Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, the connective infrastructure that plugs into every tool.

Most founders get one founding story. Merge has had three. Merge started in 2020 building boring integrations, watched its first customers die off, then rebuilt itself twice for the AI era. Not many founders talk this honestly about tearing up their company, and there’s a lot of lessons for others trying to do the same.

We get into why AI is useless without integrations, the night-shift build of their AI transformation, the time they almost hired a foreign spy, why Shensi thinks founders with an EA are moving too slow, the Embarrassment Framework, why 60% of public MCP servers quietly fail, how a dinner bot 10x'd their customer events, and why 6% of Merge employees get married.

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Timestamps:

(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

Try Merge: https://merge.dev/turner

Careers at Merge: https://www.merge.dev/careers

Follow Shesi

Twitter: https://x.com/shensi

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shensiding

Follow Turner

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

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