak:
Oh, interesting.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
It’s almost like a spy. You guys had a spy one time.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, yeah, we fucking did.
Turner Novak:
What happened with the spy?
Shensi Ding:
Okay, so I’m not 100% sure he was a spy, but I think he was. So there was this guy, he was interviewing at Merge. Sick engineer, strongest all around. Everyone was like, “This guy is so good at coding. We have to hire him.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so excited.” So I look him up on LinkedIn. I was like, oh my God, great resume. He worked at Loom. And my friend Vinay is the founder of Loom. So I was like, okay, if he’s good, I want to just back channel. Maybe Vinay can say something nice about us, and what we can do to try to recruit him. So I texted Vinay, I was like, “Hey, do you know this guy? I saw he was at Loom for like five years.” And Vinay was like, “I’ve never seen this guy in my life.”
Turner Novak:
And he was the CTO. He was the head of all the engineers.
Shensi Ding:
He was like, “This guy never worked at Loom.” I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me?” And he was like, “Yeah. Oh, I’ve gotten this back channel before from one other person, and this guy is just straight up lying.” And I was like, “Who is he?” And Vinay’s like, “I don’t know.”
And so then we were like, “Should we confront him?” So our recruiter was like, “Hey, we’re friends with the Loom founders. Are you... They said they don’t know you.” And the guy was like, “Oh, that’s weird. They should know me. I’ll circle back with another reference.” And then his LinkedIn was just deleted.
Turner Novak:
Wow.
Shensi Ding:
And we don’t know where he is.
Turner Novak:
So you’re saying he was a foreign spy, or maybe from a different competitor kind of thing?
Shensi Ding:
No, I think it was a foreign spy.
Turner Novak:
Really? Wow. Because you see those stories where they’re from a different nation state.
Shensi Ding:
And I heard they’re sick engineers too.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And they do the Zoom interviews, but they have all the answers. They’re getting fed the answers to the questions and stuff like that. Was it that kind of situation?
Shensi Ding:
No, I think he was actually a sick engineer. This was before AI was really good for cheating in coding interviews. He was actually a sick engineer. But we’re in person, so it wouldn’t be like he could try to join us by being remote with a fake face thing.
Turner Novak:
That’s fair. But you guys are really big on in-person, in the office, right?
Shensi Ding:
We are, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Is that a reason, because of the spy? Like, well, we can’t do remote anymore.
Shensi Ding:
Well, it’s a nice positive part, that it’s a little bit less likely. But yeah, it’s just really fun, and the team is a lot closer. It helps a lot with communication and being creative. We also have a lot of couples that have formed from Merge.
Turner Novak:
Really? How many?
Shensi Ding:
I think like seven or eight.
Turner Novak:
Holy shit. How many employees?
Shensi Ding:
Like 140.
Turner Novak:
So if you join Merge, there’s like a 6% chance you’ll get married?
Shensi Ding:
I guess so.
Turner Novak:
Are these marriages or just dating?
Shensi Ding:
Dating, but very serious.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Shensi Ding:
Also, a lot of times it’s really high performers dating each other, because you don’t want to date a fucking loser. You want to date somebody that’s really good.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s true. I feel like that’s one of the hard parts of modern dating, where you’ve got the dating apps. Well, I’m married, so I’ve never really used the dating apps. But you get matched with someone and it all seems good, and then your interests and your ambition, everything is different.
Shensi Ding:
Mm-hmm.
Turner Novak:
That’d be tough. But I guess you show up and you’re both at Merge. You’re obviously great filtered.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, filtered.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, great filtered. Interesting.
Shensi Ding:
And you know if they’re good at their job.
Turner Novak:
That’s true.
Shensi Ding:
And you’re also friends with the same people. I’m not encouraging workplace, you know? But it just happens, and it makes me happy that we had a real impact on them. Obviously in their career, but it’s nice.
Turner Novak:
I mean, that’s potentially a really good pitch to work at Merge.
Shensi Ding:
You don’t have to say anything else. And my husband said the same thing, and I’m just like, “I don’t know.” I feel like it’s suable. Or it’s scary. Actually one of my team members, okay, this is really bad, but she was just like, “You need to hire some hot people for me, because I’m single, and right now the probability of someone finding their future husband at this company is pretty high. So you need to hire some hot people for me.”
Turner Novak:
Just start hiring only hot people.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, only hot people for real. Okay, I’ll try. Can’t be a filter, though.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So aside from being really hot, how do I get a job at Merge? What do you usually look for when you’re hiring people?
Shensi Ding:
People have to be really enthusiastic. They have to care a lot. They also have to be really smart, or want to do a good job. But cohesively, part of our culture is people care a lot, people are really nice, and people are enthusiastic. I think the worst part of going to a job, or talking to someone, is if they’re just like, “Ugh,” and it’s super draining. After you’re talking to them, you’re just like, “Wow, I’m so tired,” versus meeting with someone and you’re really energized and you feel excited.
Turner Novak:
So what do you usually look for when you’re interviewing? Are there certain patterns of people who act that way?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, I think people who complain the entire interview, and where things happen to them versus them being in control of their life. It’s very palpable. Because also, if they complain about every single job they’ve ever had, they’re going to complain about you. You’re not going to be an exception. They’re just not going to be happy. So that’s something that I do look for a lot too.
I think it’s totally fine to have a job that you didn’t like, but it’s how you talk about it that’s really important. Sometimes I’ve heard people be like, “Oh, all those people were just so bad, I hate all of them.” I’m just like, “Whoa,” you know?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I mean, my very first job, I worked in a factory.
Shensi Ding:
Whoa.
Turner Novak:
It started at 6:00 AM. It was like the shittiest job ever, honestly. But it did teach me, you gotta wake up at 5:00 AM and go to work and stand all day.
Shensi Ding:
Now you’re just like, “This is so easy compared to that.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Now I just tweet all day and record podcasts all day.
Shensi Ding:
Men used to work in a factory, now they just move their fingers.
Turner Novak:
Now they just podcast.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
That’s the downfall of society. That’s why. I need to go back and work in the factories again.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
I mean, it actually did make me realize, wow, I need to take college seriously. I need to get a real job, because it was basically the summer freshman year after college. A friend’s mom worked at this factory, and I needed a job for the summer, because I needed to make money. And I was like, “Eh, can’t be too bad. I’ve never had a job before, but I know I’m gonna try hard and I do well. Sure, give me a shot.” And then I was like, “Wow, this sucks.” It sucks working in a factory.
Shensi Ding:
Well, what was your hourly wage?
Turner Novak:
I think you got nine bucks an hour.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, that’s pretty good for a factory.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And then you got overtime if you worked on the weekend. So I just always did overtime when they offered it. I can’t remember exactly. I think I was getting like $900 a week, or $1,000 a week.
Shensi Ding:
That’s pretty good for a college freshman.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it was pretty good.
Shensi Ding:
I didn’t work at a factory. I worked at a froyo store where I was getting verbally abused by this Korean lady.
Turner Novak:
A coworker or a customer?
Shensi Ding:
A coworker. But I was in high school. And it was like $8 an hour. Every time, I would love making money, I was like, “Oh, my God, this is so cool.” But standing for that long was something that really came into my memory forever. I was like, “Wow, I love sitting.” So now when I have a desk job, I’m just like, “This is fucking awesome.” I love sitting. I love not burning any calories, and just moving my fingers. I’m so lucky, and I like it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And then I kind of went on this arc where there was a job portal at school where you could apply for internships. And I was like, “Oh, my God, I can make like 10 bucks an hour, 12 bucks an hour.” So I just kept doing more internships. Every semester I’d get a new one where I made more money, to the point where I think my last semester I was making like 22 bucks an hour. Which, I was a 21, 22-year-old kid. And this was in West Michigan, in Grand Rapids. So there’s not a Google where you can make hundreds of dollars an hour as an intern. But it was pretty awesome. I was making more than my parents were making.
Shensi Ding:
That’s cool. That’s really exciting.
Turner Novak:
It was kind of crazy though, because it’s like the most amount of money you’ve ever had. I was getting paid more money every week than my mom had ever had in her bank account at any point in life. It’s crazy.
Well, on this vein of sitting in the office, air conditioning, a lot of founders hire an EA, or multiple. I actually know someone, they have four EA’s. How do you feel about having an EA? You don’t have an EA.
Shensi Ding:
I don’t, yeah. Okay, so I used to be a chief of staff, and I used to manage an EA, so I have a lot of experience understanding what the workflows of an EA and a chief of staff are.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
I think if you have a big company and you’re very successful and very busy and traveling a lot, fuck yeah, get that EA. Get that chief of staff. If your company is 10 or 20 people, and this is different for VC’s, by the way. VC’s have a very busy schedule where they’re traveling a lot and have a lot of meetings. But a lot of founders, you’re coding. You should be meeting with customers. There’s Calendly and there’s Google Calendar. You don’t really need an EA.
It’s kind of a vanity thing. It also slows down the time for booking a meeting with a customer when you’re so small and you really need to just get that on your calendar immediately. And it just means you’re not really fast at your computer. You should be able to learn how to respond to emails fast. You should learn how to respond to your team, and book things on your calendar, and book travel. It’s a good skill set to know how to be fast at your computer.
It’s definitely a hot take, but if you’re really fast at your computer, you can go for a long time without an EA. Good EA’s are a huge game changer, totally agree. But a lot of these people that I’m seeing with EA’s and chiefs of staff and some kind of founders associate at the same time, I’m like, “What are you doing then?” Are you really that important and that busy, where you need someone to do all these things, or are you just really fucking slow at your computer?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Does there need to be a formality though? Let’s say I’m a customer, I email you, and you say you need to be really fast. What if you just, lowercase, not a full sentence, just, “Yes.” What’s the spectrum of, you need to make sure you’re being fast and quick to people, but then the formalities of making sure you’re presenting things? Is that part of the EA? It makes you seem more legit maybe?
Shensi Ding:
I don’t think so. Because also, I’ve interacted with many different EA’s. If the EA is really bad, it makes you look bad.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, like they don’t respond for a day.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, or if the EA is a total bitch, or if you send your availability and they just totally ignore it and send another thing, it creates friction. And especially if you’re in a situation where you really want to meet with this customer, or you really want to meet with this important partner, and you have not hired well, or your EA is not representing you well, that can really hurt the relationship.
So it’s just better to have that in your control. It’s another mental load that you end up having to hold onto and think about continuously.
Turner Novak:
I think a lot about it too. I try to actively not schedule a lot of meetings and not schedule a lot of things. I feel like when you outsource it to someone else, there’s less sacredness around it. Versus for me, if I’m gonna spend time talking to you, and set up a meeting, I really want to talk to you. I don’t do 10 hours back-to-back meetings all day. I guess maybe I’m in a position where I don’t have to, but I don’t really want to do that.
Shensi Ding:
But you know what you can do with an EA though? You can have the EA blow someone off and make it seem like it’s not you.
Turner Novak:
That is true. So I guess it’s a shield.
Shensi Ding:
As a shield.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. That’s why a lot of VC’s hire associates. Because you can just be like, “Oh man, I’m traveling, I’m just slammed. Here’s Shensi on my team, find a time to chat.”
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. Oh, another thing about needing an EA. If you don’t know shortcuts on your laptop, like you don’t know how to go to the beginning of a sentence, or switch tabs without touching your mouse, you don’t deserve AI or an EA. At minimum you should know how to go between Slack channels with shortcuts.
Turner Novak:
Oh yeah, that’s fair. So actually, how do you... I don’t actually know. I don’t use Slack a ton, so I never had to learn the shortcuts.
Shensi Ding:
It’s just like using the shortcuts for Chrome and moving...
Turner Novak:
Like Control J or something?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, exactly.
Turner Novak:
Control K. I mean, Superhuman is a VC. I know all the shortcuts.
Shensi Ding:
Yes. I think Superhuman has added so much value for the people who never would’ve learned shortcuts, ever.
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah.
Shensi Ding:
But yeah.
Turner Novak:
Well, it’s like the whole... Because you did investment banking.
Shensi Ding:
I did. And not to brag, but I’m on the Training the Street leaderboard for formatting.
Turner Novak:
Are you really?
Shensi Ding:
For formatting.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So for people who don’t know, there’s like Olympic level competitions of how fast you can build an Excel model without using your mouse.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Do you... So you’re basically saying, using AI is just like using shortcuts?
Shensi Ding:
I think so, yeah. Well, obviously to a different level, but I just think that shortcuts are a mentality. If you’re using shortcuts, your mentality is like, “I need to be really productive, and I need to be really fast at whatever I’m doing.” So obviously then it extends to AI. I just expect people who are good at shortcuts are probably thinking, “Okay, how do I use AI?”
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s fair. I think that’s smart. So then personally, how do you use AI inside of Merge? What kind of things have you done that maybe are super obvious, maybe they’re not that obvious, it’s unique to you guys? And personally, how do you leverage it to get more done?
Shensi Ding:
So I don’t have anything personal outside of Merge. That was a stupid question.
Turner Novak:
I mean, like, as a CEO.
Shensi Ding:
I’m joking, I’m joking.
Turner Novak:
I mean, there’s some people that are like, “Oh, where should I travel?” Organizing, or what Netflix should I watch, with AI.
Shensi Ding:
But that’s like level one. So for me, it’s basically anything that I see at the company where I’m just like, why is this taking so long? I’ll just build it, or I’ll have someone else build it, or I’ll give a very detailed prompt on exactly what to do.
So one example. We have these dinners that we used to organize for our customers and partners. We would do one or two a quarter, because it was just such a pain in the ass to coordinate. It would require our whole team to go through LinkedIn, find who to invite. They would invite them, and they would have to update the sheet, and they would be like, “Oh my God, the dinner’s all full.” Everyone would freak out.
Turner Novak:
You gotta organize the dinner too. Communicate with restaurants about availability.
Shensi Ding:
Yes. And the seating chart. There’s just so many things for the dinner that it was like, okay, we can only do one or two a quarter, because this is just too much time. And what would always happen, because we couldn’t fill the dinner, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed, was that I would end up spending all my time, through two to three weeks before, going through my LinkedIn being like, “Who’s in New York? Who’s in San Francisco? Who have we talked to recently?” And inviting them manually.
I hated that process, because it was something that I always needed to get involved in, and we just couldn’t scale it. But the ROI of them was so high. People love these dinners, and we’d have such a good time, and I love seeing our customers.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
So one day I was just like, you know what? I’m just gonna spend like two days. I’m gonna build a dinner bot. So now what this bot does, it doesn’t do everything. Like the taste of the restaurant, it can’t decide what’s a good restaurant. You know what I mean?
Turner Novak:
McDonald’s.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, Chipotle.
Turner Novak:
Chipotle dinner.
Shensi Ding:
Or like a $30,000 dinner. No. Right? So it will surface, here’s the top restaurants, maybe do an outreach. TripleSeat, I think, doesn’t have an API either, so we can’t automate that part. So I do fill out a form, but whatever. Once the restaurant is picked, it does the calendar invites. It looks through Gong for every person we’ve met with before. It goes through our Salesforce and Apollo. It goes through our customers and contacts, adds those, and who’s in the city, and it just sends the invites as me.
And then when they respond, it syncs the updates and responses. Before the dinner, it sends the reminders. The day of the dinner, it reminds my sales team to send notes to the people who are going, so they know what to talk about. Does the seating chart. So we went from having one or two dinners a quarter to now, I think we have three to five a month.
Turner Novak:
Cool.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, and it’s awesome. So it’s been so helpful for us.
Turner Novak:
So it 10x’d your dinner throughput.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. So that was something where I just decided to build it out to help the team out, and it’s had a pretty material impact. But me having that experience, building my own agents, and knowing what I can tell people to do. If someone’s like, “Oh, this is too hard,” I’m like, “It’s just not. I know what you need to do here.” Versus if I didn’t know, then I’d be like, “Okay, then we just do that,” and end the conversation.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think it’s a good framework where you can use AI to do anything that takes a long time. The thing I always do, I use AI a lot for the podcast, for all the prepping and all the post-production stuff. And anytime I change something, I always just say, “Hey, I changed this. Just do it the right way next time. Figure out what I did different and just fix it.”
And that’s a pretty... What do they call it now? Looping? They call it a product, if you’re using AI to do loops to build everything.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Do you guys do that?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, a lot.
Turner Novak:
And what’s your extent? Do you do any AI coding still?
Shensi Ding:
I only AI code.
Turner Novak:
You only AI code? Okay.
Shensi Ding:
It’s the point where, this is really bad, but it’s the point where if I’m on an airplane and there’s no Wi-Fi, I’m like, “Fuck, I don’t know what to do.”
Turner Novak:
I did Wi-Fi on my flight here today.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, really? What’d you do?
Turner Novak:
Listened to some music. Well, I played, I have a game on my phone called Slay. It’s kind of like Risk. It’s called Slay. It’s a game from like the early ‘90s I played as a kid that I found on my phone.
Shensi Ding:
You guys sponsor the podcast if you love playing this game.
Turner Novak:
It’s a free game. And I don’t know if you can even pay for it.
Shensi Ding:
How long is the flight?
Turner Novak:
It’s just like an hour.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, from Michigan?
Turner Novak:
From Detroit, yeah. I think it was like maybe an hour and 15.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, really? I didn’t know it was that close.
Turner Novak:
It just depends. Sometimes it’s closer to two, sometimes one and a little bit.
Shensi Ding:
Okay. Well, welcome.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thanks for having me here.
Shensi Ding:
Well, wait, are you in Western Michigan?
Turner Novak:
It’s Detroit, East Michigan. I live in Ann Arbor.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, I thought you were living in Western Michigan. I grew up in West Michigan.
Turner Novak:
And then we moved to Ann Arbor right before COVID. It was really good timing. My in-laws are there, and then with kids, that’s why we live in Ann Arbor.
Shensi Ding:
Are you gonna make your kids go to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor?
Turner Novak:
I’m actually not convinced I’m gonna make my kids go to college.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, I think it’s gonna be like not, yeah.
Turner Novak:
I mean, everyone has different opinions on that, so I don’t know if they even want to go.
Shensi Ding:
That’s very San Francisco of you.
Turner Novak:
Of being open to them not going? Well, I don’t know. My oldest daughter’s more into art and dancing and singing, so she might want to go to an art or dance school. I don’t know. She’s also really good at math, really likes reading. So she might be an English major. Maybe she gets a PhD. Right? So I don’t know. I’m of the view of, I’m not gonna force you to do something, because that sucks. I don’t want to force my kids to do things they don’t want to do.
One thing I want to talk to you about. When you think of marketing, as a brand, as a product, as a founder, as a company, what’s been your approach with Merge? How’s it evolved over time?
Shensi Ding:
So I think every function has gone through an AI transformation, and I think this year marketing went through its own really dramatic change. It became really clear that marketing was shifting a lot, especially the past few months, where there’s all these taste AI companies, all these design AI companies. And it’s because I think coding, AI coding got so good, that the bottleneck for pretty much most companies was marketing. Because you’d end up building so many features, and you wouldn’t be able to market them at the same pace, because there weren’t a lot of tools ready for that.
So we’ve basically changed marketing to become an engineering function. All of our team members have to build agents for everything, like the dinner bot. That’s one thing, right? Everything that’s really recurring and everything that kind of sucks, we should be using AI for. A lot of our ads, we generate them with AI. We have recurring posts or content that we generate based off of things that we produce in our product, and it just pulls straight from our GitHub and then generates the social post. And we obviously eyeball them, but it just releases them too.
All of the data analysis for demand gen of our different ad channels, all of that now, we use AI. We have a calendar, everything that goes into the calendar is automated too. So we’ve gone through a pretty big transformation over the past two months, and it’s been really exciting.
Turner Novak:
Is it working, or is it too early to know?
Shensi Ding:
I think so.
Turner Novak:
You think so?
Shensi Ding:
It’s hard to tell, because it’s definitely lagging.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So then what are you looking at as the leading indicators of an AI-native marketing machine?
Shensi Ding:
Signups, website visits, conversion, obviously early revenue, or POC’s and opportunities that have been opened in Salesforce. So those have been the leading indicators. But it’s still only been one or two months, so we’ll see. I’ve been seeing a lot more activity, and activity hopefully ends up leading to more other things.
Turner Novak:
You mentioned customer signups. So I know in the early days of Merge you were more SMB focused, originally. So why did you start with SMB?
Shensi Ding:
We started with SMB because we were infrastructure, and no one bigger wanted to take a chance on us. It was very scary. We could have died any minute. They would’ve been screwed. And if we had a security incident or any downtime, there were just so many risks with being an infrastructure company. So we really had to climb the logo ladder over time, and move to bigger and bigger companies as our product matured.
And then around three years ago, we made a very concerted effort to move enterprise. So that meant a complete change of who our team was, how our team was segmented, how we approached our marketing. We didn’t used to have decks for sales meetings. And then we ended up having decks, and we had a CRO who was really good at enterprise sales. That helped transform our company too.
So it was a pretty big transformation, and it took a few years. But last year really was the year when everything came in. We had all those logos that you mentioned coming to us, and it was just really exciting to see all the prep and the work that we’d put in for the past few years finally coming in.
Turner Novak:
So then what was the evolution of the product? Because when you first started, it was literally accounting and HR integrations with accounting and HR SaaS tools, and this was back in 2020. So how did that evolve over time, and how did you decide what to do?
Shensi Ding:
So the goal was always to be cross-category. We just picked one or two categories in the beginning, as a wedge into the market and to introduce ourselves. But we picked them based off of what would overlap, what had big TAM opportunities, and especially as the market continued changing.
So fintech was getting really hot when we launched our accounting API. Then we started noticing a lot of sales AI and productivity tools starting to form, so we invested in ticketing and CRM integrations. But we always just kind of followed where the market was going. When we saw AI search was going to be the next frontier of what really needed integrations, we started focusing a lot on productivity and sources of truth, like knowledge base, chat, ticketing, file storage.
So it’s always been TAM driven, customers. I think that’s the nice thing about B2B. Customers tell you what they want, and you just really have to listen to them.
Turner Novak:
Versus consumer, you have to be kind of philosophical, like, “I think this is what the consumers want,” the tastes, the discourse.
Shensi Ding:
It’s hard.
Turner Novak:
Versus B2B, it’s just like, “Yeah, there’s a billion in pipeline that wants this. Build the thing.”
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. I’ve always really looked up to good consumer founders, because I feel like it’s much harder.
Turner Novak:
And then the evolution of the AI product. What was the very first AI feature that you initially launched for Merge?
Shensi Ding:
So there was a product that was for AI companies, and then we had our first AI products that were just very, very AI. But our unified API, we started noticing that for AI search, we needed to have file storage integrations be really good, like Google Drive, Dropbox, Box. Those platforms have so much data that people want to be able to search across. And also having knowledge base, like Confluence, Notion, chat, like Slack, Teams. A lot of companies need those integrations, especially as you want to make it very easy for people to do semantic search in your product, and no one was really able to do that. So we felt like it was a unique wedge for us, and we started going all in on that early last year.
And then at the same time we were like, “Okay, we need to be very aggressive about this move into becoming an AI company.” So we were gonna launch our first AI product, which was Merge Agent Handler. These were tools for agents. Being able to make live tool calls, instead of our synced integrations, was a slight adjustment from our first product, but a completely different product. And it required us to really build something zero to one, do completely different marketing, learn how to sell this new product, and have different pricing. It was a lot of work.
Turner Novak:
Different pricing is scary. Because if I’m a public company CEO listening to this, I think of different revenue structure, and different distribution strategy, and sales. Basically you have to completely reinvent the company when you change the pricing. So how did you approach the new pricing model?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. Good news is it wasn’t a full dramatic shift. The first product, we kept the pricing consistent. The second product, we layered on a different pricing model, and we had to train our sales team for how to talk about it. And then when we did our third product, it was a different pricing model again. So we didn’t shift the first two.
We will get to a point where we’ll have to consolidate all three, because it’s too confusing for our sales team. We’ll also probably have to repackage what the products look like, so it’s a little bit easier to talk about. But it’s been a really big shift.
And I think another thing that was really interesting for us to observe. So Gil, my co-founder, and I were startup people. We remember what it was like when it was very early, to get something from zero to one. And a lot of our team members had joined when Merge, that first product, was pretty established. We had customers, we’re thinking about scale. So they tried to apply a lot of the things that were working for that first product to our second and third product. So we really had to tell the team, “We gotta move out of this. We can’t think about things that will scale. You guys are trying to protect us from the downside. That’s probably not gonna happen. Because we’ll be very lucky if this happens.”
Turner Novak:
Someone uses it in the first place.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, exactly. So that was something we really had to iterate to the team. Don’t be so focused on that. We need to just move really fast so that we can get those first few customers. And luckily they were very understanding, and we were able to do pretty well.
Turner Novak:
And then the second one is the agent handler product. So this basically changes which model the... am I saying this right?
Shensi Ding:
Oh, that’s Gateway. That’s the third product.
Turner Novak:
So this is Gateway. Third product, yeah. Okay, third one. Well, I think that’s an interesting one too, where you basically route the AI direction flow through the cheapest model, or the most effective, highest ROI model.
Shensi Ding:
So the beauty, it’s whatever you want.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So then why is that so important? Because shouldn’t you just have one vendor that you use, and you always get the same result? Why is it so important to be able to switch between different models?
Shensi Ding:
So before, because AI was still getting so much better at every single release, whenever there was a new model release, you were kind of like, “Wow, the last version was totally shit compared to this one. Why would I ever use the last one?” The new one actually works. So we had a couple years where that was really the case, and every single time there was a new model release, everyone would just default go to the latest model. It would just be a one-size-fits-all.
But now, there’s so many new model releases. Each frontier lab is releasing models like every month and a half or so, instead of every six months. There’s also a lot of options. There’s a lot of open source options. There’s a lot of cheaper options within the same lab. And the costs are really starting to become more and more prominent.
Fable coming out made it really at the forefront of how expensive this could be, and how companies really need to start focusing on optimizing their AI spend. But I think we’re seeing, like Coinbase, DoorDash, they’re very advanced companies thinking a lot about how to optimize their internal engineering spend, and how to make sure they’re not overspending on certain workflows.
But for a lot of smaller companies, and also companies that are not that advanced, having that kind of functionality and focus internally is just really hard. And even if it’s embedded in your product, the AI optimizations, it takes a lot of resources. It can be a full team fully focused on, how do I route, when do I make sure one plus one doesn’t go to Fable? How do I make sure hello doesn’t end up costing us three cents? Those are things that a lot of people need to focus on in-house. But it’s what everyone’s building over and over again. So it was a natural extension of our existing products. It is a unified API. It’s one API to route to all the different model providers.
Turner Novak:
Do you know how many different model providers or model options there are right now?
Shensi Ding:
I think we have hundreds.
Turner Novak:
Oh, inside of Merge?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, inside of Merge.
Turner Novak:
What about total, that you could use total?
Shensi Ding:
Oh, I don’t know. There’s also complexities, because it’s not even just... People also have in-house models that they’re probably not disclosing. So it’s infinite. People are starting to do post-training.
But we’re definitely moving to... Right now, this year was the year where everyone started realizing there’s a best model per task. Next year, people are going to start training their own models, but it’ll be very good for one specific thing that’s unique to that company.
Turner Novak:
Where are the areas you think people are lighting the most money on fire right now with wrong model usage?
Shensi Ding:
I think it’s in product, where they’re not smart routing their customer’s prompts. Where everything they send, because the customer’s like, “I want to use the latest and greatest, I’m just gonna pick Fable 5.” And then they just end up using so much money for the stupidest stuff. So they’re not smart routing it when they need to be.
Turner Novak:
What do you think is the biggest risk to Merge today? Because in theory, every single software could throw out an MCP, and there’s no need to use Merge. In theory, right? Technically. Is that it?
Shensi Ding:
No, it’s not. So I think MCP is still pretty new. It’s just a protocol, right? So a lot of companies are releasing their own MCP servers. There’s public MCP servers. But for most companies, their public MCP servers were a side project or a marketing thing. It wasn’t meant to be a...
Turner Novak:
Oh, they didn’t actually work?
Shensi Ding:
A lot of them don’t.
Turner Novak:
Really? I guess I didn’t realize it was that insane.
Shensi Ding:
We’ve been doing some studies, and the success rate of most public MCP servers was like 60%. We build all the tools for MCP in-house, and then we test them really extensively, so the success rate for ours is like 99.9%. We really battle test them. And also, you can have a really dumb agent that ends up making it not successful, so we account for things like that.
Turner Novak:
What’s the dumbest agent activity?
Shensi Ding:
You’re basically like, “Here’s the tool. Here’s the information for what to say. You need to send us the date in blue.” And it just is like, “I’m not sending you the date. I’m just gonna send it in red.”
Turner Novak:
An agent will do that, even though it’s just...
Shensi Ding:
The agent will just be fucking stupid. We’ve seen that with older agents. Some agents are just really bad at tool calling.
Turner Novak:
So instead of upgrading to Fable, they’re still on GPT-1. They’re just so dumb they can’t even...
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, and you’d be surprised. There’s some later stage models that are just still really dumb. But it’s not a risk for us, because there’s other things that we cover in our platform, like DLP’s. We have a security layer that looks for making sure PII isn’t getting sent across. You can add custom rules too, to make sure, if you have certain policies for your company, or you’re in a regulated industry, you can block that data from getting passed to a third party.
And authentication, refresh tokens. There’s governance, making sure agents only have access to certain connectors. A lot of those things are out of the scope of the MCP protocol, that we also include in our platform.
Turner Novak:
Why isn’t that part of the MCP protocol? Was it just, when Anthropic invented this, that was not something they were thinking about?
Shensi Ding:
I mean, MCP’s already such a big... Why are you shitting on MCP?
Turner Novak:
I’m not shitting on it, but...
Shensi Ding:
I’m joking. It’s just out of scope. Because all those things, the governance layer, the observability, logging, DLP, those are things that not every single company needs. And also they might not think about. And it’s just a huge build.
Turner Novak:
Well, and it’s probably, to your point, some of that stuff is more enterprise grade that you need. I mean, the goal of MCP is just to get people using Anthropic products, and the most average, the median project, is a developer in their bedroom making a side project on AI. So it doesn’t have to be that robust.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, it doesn’t. But what was interesting, when MCP first came out, we actually were like, “Wow, this could become a big security issue.” So we started off trying to build a security product for it. But when we were going out to market and talking to everyone, no one cared about the security, because there hadn’t been a vulnerability yet. There hadn’t been anything bad that had happened. So no one was like, “Okay, this is nice, but it doesn’t matter yet, because there’s not a big issue.”
And what we really want are the connectors. So we were like, “Oh, okay, I guess we’re gonna build the connectors then.” So now the connectors are really good. But you can’t have a security incident if the connectors literally don’t work.
Turner Novak:
That’s fair.
Shensi Ding:
So now that we have everything end to end, where our connectors are really good, and we have the security layer, and then we also have the observability layer, it makes it so it’s really enterprise ready.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s fair. So you’ve pretty much gone all in on enterprise. You still have self-serve, there’s still a lot of smaller companies that use Merge, but what was the decision to go all in on enterprise? I think you mentioned you did it in like 2023-ish, 2022-ish.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So why do it? Did you have to? Was it existential, like, we’ve gotta do this?
Shensi Ding:
There’s so many reasons. I think it became pretty clear that, with our first product, it was just a lot of effort for each customer. The amount of time that we spent with each customer, and making sure they were successful, and the amount of requests that they would end up having, was just a lot. And if the customer didn’t make it, it was just a lot of work for someone who just died. So even if they paid us a lot upfront and they died, it was very painful for our business.
So moving enterprise allowed us to have longer term relationships with companies that will probably be okay in 10 years. It allowed us to invest in them, them to invest in us, and it made our company a little bit more predictable. On the downside, we ended up becoming more of a whales business. So we ended up having certain really large logos that we close. And there’s more timing risk in our forecasts and our predictions, and if something slips, it hurts us more. Or if something comes in magically, it’s really exciting for us.
So there’s definitely pros and cons. But I think the pros of having enterprise customers is that you’re building together, it’s a longer term relationship, and you know that if there’s something wrong, they’re still committed to working with you. Versus if it’s very PLG, and you’re more of a commodity business where everyone’s just switching because you’re the cheapest provider, it’s just hard to have customer loyalty. It’s hard to have a second chance too, if something goes wrong.
Turner Novak:
It’s interesting when you see market share of models, how it just fluctuates so much. Even when you look at maybe a year ago, all of a sudden it felt like out of nowhere, everyone’s using Claude. Everyone’s using Claude Code. And then we saw, I was talking to someone in the latest YC batch, and he’s like, “Everyone’s using Codex.” It’s just crazy that it just fluctuates so much. People just change.
Shensi Ding:
People are very unloyal right now.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
So that’s why sometimes, if your moat is the customer relationship, it’s helpful.
Turner Novak:
That’s a lot of things when an investor’s evaluating how good a business is. It’s like, do you have sticky, hard to acquire customers? I mean, every business is just valued off the cash flows. Do you have customers that will pay you a lot of money that will not churn? That’s essentially what a business is, a collection of customers paying you money. Really, at the end of the day, we’re not romanticizing this at all. But a lot of investors will think about that. Do you have big customers that will pay you a lot, and you’ve acquired these really hard to get businesses to the point where they won’t churn? So that’s valuable.
And so you think more startups should go after enterprise? But it’s hard, right?
Shensi Ding:
It’s hard. And also the revenue growth is going to be slower than what you’re seeing with Lovable. Lovable is PLG, so it’s very easy to have a ton of companies just randomly sign up, and Lovable doesn’t have to do as much, and it just scales really quickly. With enterprise customers, each customer, you have to have developed a relationship. You have to build together.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, the dinners.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, the security review, legal. It’s just bigger.
Turner Novak:
Mm.
Shensi Ding:
So it depends. But then also, I’ve seen some companies, they just get some really big logos immediately. That helps them a lot too. But yeah, if it’s really hard, it’s hard for someone to copy.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s true. I’m definitely a proponent of, you should just do the harder things, because to your point, it’s harder to copy. The whole meme of, someone will vibe code and just steal a thing. It’s kind of true. You kind of want to make sure you’re not in a position where people can just vibe code your product, and there’s a million competitors that pop up. So it’s like, what can you do that’s harder? That makes it less likely and less possible.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I feel like part of it too is there’s always so many other things, whether it’s the customer relationships, the partnerships. I think it’s actually not that likely that someone just vibe codes and copies the product.
Shensi Ding:
No, it’s such a pain in the ass to have to maintain something in-house. I would never vibe code Salesforce in-house. Like, ever.
Turner Novak:
It was so interesting, that discourse was probably... Was it 2024? I think so. That was the big thing, that everyone’s just gonna vibe code, and all the software’s gonna just go away.
Shensi Ding:
Well, also, who has the time to build and maintain this application in-house, in addition to their core product?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, you just said you make the events thing, your events tool.
Shensi Ding:
That’s not a product.
Turner Novak:
So this is not, like, you’re selling it to people.
Shensi Ding:
No. It’s just using it internally.
Turner Novak:
What if I make a marketing event field work tool that then I sell to you? Would you buy it from me?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So then how do you decide...
Shensi Ding:
Depends on the price.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So was it, you built this internally because it probably didn’t exist?
Shensi Ding:
It didn’t exist.
Turner Novak:
And so then, if I’m thinking about...
Shensi Ding:
But at the time, if it existed already, I’d buy it. I don’t want to build it.
Turner Novak:
How much would you pay for something like that, though?
Shensi Ding:
Probably not a lot. Because it’s not... But, like, Salesforce, we pay a lot, because it’s way more, you know? So it depends on the ROI.
Turner Novak:
But then, with Salesforce, I feel like there’s people that say they vibe coded, replaced the Salesforce. Why do you still use Salesforce, and why have you not vibe coded it?
Shensi Ding:
Because it’s a source of truth that connects to everything. Everything connects to it. We’ve maintained it for years. We have a lot of automations built on top. There’s just so much that we do in Salesforce that we can’t replicate if we built it in-house.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it’s probably the more integrations that you have, and the more different things you connect with, the more defensible you are.
Shensi Ding:
That’s why I would tell a lot of these companies that are a source of truth, the more companies that are built on top of you... Linear does a really great job of this. They’ve created an ecosystem around their product. That makes you really, really sticky. Ashby’s also doing a really good job of this too. So many companies integrate with them.
And the more legacy companies are like, “Oh, well, these newer companies don’t understand, that’s why we’re closed off, and we have secret sauce, and people are really dependent on us.” But that’s fine for now. That degrades over time.
Turner Novak:
You’ve kind of taken the mentality of all the different partnerships, all the different integrations. You’re kind of that layer personified in a way.
Shensi Ding:
We are. But the thing is, whatever someone wants, we’ll follow. If a company is like, “We’re open right now, but we’re gonna be closed off next year,” we’ll work with them on that. We are always going to follow what the partner wants, and make sure that we facilitate that. We really want to be that layer in the middle, and help make companies integrate with them more easily.
Turner Novak:
And so one thing you mentioned is you still do a lot of outbound, as the founder, manually. So why do that? You could vibe code some, or use some AI automation stuff.
Shensi Ding:
So it’s a different type of outbound that’s not necessarily automated.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So what’s an example?
Shensi Ding:
So for recruiting, I do a lot of sourcing. For engineers, I use this recruiting tool. It is an AI recruiting tool. I use AI for that. I’ll just basically be like, “Okay, this is what I’m looking for.” I’ll have an agent that automatically sends outreach for candidates based off of the criteria that I’ve done.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really? So you don’t even know that it’s sending it.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Oh, that’s interesting.
Shensi Ding:
Well, because it’s hyper-specific. But this tool’s really great. It allows me to also just select all and send. So I can do that too. But for dinner outreach, it’s kind of like having a good party. You want to have a good party, you gotta know the vibes.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
The vibes. There might be, like, Shensi would not be a good guest at this party, so I don’t want to invite her.
Turner Novak:
Or I do.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Like, I do.
Shensi Ding:
I know this person’s fucking hilarious. They’re gonna be in the middle. Or this person sucks, I’m gonna put them like...
Turner Novak:
It’s like, oh, it’s one of our biggest customers. I haven’t talked to him in a while. He should probably be here.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, exactly. So there’s just certain things that are hard to replicate with AI, or even having another person. That’s why it’s hard if we hire someone to even do some of these things.
And then another thing, the outbound is more a lot of networking. I hate to say it, because I think when we were smaller, networking was not helpful. But now that we’re bigger, there’s certain networking events that have been super useful for us, and the ROI has created partnerships.
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Shensi Ding:
Networking has actually, unfortunately, been very helpful.
Turner Novak:
Networking in what sense?
Shensi Ding:
Like meeting other founders.
Turner Novak:
Oh, okay. And you’re just manually, you come across someone and you just DM them, like, “Hey, want to chat?”
Shensi Ding:
No, not quite. It’s like you’re at a conference, and you meet them, or you’re at some kind of founder event and you meet them. And you just have to say psycho shit so they remember you.
Turner Novak:
Wait, what?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, you just have to say... Because the thing is, you just have to be memorable.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I like that advice, that you have to say something that is memorable, and then it’s easier to follow up. Because the follow-up’s so important. When you read those networking 101 guides, it’s always like, “Make sure you follow up after the meeting.” Well, there’s been times I’ve gotten a follow-up from someone, and I forget meeting them.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, no, because they suck. So you just have to be really memorable. I met the Runway ML guy on the street, when we were going from one founder event to another founder event. And I was like, “Okay, I need to just not be a bitch, and I need to just say hi to people.” And so then I talked to him. But I talked to him, and I was like, “Oh, I’m never gonna be able to sell to him. I don’t even know why I bothered.” But I was really nice to him, and I made a few jokes. And now there’s a deal, and he remembers me, because I was the only person to talk to him. Everyone else was being so unfriendly, and I was the only person that talked to him on that street.
Turner Novak:
This was when you were walking, or at an event?
Shensi Ding:
We were literally just walking. And I just talked to him.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. I actually remember there was one event in Michigan, University of Michigan, that I went to. And one of the... She was a professor, also has a company, that I talked to in between some events. And I just saw her randomly walking through downtown, and I was like, “Oh, I know that person.” I just said hi to her. And again, I remembered her because we talked at this thing.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, you have to be memorable. So this is like four years ago. We were at Web Summit, and I was like a baby founder then. I wasn’t super experienced. But at the time, Carta was like the hottest company in the Valley. And I remember being like, “Oh, I’m so bummed,” because Carta is using our competitor, and I really want them as a customer. It would just be a dream logo. We’ve used Carta for a long time. I’ve always looked up to Henry Ward. I really wanted Carta as a customer.
And so then I look up and I see him, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I have to talk to him. I’m never gonna see him again if I don’t talk to him.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
And Gil, my co-founder, he’s like, “What are you doing?” I was like, “I need to go talk to him.” I was shaking. I was like, “Oh my God, I need to just fucking man up, and I need to go talk to him.” So I go up to him and I introduce myself. It’s so creepy, because I read, knew everything about him by the time we...
Turner Novak:
It’s like one of the things where you introduce, and you read their biography to them. You recite every single piece of information that you know about that person.
Shensi Ding:
100%, yeah.
Turner Novak:
So how do you avoid... What do you say when you first come up to someone like that?
Shensi Ding:
I just had to be, I’m not usually, but I had to be pretty charming. I had to be like, “Hi,” and really think of things to say, and comment on the event. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but he remembered me. And then I got a text, or an email right after, that was like, “Hey, I’m doing a dinner tonight. Do you want to come?”
Turner Novak:
You got that from him?
Shensi Ding:
Yes, from him. And I was like, “Fuck.”
Turner Novak:
Wow. That’s huge.
Shensi Ding:
It was crazy. So that night we had dinner with Henry Ward. And it was such a cool thing, because I had looked up to him for so many years. He’s just such a great founder. And I got blackout.
Turner Novak:
So you don’t even remember the dinner?
Shensi Ding:
I don’t remember most of it, but I had a great time. We had a lot of jokes. We had a good time. And then they became a customer.
Turner Novak:
Wow.
So you have this thing called the embarrassment framework?
Shensi Ding:
So I always tell my team, what’s more embarrassing, posting something on LinkedIn about Merge, or the company dying? And so there’s a clear answer.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I mean, that would be terrible to actually have to post on LinkedIn.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
But so that’s the framework, is just...
Shensi Ding:
It’s the framework. And it’s helpful for the team, because I think a lot of them are kind of like, “Oh, it’s so embarrassing.” I’m like, “Yeah, but it helps us so much.”
Turner Novak:
And imagine if you worked at that company and it died, and it’s just because you didn’t post on LinkedIn. Come on. Just make the post.
Shensi Ding:
I, yeah. And obviously, a LinkedIn post isn’t gonna save the company. There’s so many different things. But it certainly helps. And it’s free. And it definitely propagates more to the founders. It is the founder’s responsibility to do the thing that’s embarrassing. You need to send that email. You need to go up to that person. You need to shoot your shot.
And there’s so many times I’ve had to send an email that is so embarrassing and so horrible, and then I’m so glad I did. So Dropbox is one of our customers. We went through a deal process with them, and they were like, “No, we’re not gonna move forward.” I was like, “Oh, so sad.” And then I stayed on it. I was like, “Hey, how’s it going? How is building in-house? Any updates?” And it was so embarrassing. Obviously they didn’t want to fucking work with us, right? But then, I think like the sixth time I emailed, they were like, “Let’s chat.” And then now they’re a customer.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So how do you get past that embarrassment? Any advice for doing these uncomfortable things? I get it, the company’s gonna die, but you still have to do the thing.
Shensi Ding:
It’s, let your inner autist come out.
Turner Novak:
So you almost take down your guard of social acceptability, just being like, “How’s it going building this thing in-house?”
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, pretty much.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. How do you channel your inner autist?
Shensi Ding:
I think you just have to give no fucks, but it’s hard to get to that point. But you can be memorable over text too. I show my friends and my team members some of the messages that I send to our prospects, where I’m like, “Hey, Tim, why the fuck are you ignoring me?”
Turner Novak:
You actually will say that?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. Tim from Apollo has gotten so many texts. All blue, but I love him.
Turner Novak:
And then that works?
Shensi Ding:
It works, because we love each other.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Shensi Ding:
Or maybe I love him. I don’t know. But when we hang out, it’s a good time. He remembers me, you know?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
Also one of my friends, she’s a really hot girl, but she’s definitely autistic. She went to Stanford, but she looks normal. So it comes off like she’s a bitch, because she looks normal, right? So she tells me that she knows she’s a little autistic, and she just leans into it when she needs to for business purposes. And that actually really inspired me, because I’m definitely not there. I’m not like that.
Turner Novak:
I think everyone is somewhere on the spectrum though. From zero to 100, most people are not zero.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, but I’m not her level. But if I need to, I’ll just try to do it.
Turner Novak:
It’s kind of like... You know how the first time you drink alcohol, you drink beer, and you get drunk, and you’re like, “Oh, this is what it’s like being drunk”? It’s almost like it brings that inhibition level down, and you can tap into it later. I wonder if it’s the same thing, where you get an example of it from someone else, and you learn, “Okay, this is how I do it.” I don’t know.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. She’s really good. She’s very direct. So yeah, will this get me canceled? Will people be like the anti-autism... I don’t know.
Turner Novak:
I mean, if you didn’t get canceled before, in the first hour and a half, this will definitely do it.
Shensi Ding:
No.
Turner Novak:
No, I don’t know. I feel like it’s almost un-cancellable, talking about being autistic. It’s acceptable, right?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. I think if it stays in the tech sphere. Once it gets out, then it’s kind of like...
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s fair.
Shensi Ding:
Also, you never know when things will... At least right now it’s uncanceled, but in like 20 years someone’s gonna be like, “She said the A word.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That’s true. It’s so funny when they’ll dig up old videos of Trump, and he’s just like, “Republicans are idiots. If I were to run for president, I’d be a Republican, because they’re just really dumb.” And he probably wouldn’t say that today. But he said it in the ‘80s. So I don’t know. Anyways, I feel like being canceled is kind of overrated.
Do you have a favorite CEO, founder, or business, maybe throughout history, at any time, that you get a lot of inspiration from, or that you’ve always looked up to?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. I love Frank Slootman.
Turner Novak:
Frank Slootman. Okay.
Shensi Ding:
I know that’s kind of a basic bitch response, but...
Turner Novak:
So why?
Shensi Ding:
He’s alpha as fuck.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So what’s been the biggest thing you’ve learned from Frank Slootman?
Shensi Ding:
Well, I’ve never met him, so it’s a little harder.
Turner Novak:
It’s that parasocial relationship.
Shensi Ding:
It is, yeah. I mean, I think he’s really good at saying the thing that’s hard to say. He’s very, very direct. And he’s not afraid to push people, which I think a lot of people forget. And he’s okay with being disliked.
Turner Novak:
Is that a hard part about being a founder, being disliked? You say something and somebody’s like, “I quit,” or “I don’t want to work for...”
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, 100%. All the time.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Shensi Ding:
Like, you say something that’s true and correct, and for the good of them. Because, maybe this is also because, I don’t know, maybe because I’m a woman, but I really care about people. And so sometimes I’ll share feedback because I want them to really do well. And they’ll take it personally, in a way where they think I’m trying to hurt them, or it’s just malicious. But it’s not. It’s for the purpose of them and their personal growth. But yeah, it makes me get disliked.
Turner Novak:
How have you learned to give harder feedback as a founder? Because I’m assuming you have to give it a lot.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, I just am direct. You have to just say it. When you’re not saying it, it ends up hurting the company and the team a lot more over time.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like the most honest, nowadays, is from my wife, telling me something, like, “You need to change this behavior,” or “You do this thing.” I’m pretty avoidant, I have an avoidant personality. And she’s always like, “You need to stop avoiding this.” I’m like, “You’re right. I do.” So I think it’s really... It’s hard. Because you don’t want to hear it. You hear this negative thing, this thing that you messed up, or you need to be doing something better.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. And if the person knows, and they clearly don’t want to talk about it, then I’ll just be like, “Hey, I think we both know. Let’s not talk about it, but it can’t happen again.”
Turner Novak:
Is that a good way to approach it? Like, we both know?
Shensi Ding:
If they know, then yeah, it’s not really worth it. Because they’re gonna be harder on themselves than I could ever be.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And that’s the people you want. You want people who realize, “I messed up. I really want to be better at this. I want to improve at it.”
Shensi Ding:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
So yeah, it’s hard. And especially because the company’s bigger. I think the thing that was hard for me to adjust for was that the feedback got scarier.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Shensi Ding:
The people that I worked with much earlier, when the company was smaller, we were just so close, and there was so much trust from two-way feedback, that it wasn’t really... I didn’t even have to think about giving feedback, and they didn’t have to think about giving me feedback, because it was just how we worked together. It was like, “Oh, this part wasn’t super good,” or “Hey, this was a little delayed, you can’t do that next time,” or “Can you do this better?” It would just be two-way.
But then, almost like once we hit 75 or 100 people, all of a sudden it was scary. People would just be really offended by things that I said. They didn’t know me as well, so they didn’t really understand. I met Howard Lerman from Yext, and it was around the time where I was going through a really hard founder transition, where I just wasn’t used to how removed people felt from me. And he was like, “Yeah, it’s really hard at this point, because they don’t understand you. In the beginning, they really want to understand you.”
Turner Novak:
So when did that transition happen?
Shensi Ding:
It was like 75 to 100 people.
Turner Novak:
Okay. And the thing you go through is that you’re just not spending as much time with every single person, so no one knows you as well. So what do you do? What did you change after that?
Shensi Ding:
I realized I needed to go through my managers a lot more, and be a lot more reliant on my executive team. And I had to spread out the responsibility of sharing feedback and ownership with my executive team more. That helped a lot. So we have a really strong manager bench. Our managers are very... I spend a lot of time with them. But I don’t give feedback to IC’s anymore. I give feedback to their managers, and their managers already know usually, and will be giving feedback to their team members. Same with our exec team. Our exec team will usually end up talking directly with the managers and then the IC’s too.
Turner Novak:
So then what is your job as a CEO, when it’s my first day as an engineer, I’m meeting you? I’m probably pretty nervous, honestly.
Shensi Ding:
I’m like, oh, man, I’m meeting the CEO.
Turner Novak:
Of this hot company.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, yeah, something really bad happened. So there’s a guy who started, and he’s so nervous, and he was introducing himself to me. And then on his second day, he actually called me another Asian girl’s name.
Turner Novak:
Wow.
Shensi Ding:
I know. For me, I’m like, “I don’t care.” But I know he will never forget that.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
I know he will never forget it. He’ll always think about it. I’m like, “That’s so fucked.” I feel so bad for him. But he’s so nice.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
So, yeah.
Turner Novak:
So then is your job as the CEO mostly making people feel excited about what you’re doing at the company? Or is it motivating people, or showing the vision? It’s less about, hey, specific tactical things. It’s more big picture. Is that more how you think about it?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, so it’s things that I can uniquely do. So it’s recruiting, showing the direction of where we’re going, making sure morale, making sure the team is excited, and knows what we’re doing. And a lot of those things can be aligned and get close together too. And then there’s certain strategic big deals, and sales things, that Gil and I need to be involved in. And then product, obviously.
Turner Novak:
What’s your level of involvement in sales? It sounds like you’re still texting and emailing customers all the time, but what’s the level of involvement? Have you gone through any cycles of more or less?
Shensi Ding:
Oh my gosh. Yeah. It’s always in two to three-month stints, where something will be my 100% focus. So earlier this year it was 100% recruiting, with some product. And then at some point it was 90% coding. We just really needed to get a product out, and I wanted to know what was going on, so I was coding so I could help contribute. And then right now it’s mostly a lot of marketing.
Turner Novak:
So then how do you know when to lean in and out of different things?
Shensi Ding:
Honestly, I don’t... This is so bad, but it’s just gut.
Turner Novak:
So it’s just your gut is like, “We need to get the word out, I need to do marketing,” or “We’re shipping this thing, I need to work on the product this month.”
Shensi Ding:
Yeah. I go to a spot where it’s extremely high ROI, only I can do it, and if I don’t help out with this, then it’s gonna really impact the company negatively.
Turner Novak:
What was the hardest thing to give up doing, on a daily basis? Because I’m assuming, when it was you and Gil in the room during COVID, you did everything. What’s been the hardest part to give up?
Shensi Ding:
I love coding. Yeah, I really love coding.
Turner Novak:
And so you obviously don’t do that all the time anymore.
Shensi Ding:
I don’t get to do it. I’ll do it for fun, or to help the team out. Also, because I work a lot, and I’m kind of a loser, so I have a lot of time to focus on Merge. So with the time that I have...
Turner Novak:
Your free time is coding.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, for fun. Like, when I’m watching Real Housewives, I’ll code.
Turner Novak:
What is it, Girl Housewives?
Shensi Ding:
Real Housewives.
Turner Novak:
Oh, Real Housewives.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
What’s so good about Real Housewives?
Shensi Ding:
Oh, my God. You can go in and out and multitask in a way that you can’t do with anything else. It’s not just Real Housewives, it’s all Bravo shows, like Summer House, Vanderpump, Southern Charm, all the shows. I don’t really need to know what’s going on, because it doesn’t matter.
Turner Novak:
Because just some fight is happening and you’re like, “Oh, this is entertaining.”
Shensi Ding:
Exactly. So I can do it while coding.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Shensi Ding:
And it allows me to spend... Versus if it’s silence and I’m coding, it’s not the same vibe. Versus I feel like I’m enjoying it. I’m watching TV while I’m doing something very productive.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Have you ever watched Traders? Have you seen that one?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, I fucking love Traders.
Turner Novak:
I love that show.
Shensi Ding:
I love it. It’s so good. We should do a VC Traders.
Turner Novak:
I thought about it. We should just film it like what Founders Fund did.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I’ve thought about it. So the issue I thought about is, it’s a lot of work.
Shensi Ding:
It’s a lot of work.
Turner Novak:
Like, this is helpful, because I learn a lot through this, and it’s just kind of fun to hang out. You get to meet new people. I make money from it. It helps the portfolio. You have founders that you either want to meet, or want to help. There’s just this whole thing that’s pretty helpful. Versus if I spent a month doing a Traders show, it would be really fun. And I’m sure people would talk about it. I don’t know.
One other one I’ve thought about is making parody music.
Shensi Ding:
Oh, parody music. That’s pretty good.
Turner Novak:
So, what was this guy? You know, by Drake, it’s called God’s Plan.
Shensi Ding:
Mm-hmm.
Turner Novak:
Some guy made a song that’s like Claude’s Plan or something like that?
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, I saw that.
Turner Novak:
So good. That was really good. One that I thought about is, who’s the guy, Chief Keef, he’s got a song like I Hate Being Sober. He could probably make a song like I Hate Being Bootstrapped, or something like that. And all the words are talking about AI, like token maxing. You could probably just take popular songs and change the words, the same pattern, same flow, and it’s just about something startup, tech, VC related. And people would identify with it and get it, and it’s just unique and different.
Because I think one of the most important things with marketing generally is, you just don’t do the same thing as everyone else. You figure out what is a new thing to do or try. So we kind of go through cycles with watch videos, everyone starting a podcast, etc.
Shensi Ding:
Also ABG marketing.
Turner Novak:
ABG marketing. Have you guys gone through any ABG marketing waves at Merge? Followed any?
Shensi Ding:
Unfortunately, no.
Turner Novak:
Unfortunately?
Shensi Ding:
Unfortunately, no.
Turner Novak:
Does it work? Like, should you?
Shensi Ding:
It probably does.
Turner Novak:
Hmm.
Shensi Ding:
All those posts have gotten hundreds of thousands of views. I don’t have a single post that has hundreds of thousands of views.
Turner Novak:
That’s not true. You have a couple launch videos.
Shensi Ding:
Okay, yeah. That’s true. So maybe I accidentally was my own ABG.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, eyeballs works.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. But you’re also literally finding love at Merge. The employees are literally getting married. So that is a good... I feel like that’s success.
Shensi Ding:
Yeah, we’re creating ARR and love.
Turner Novak:
Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for doing it.
Shensi Ding:
Thanks for having me!
Find transcripts of all other episodes here.
The night-shift rebuild story and the way they forced AI fluency into the whole company is interesting. I liked the honesty about tearing things up and the Embarrassment Framework make it feel unusually useful.