Meet the 22 year old billionaire who got paid big time so you don't have to get paid at all...
Meet Brendan Foody, the 22 year old founder of Mercor, the AI-powered hiring platform shaking up Silicon Valley. Foody is what my father, back in the day, would have referred to as an "interesting character." He's a young man "defying the stereotype that Gen Z doesn’t like hard work" which Foody says "on a long week could feel like 40 hours." And, what does one get for all this "hard work?" Following Mercor's recent $10 billion valuation, Foody's stake in the company has crowned him as the world's youngest billionaire.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/world-youngest-self-made-billionaire-102200455.html
How does such a thing happen you ask? Well, in Foody's case, you have a father who is a former founder of a graphics interface company who now works as a startup advisor. Then, you get accepted to, become bored with and finally drop out of college at Georgetown because you've got an idea. Next, you present that idea to Republican mega donor venture capitalist Peter Thiel who, in turn, grants you a coveted Thiel Fellowship - a fellowship said to be "designed to support young entrepreneurs in dropping out of college to pursue their startup ventures." As part of the program, you receive a $200,000 grant and imprimatur to Thiel's extensive network of tech entrepreneurs and investors so that you can build your company more quickly and attract further investment. Congratulations, dude, you're now a Tech Bro.
https://thielfellowship.org/
Right about now, you might be saying - This doesn't sound like a bad deal. All I need is the right parents, the right idea and the right connections and I too can be a Tech Bro billionaire. But, here's where things get a bit squirrelly - because all these other Tech Bros investing in your idea might actually expect a return on their investment. Don't fret too much though, because all you really need to get over this hurdle is an absolute lack of any scruples whatsoever. So, for instance, in the case of an "AI-powered hiring platform" like Mercor, what you need is a business model structured on a simple premise:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1onvdcp/mercor_ai_what_the_actual_hell_is_going_on/
(1) Invite individual job applicants to a “free online interview” for an unnamed business client (which, in reality, is actually a means of helping that business client to train their AI model by having a natural conversation with an actual human being).
(2) Inform the individual job applicant that the business client is impressed with their interview performance and inform them that they have progressed to the next step in the hiring process.
(3) Offer the individual job applicant an unpaid assignment for the unnamed business client to review. This assignment will be composed of two or three part tasks and will typically take around 6 hours to complete. In reality though, the job applicant is once again only providing more free data to train the business client's AI model.
(4) Finally, after the individual job applicant has invested six to eight total hours of their time, inform them that the unnamed business client has decided not to move forward - but that the individual is more than welcome to "stay in the system for future job opportunities.”
Business clients paying you to not pay hopeful job applicants to build their AI models. Don't worry if you don't understand how any of that should add up to a multi-billion dollar company. You're probably just too old to understand.
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