CRV Risk Takers Ep. 1: Anuj Kothari with Veronica Orellana & Nadine Fattah

Anuj Kothari was headed for a conventional big-tech PM job. Then a lunch with an old high school debate teammate turned into a one-week work trial at Mercor, and he signed the offer the same day. In the first episode of Risk Takers, CRV's Veronica Orellana and Nadine Fattah sit down with Anuj, one of Mercor's first 10 employees and now a General Manager on the operations team. They talk about how speech and debate became a hiring pipeline, why poker taught him to judge decisions by process instead of outcome, what it took to scale culture from 6 to ~600 people in two years, and why he believes the AI data market is still in its first inning. Risk Takers is a CRV series by our very own Veronica Orellana featuring the people who bet on themselves early. 0:00 Intro 0:25 Bellarmine, speech & debate, and quiz bowl 3:23 Debate as Mercor's hiring pipeline 4:37 Skipping the pre-professional path at Penn 5:38 Poker and building a risk appetite 7:55 From a big-tech PM plan to Mercor 10:02 The one-week work trial 12:52 Why the pitch resonated 14:58 Scaling culture from 6 to ~600 people 17:57 How his role has evolved 20:47 The state of the AI data market 25:15 Lightning round: best debater, poker vs. debate 27:40 Mercor's 10-year vision Anuj Kothari:   / anujskothari   Veronica Orellana:   / veronica-orellana-b90820114   Nadine Fattah:   / nadine-fattah   #RiskTakers #CRV #Mercor