S11E6: Building the Unified API with Merge Co-Founder, Shensi Ding

No one's gonna steal your idea. You need to just be like, okay, I'm meeting with everyone, I'm showing people who I am, I'm showing people like why they should believe in me. And it's a great way to start getting first impressions of different VCs and start building a reputation for yourself. So by the time you do come out of stealth, when they see portfolio companies that might need your solution, they think of you and start referring people to you. It's definitely helpful, like you have to meet with everyone.

Welcome to The Room Podcast.

I'm Claudia Laurie.

And I'm Madison McIlwain.

I'm Madison McIlwain. We are on a mission to open the door to the room where it happens, sharing the stories of some of the world's most iconic founders and funders. We're recording this introduction the week before our 11th season launch at the Forbes 30 Under 30 conference in Cincinnati. After making it onto the 2024 list for media, we've hit multiple milestones, including our 100th episode and our first ever all-day conference. Inside Summit with over 120 attendees July of this year.

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Welcome back to The Room Podcast. On this week's episode, we sit down into the B2B ecosystem with Shenzi Ding, the co-founder of Merge. Merge has pioneered the unified API space, a category born from insights and feedback of customers that have been facing mounting challenges and integrations. Shenzi's journey began with her own early passion for coding in Boston to her undergrad at Columbia, ultimately into an early career in finance at Silver Lake, investing in tech companies. Given her engineering roots, she was in a unique position to start a technical product to help support the SaaS sprawl of our time. With her co-founder Gil Faig, Shenzi has built a balanced partnership, each of them bringing complementary skills that have driven Merges' success. It might have helped that they are both co-presidents of Columbia at the same time. Their collaboration illustrates the power of teamwork in tackling the complexities of integrations while also fostering an innovative culture. Today, Merge counts major players like Ramp and BambooHR as customers, proving that customer-centric category creation is a winning approach. They've raised over $75 million in venture dollars from top firms like NEA and Addition, and with over 100 employees and offices across SF and New York, they aren't slowing down. The key insights and themes include how customer collaboration can drive category creation, building with a balance of co-founders in mind, and fueling your seed fundraise initially on vibes and then transitioning to successful metrics-driven fundraise. Let's open the door.

Shensi, thank you so much for being on The Room today. We're so excited to have you.

I'm so excited to be here too. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. We love to start at the beginning with our guests. Tell us, where did you grow up and how did that shape your view of the world?

I grew up in the suburbs outside of Boston, and it's a really nice place to grow up because it's super safe. Everyone's really smart. And I had a great group of friends in high school that were all just equally as nerdy, but there was not a lot to do. And so for me, I knew I really wanted to get out of the suburbs and into a bigger city. And I also really wanted to be online all the time. I was always on my computer, I was always online. My parents actually had to block me from the internet because I was just so, I was so crazy obsessed. But from being online all the time, I taught myself how to code. I made a lot of online friends, got into like web design and building websites. And when I was in high school, there was a computer science class I was very fortunate to have access to, and I obviously wanted to take it because I was already so interested in it. So did that. And then when I was looking at colleges, I knew I needed to get out of Massachusetts, and so I'll apply to Columbia and thankfully got in. And being in New York City really changed my life a lot.

You were coding at a young age, really involved in the internet at that point in time. Tell us, did you think you were always going to become a founder?

Back then I was like, oh, I'll make a website and people will donate money to my PayPal account because they love it. And it was mostly small. I was like, oh, like I'll just make money in this way. And I always thought I was actually going to go back to Boston until I actually physically got to New York City where I was like, no, I really wanna be in New York. But not really. I didn't really actually think I was gonna be an entrepreneur.

Wait, hold the phone. You had people paying you for your website on PayPal? What was this website?

No, sorry, I actually never did, but people who had better websites than I did would. I was talking to my co-founder about this actually, but it was really interesting because online website culture actually intersected with dolls culture cuz you make websites and teach people how to design dolls. And you'd also make websites, then teaching people how to like add graphics to your website, like modify your WordPress, modify your MySpace page. And if you had really great tutorials or really great designs that you were showing other people, then people would just donate money to you for some reason. I never got there because I was always too busy in the basement like designing my website to actually have content on there. I would just like redesign it over and over again, but other people did. They were really great.

I love that. Rewind into like early 2000s, 2010s internet culture.

Such a throwback.

So you mentioned you went to New York for undergrad at Columbia, and there you were really deeply involved in the engineering department. Tell us, how did your love of making websites fall into a broader love of computer science?

I really love problem solving. I thought it was really fun. I also thought my classes were really fun, and Gil, my co-founder, and I actually took one class. It was like computer science problem solving where you would get a challenge and you'd have to build something to solve it. So it could be like a game, it could be like a problem, or it could be like some kind of prompt and then you'd have a small team and you'd build something around it. But that was, it was just super, super fun. You could be really creative and build whatever you wanted. And I think one of the unlocks of learning computer science is it really gives you confidence knowing that you can really do anything. It just depends on how much time you wanna spend in learning it and solving it.

I love that problem solving can manifest in so many different ways, whether it's building a website or building a B2B business, and we'll get into that later. But after college, you started your career in finance. You went to Credit Suisse as an investment banker, then moved to Silver Lake. Tell us how finance informed who you are today as a founder.

I think one of the downsides of moving to New York City, though, is if you are studying computer science and you are an engineer, at least back then, it kind of removes your desire to go into tech because finance is so dominant. So I think that was one of the downsides of being in New York City because tech is not the coolest thing, unlike in San Francisco. But I think for me, one gap that I had was I didn't understand businesses. And even if I would think of a really cool idea or have some really cool solution, I didn't really understand how much money I could make, if it was actually a good business or not, how revenue is incorporated into whatever you're trying to build. And I felt like it was a pretty large area that if I didn't understand pretty soon, then I would never have the chance to learn. I wanted to go into the most intense version of learning that as possible. So did investment banking and did that for 2 years. And it was such a good overview of understanding what financial statements are. It really taught me a lot about the different levers that go into a business, how everything flows into each other. But it's not quite the same as actually working at a company. And I thought I could get a little bit deeper to that and a little bit closer by moving into private equity or investing. And so that's why I moved to join Silver Lake. I would say actually my experience at Silver Lake, even though the day-to-day work was similar to banking, it gave me a lot more perspective of what it would actually be like to meet a founder, how they think about the business, and how little investors know about operating. And I think after that I understood, like, whenever we have an upcoming fundraising meeting, they likely haven't done a ton of prep and they probably already have some kind of existing point of view and I'm unlikely to change it. In addition, if they haven't worked at a startup before or some kind of company, there's just a really wide gap that I will have to try to cross it in some way. And I think that has actually helped me have a better understanding of how to use our investors, how to pitch investors, really understand like, this is what I need, how do I get that from our board?

I'd love to dive into just your key learnings fundraising as a founder, but also having experience on that side of the table. So that's super cool. But in 2018, you really decided to leave finance to become an operator full-time. You joined Expans, a cybersecurity company that was bought by Palo Alto Networks during your time there as chief of staff. Tell us a little bit more about why you decided to leave finance and why Expans.

I could just tell from finance that it was not going to be a new experience for me, and it was going to be very similar. I interviewed a bunch of different companies and the Expanse experience was really unique because the team was really intense. The strategic finance team was also just amazing and I was going to be working with the VP Finance and Operations there. And best of all, I was going to be working side by side with the CEO, Tim, who is extremely dramatic and extremely fun, but also just brilliant, like very, very, very smart. So after interviewing with those different opportunities, I just knew I really wanted to learn a lot from Tim and my, and the other VP Finance and Ops. It was such a great experience. I'm still very close to the team there. I learned a lot from that experience. But actually Scott Sandell from NEA, who's on the board of Expanse, also joined, ended up joining our board after the seed round.

It's fun to see the threads behind some of those career decisions. Like when you're making them in the moment, it's hard to know where it's gonna leave, but having even that board member from that company join what is now Merge, it's just really incredible. But let's orient around the launch journey for Merge. It's 2020. Claudia and I also were stuck at home thinking big ideas. Sounds like you were busy too. Your co-founder Gil, you mentioned him here. Um, did you guys meet in college? Tell us a little bit more about that origin story and how that friendship built the conviction to start Merge.

Gil and I met freshman year of college. Uh, the CS department at Columbia was pretty small back then, so you ended up just knowing everyone else because you were in all the same classes, group projects, and everyone's faces became familiar. And Gil was also just really fun, so we naturally became friends. We were in a lot of the same classes. I joined his group projects a lot just because he was so good. Yeah, we just kept in touch. So when I moved to CMU and oh, and we also ended up doing engineering student council together. So I was class president and he was vice president, and it was just a great experience because every time he said he would do something, he really would. And that was actually quite rare even back in college when it came to like certain working relationships. When I moved to San Francisco from New York, like he helped me move in, he helped me find my apartment. So naturally we would just get dinner and catch up about work. And when we would talk about work, one thing that came up to him was integrations because he was working a lot at the time. And I was like, what are you working on? Why is this destroying your life? And he was saying that he was working on integrations. And my company was also working on integrations. And so I was asking him about like, why was it so hard? Why was it so difficult? Because for me, I understood the P&L impact of integrations. At Expensii, it was really starting to impact our sales processes because we didn't have any at the time. We just had a CSV upload and download feature. It wasn't enough for a lot of our deals or prospects. And for him, he was telling me a lot more about the actual engineering side implementation, why that was so difficult too. And it just seemed like it was a problem that was becoming more pervasive because we were very different industries. Everything was getting more fragmented and the buyer increasingly when looking at vendors was just expecting the vendor to have integrations out of the box. It was going to keep getting worse, but I didn't understand why no one had solved this problem yet. We did a lot of research before COVID meeting with people in San Francisco for coffee. I did a lot of cold outbound and then by the time COVID happened, we had done a lot of research and we were ready. We were planning on prepping. I was relearning how to code. And then he went to his parents' house during COVID and came back and then we got started. Me, him, and my husband, we joined the same COVID bubble and I would just bike to his apartment in the morning. We would code all day and then I'd bike home.

That's amazing. I love that you had a little bit of that jumpstart too on the founding journey and got to maximize— you're talking about this problem of integrations. I'm resonating because when I started my career at Gap, we were still building our externalized APIs for our order management system. And so we would have all these startups come and talk to us. They'd want to plug in and help us sell better, which makes a ton of sense. They would have been great, but we didn't have the resources to be able to give them access to our data. And so Taking a step back for Merge itself, we understand Merge to be one API that unlocks hundreds of products integrations and is really an early mover in this quote, unified API category. Taking that one step further, you're solving the problem of tools being fragmented, as we all just discussed, like percolating across the SaaS ecosystem. Sounds like that aha moment came through your own work. Could you expand upon that? Where was that product idea moment?

I think the problem came first. So we didn't actually have the product idea or aha moment for a while. We just knew that this was problem. We actually met several times to talk through the problem and what a potential solution might look like, and all our potential solutions were just horrible. So I actually feel pretty strongly that it's much better to think through the problem first versus the solution, because the solution can take a long time, and if you're really stuck on the solution, it might not be the right answer anyway. So it didn't come for a while, and to be honest, it didn't really happen until we started onboarding customers.

In the simplest terms, what is the solution?

The solution is one API that returns normalized data and also allows you to post normalized data in one format. So regardless of which vendor that your customers are using, you integrate once with Merges API and are able to offer dozens or hundreds of integrations in your product. So say one of your customers is using Jira and then you have to build that Jira integration. Could take 6 to 12 months and then you have to maintain it permanently. But the next prospect is using ServiceNow. So now you have to build a ServiceNow integration. You have to learn the API documentation. You have to get access to a sandbox. And then the next customer is using Asana. So now you have to build an Asana integration. Every category is so fragmented. And it's virtually impossible to build and maintain all these integrations in-house without millions of dollars of resources and hiring tons of engineers. In addition, customer success is increasingly getting a lot more involved in these integrations as well. And every single time there's some kind of confusion from the customer, then customer success then has to ask engineering to look into what's happening to help get some resources to dig and see if it's a bug or some kind of user error. Overarchingly, it's a very intensive and expensive part of the business to operate. and the worst part is if you don't do this, then you can't sell your product and your TAM is essentially constrained by the number of integrations you have and you can only sell your product to customers that are using vendors that you integrate with. It's just an overall very painful problem and it continues to get worse because now there's so many vendors out there. The buyer can do whatever they want. They don't have to choose your shitty little product that doesn't have any integrations. They can choose someone else that has much easier, um, syncing. It's just getting worse and worse. And so that problem just really resonated with us. And then the solution, when we started talking to people, we had a few ideas, none of them were good. And then when we came up with this one, we really started seeing a lot of interest.

I love that you collaborated with your early customer base to help actually produce a solution that solved the problems that you and Gil were feeling, but then also the problems they were feeling. And you have some incredible name brand customers today, everything from Handshake to Ramp, BambooHR. Tell us a little bit more about that first customer who was kind of the first yes there and how they helped you co-produce what is the solution.

First customer was a company called Prada. They became a unicorn in one year and their team is just fantastic. They gave us a lot of feedback. They also really pushed us. They had a really high quality bar, like they weren't going to tolerate us having bugs or a lot of errors or being really slow to fix things for them. And that really set the pace for the business. They were just really great partners to us. So I think because of that, pretty early on in our DNA, we just started wanting to have a great product. Early on, I had customers that were just like, "Oh, whatever, this is totally fine. It's not that big of a deal. You can take a month to fix this." We're just very fortunate that Daniel and the other engineering and QA teams were so hard on us because it just made us better. But finding them, it's all outbound. I think a lot of people, when they first get started, they're like, "Oh, golden people are gonna come to you," and that's just not true. Like, you have to be really down to do a ton of outbound, ton of self-promotion, and it's obviously embarrassing, but you just have to shoot your shot.

I want to ask one more question about the product experience. What are some of the most popular ways that customers are using Merge in this suite of things you enable?

The main use case is always that you want to add integrations to your products, and there's a lot of different integrations within a certain category that you have to build. And so you're using Merge for a specific category, whether it's HRIS, ATS, accounting, CRM, ticketing, file storage, or marketing automation. Within each category, there are several different use cases that are quite popular. So for ATS, if hosting, monitoring, and creating candidates and applications. For ticketing, it's monitoring tickets, creating tickets, monitoring them, patching them. Same with CRM, but with opportunities and contacts and leads. And for accounting, it's pulling general ledger transactions, creating invoices, monitoring the invoices, updating them, etc., etc. I know that HR has a lot of auto-provisioning, org chart, time off. It really runs the gamut and do support quite a few use cases because it is so broad. The beauty of Merge is that anything that's possible by building directly is really possible through us.

What should we be thinking of as this space? Everyone likes to say you're building in a space. For some time, modern data stack was hot. Kashish Gupta recently told us that's no longer a hot phrase. So what are, what are we calling the area you guys are building in?

We call this the unified API category. In the future it may change, but right now it's a little bit different from other iPaaS providers that are historically more internal focused. So that's why we call it specifically unified APIs because iPaaS just doesn't quite convey this new angle of integrations, and the integrations industry is quite nuanced.

Absolutely. Well, I'm learning a new term today, so this is really helpful for me. Thank you very much. Obviously, you cannot build this without a team, so it's you and Gil, and then you are finding these customers who have this hair and fire problem. You've been able to build a solution and solving it for them. Today you're at over 100 employees, which is incredible. How did you think about building out your initial team?

The initial team had to be really strong because it was going to be the foundation for everything else. We also knew that it was going to be a lot of hard work. And so we had to be super direct about what the expectations were going to be and what kind of company we were going to be building. And everyone just made a lot of personal sacrifices. But thankfully, during COVID you weren't sacrificing as much as you would be now. And if you were down, then you'd make the next step. But it really was a pretty intense filter for a lot of candidates, and most people just were not interested in that. That's totally fine. Like, if you're interested in chilling, absolutely. There's so many great companies for you. But for Merge, it was going to be an intense experience and we wanted to be upfront with people about that. And for a lot of people who wanna accelerate their career and have a lot of like personal connection with other team members and a really unique company growth journey, it's a great place to be.

Yeah, I, I love that of just like open communication from pre-hiring to actually being able to say, hey, this is what we're looking for, opt out now because it's not gonna get any easier, but it's also gonna get a lot more rewarding and The job for anyone who's joined truly has been an incredible growth journey. We're kind of talking about the 2020 phase, but today you raised over $75 million in funding from incredible VCs, from NEA to Accel to Addition and others, of course. So you gave us a bit of a sneak peek into how that board came together, but we are curious, who was the first person to say yes to investing in Merge?

It was NEA. We were very lucky. We had a previous relationship with them. and they had invested in MuleSoft and they just understood the integration space. So we were very fortunate to have them on board and they've continued to be very supportive.

But I have a feeling that you had something to do with the special sauce there. And so you alluded to having to like relearn coding or get back into that coding grind after your banking days and PE days. For founders who are technical or non-technical, I'm curious what your experience was selling quite a technical product and like how you told that story with you and Gil on the fundraising journey, specifically about your individual unique skill sets.

In the seed fundraise, really, it's all vibes. Maybe it has changed a little bit now, but back then it was all, or actually maybe it might even be more vibes. But yeah, it's really all just like, who are the founders? Are they alpha? Or do you think that these people are gonna just roll over and die? And what is their relationship? Like, are they gonna either fight and are they gonna kill each other or are they gonna be able to work well together? And lastly, like, what is, is the idea? For us, we were really confident in our relationship. We'd already done the student health thing. We were really good friends. Gil was also just a really strong engineer and I had a finance and operating background. I'm more of like a useless jack of all trades. I'm not really good at anything, but I can do it all if I need to, but I'm not like really great at anything. And Gil was just like a really strong technical counterpart, which was what we needed. And I felt strongly though, if we want people to gain conviction, we should have to make the down. and so we spent a month or two building a demo of the products that we could show people what it would look like. And it wasn't fully functional, but it really gave them the picture so that they could feel like, okay, this is what I'm signing up for.

A demo. I like that. I don't always see that in a pre-seed or seed pitch, so that's pretty unique. Do you have any other hot takes for fundraising?

Yes. So I think for seed, a lot of people are like, oh, I don't want people to know my idea. No one gives a shit about your idea. You have to go meet with as many people as possible. It's like a debutante ball. No one's gonna steal your idea. And even if they do, are they really going to spend 10 years of their life working on this? Probably not. They're not going to want to wait. You only have, what, 100 years to live? Like, why are you gonna waste 10% of it on someone else's idea? And if you do, they're probably gonna die anyway too. You can't be like, oh, I'm afraid of like telling people because someone's gonna steal it. Like, you need to just be like, okay, I'm meeting with everyone, I'm showing people who I am, I'm showing people like why they should believe in me. And it's a great way to start getting first impressions of different VCs and start building a reputation for yourself. So by the time you do come out of stealth, when they see portfolio companies that might need your solution, they think of you and start referring people to you. That's what I think is really important for the seed round. It's just, it's a debutante ball. Like you have to meet with everyone.

That's the most iconic quote I've heard in a while. Fundraising is like going to a debutante ball. We have to save that. That's really helpful framing for a lot of our listeners that are maybe considering a fundraise.

One other thing too that I feel really strongly about, there are no casual meetings or VCs. And I think one mistake that we made was we did like one casual meeting. We thought it was just like a coffee, but then they were like, oh, can you come in and pitch? And we were just not prepared. And it was the worst pitch of our life. You only have one shot. Make sure you're really prepped. And when you're ready to fundraise, you're actually ready to fundraise and you, you prep, you have a deck, you know what you're saying, you've already pitched it multiple times so that by the time you have that first meeting, that's your first impression and not some shitty one.

Huge plus one to that. Just random fun side anecdote. I had a friend who just moved to San Francisco and she was like, Oh, you have to meet my super close friend, ABC. She's a VC, but you would just hit it off as friends. And so I like go into this coffee just being like, oh my gosh, like where do you get your nails done? And she was like, tell me about your business, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, wait, hang on. I did not realize the way that this was going, but okay, I'll pander to your questions. And then I get an email later being like, I think you are a little too early for us. Shut up. Yeah, no.

As the VC on the call, that's the worst because like It is about vibes, right? You do wanna have those casual, fun relationships that secretly you can invest in, à la me and Claudia, but it's like a very, very fine line between the vibes and the go-to-market on your own investing.

Totally.

Totally. Well, yeah, your vibe is just not gonna be right if you're not prepped. If it's the 10th time you said it, then you're just gonna sound much better. Sometimes people will be like, oh, like I'm just going to meet with blah blah blah. Like they're just getting coffee and it's gonna be casual and I'm just gonna gram them. But I'm just like, that's a whole You're not gonna be able to talk about it properly.

You successfully fundraised and part of that funding goes into really accelerating go-to-market and getting your product into the hands of customers. It's super clear you're on a rocket ship, and I think one of the hardest things for me as a founder to get through in the seed was how to do outbound sales. You mentioned outbounding, quarter-year strategy. Can you tell us a little bit more about Merge's go-to-market strategy and How did you build that initial sales team?

For the seed, it's just you, the founders. Like, you are responsible for pipeline, you're responsible for closing, you're responsible for selling. It's good practice. You should get destroyed and verbally abused by people because then you are understanding what is not working. And by the time you hire someone, you're able to train them. But I would never have someone else figure out that initial sales process because they're just not going to be able to do it to the same degree. And it's just a much faster or much tighter feedback loop if you're getting yelled at on why your product sucks and then you're able to then implement it into your product immediately. By the time we were about to raise our Series A, we did hire a head of sales and he was also our first sales rep. But by then we had a script and we were really understanding what's doing well, what's not well, who to reach out to. But he was really able to help accelerate that.

Let's say you bring on that first head of sales, maybe your sales team is a team of 3 or 4. How do you go from that to, let's say, what your team should look like at $10-15 million in ARR?

Oh my God, it's totally different. So I think up until $10 million, it's all blood, sweat, and tears. It was literally the entire team just running. Everyone building wherever they can. And like, you're getting yelled at and you fix it immediately. That's all just hard work and hours. But from Series B onward, Series B metrics I think are like $5 to $10 million. So that range and beyond with Series C, it's repeatability and scalability. Your team needs to, they need to be able to come in and say the correct things and be trained and onboarded much more quickly. A true sales org and like a CRO that's done it before and is able to scale it. Our sales team has just totally changed in that time period. Now you segmentation, we have an SDR team, we have career paths. And back then it was just like, are you gonna come in and just survive? So yeah, a lot of things have just totally changed. Our analytics, our pipeline generator, it's all just so much more sophisticated because we had to grow up and it's so much harder to scale beyond 10 million than it is to get to 10 million, which sucks because I know it was really hard to get to 10 million, but like it's way harder. I'm like, it's way, way harder. Yeah. And that's someone else that said that to me too. They were like, oh yeah, they're $100 million, sucks too. I'm like, okay, yeah, I guess it just always sucks.

Better love what you're building and selling.

Yeah, exactly. And actually I did go to a dinner with Jeff Lawson where he was saying like every phase sucks for him. When they went public, he was like, wow, this really sucks. But it's like a part of life where you do have to like change and adapt and get new challenges. And it's up to you to decide, am I up for this? Do I want to grow or modify or do I wanna just go back? And I found that to be quite comforting.

Let's shift gears a little bit and chat about AI. It's a hot topic. It's being discussed everywhere, and Merge is a mover in the AI space, allowing teams to build AI features with LLM-ready data from your product integrations. Tell us a little bit more about how AI is disrupting the unified API space, and how do you think about Merge in that?

It's not quite disrupting the unified API space in terms of the product. We found some benefits in terms of testing data, but it's not quite there yet for generating full end-to-end integrations that don't require any maintenance. Unfortunately, there's just a lot when it comes to maintenance, so it's not quite there yet. But on the customer side, it's been really exciting to see just a lot more broad interest across every single category of integrations possible, and integration can just become table stakes for any B2B AI application. For instance, before, most companies would just purchase one or two categories, and now every AI startup purchases almost every single category because AI is just inherently data hungry, and the more data that you have and the more specific it is to your customer, the better your product is. On that side, it's just really exciting seeing all the different use cases, the different product ideas, and yeah, we're here for it. It's great.

What's a moment where like the founder journey surprised you? Something truly was unexpected.

When I first started Merge, I had some contacts because my old CEO, I just would talk to him all the time, so I just knew a lot about what he was doing, what he was going through, and like how hard it was. But you can't trust anyone. Like, you really can't trust anyone. Anything can happen. People can change their mind. There's just so many things that could be going on in the background. And so you just really need to be thinking like a few steps ahead for everything. One thing that I learned from my old CEO was that whenever he'd run into a problem, I, I just wouldn't even think about the problem, even if it was keeping him up at night, because I was just like, he'll figure it out. He'll be fine. He's so smart. And he actually would figure it out, which now in retrospect is shocking because it was so hard. But for me now, whenever there's a problem, my team acts the same way around me. Like those like, oh, you're fine, we'll be fine, you'll figure it out. And I'm just like, I don't know if I can. And it's interesting because I actually have the same dynamic with Gil, my co-founder, where if he's the owner for a problem, I feel the same way with confidence where I'm like, he'll figure it out. And he feels the same way about me in reverse. But when it's like you who's responsible for it, It's not sure. I think that part has just been really interesting for me to realize that it's just, people will see it work out and they'll be like, oh, of course it was gonna, and they don't really understand like how hard it was to make it work out. They're just like, it's fine, of course it worked out, but it's really hard. There's just a lot of things that just don't work out and then it is your fault, but then if it does work out, they just forget about it because it's as expected.

That really resonates for me. I can confirm.

Yeah, Claudia's like deep nodding. Yeah, I think honestly both of those things that you said, how do you find partners around you that you really do trust to actually figure it out and solve it? That's a really high bar. And having those partners for the long run is super valuable. Co-founders, investors, et cetera. I think the 4 years that we've been telling stories here on The Room have been the craziest of times and some of the hardest of times in the macro economy. And you've now been through that cycle as a founder, taking a step back around how you're feeling and how you think your peers are feeling in the environment of the next stage of growth. What do you think the sentiment is right now amongst founders? Is there zeal and excitement to keep building? Are people tired? What are we working with?

I think a lot of people are really tired and I'm definitely seeing it from my SMB customer base. Founders that got started a little bit after COVID or right before, like everyone's just a little bit tired. Things have been changing so much. And so you have to constantly be adapting. You have to constantly be like changing yourself, your company to adjust for whatever's currently going on. It is a lot of energy, but to me, I feel like right now, like it's been a little bit more consistent for at least now for like, you know, you know, a year and a half to 2 years where like things are just harder. And I feel like everyone's a little bit more confident and like calm and understanding the direction that they need to go. And like right now companies are just more efficient. We're just kind of to do more with less. Cover up to be able to focus just on headcount as the main metric for growth. Now it's really like, what is your revenue? How much cash are you earning? Are you being efficient with your money? And that's really the main focus. And I think now, because it's been like that for a while, you're able to just be a lot more calm and focused.

But who knows? No, no, I, and I think it's easy to think that this thing is easy to do, founding a company when valuations are just coming in hot. But when you actually have to sit down and have real benchmarks and real KPIs. It just gets more real, like, tactically. And I mean, obviously it sounds like you guys have done an incredible job of managing both, like, the external expectations whilst also bolstering your team and keeping them energized and keeping them going. I'm curious, you mentioned this unified API space that you're building in. Who would you say are your peer group? Who are the people you're enjoying building alongside and that critical to the Merge tech stack these days?

It's just like Datadog, AWS, like AWS, I don't know. Gil's a pretty high conviction person and you have to use established vendors and like you can occasionally for when it's lower stakes use newer vendors that are more up and coming, but it's just too risky. And at a previous company that he's worked at, they always make the incorrect bets about new technology and it just made it way harder for them to build. And so Gil's been pretty good about making sure like we're using established vendors, but in return for that, I don't expect them to evolve that much around me. I believe that like our life is our fault and that we're in control of our future.

Well, speaking of that future, we're curious to know what's next for Merge and also what's next for you on the personal front.

We just have to keep our heads down. We're very much focused and we know what we need to do. So just continue to go in that direction. And again, hopefully the market stays consistent because we're just feeling really good. We know what we need to do and we just have to execute on it. It's been really good so far, ever since we realized that direction. For me, what's new on the personal front? I need to like rest this year. I've been like traveling a lot for work, like visiting customers, going on site. So I need to work out and be in New York a little bit more next year. Now we've really honed in on our event strategy, so hopefully I won't be traveling as much next year.

More solid core, more sleep, but like mild modicum of work-life balance, if that's even possible as a founder. I feel like we've had people come on and be like, yeah, work-life balance is a myth, but good luck. I believe in you. You know, this has been such a fun conversation. I just think getting to see your journey. It's super inspirational, especially as we think about growing this business and also Claudia and her journey as a founder. Like, truly, thank you for sharing a bit more and peeling back the layers behind what has enabled Merge and your company. Our closing question is one that we ask all of our guests: who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

So I don't have an answer for this because I think that you need to be really independent and you need to be able to have an impact on yourself. So I don't have anyone really externally that has a huge impact on my career outside of people that I've worked with that have been my direct managers and they all, those have been male. So it's hard for me to answer this, but I do think that like your life is in your control and you really should make sure that you feel like you can have an impact on your life versus having some kind of external force come in and change the direction of it.

Honestly, that is so empowering. Like you being the woman that has the impact on your life.

I love that. Thank you for that perspective and just generally the perspective that you've shared today. It's been a super energizing and fast-paced conversation, which we absolutely love, and I'm grateful to get to have the chance to tell your story in the room and also help empower the next generation of integrations because that sounds like what you're up to every day, which we love. So Chenxi, thank you so much for the time and, uh, looking forward to having more conversations soon.

Thank you guys. Thanks for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode and inspirational guest Tuesday. See you in the room. Perkins Coie supports the most innovative entrepreneurs and investors in fast-moving and high-growth sectors, addressing their myriad of legal needs. But the firm doesn't just provide end-to-end legal and business counseling to its startup clients. It also facilitates introductions to key advisors and sources of capital. Perkins Coie's interactive website Startup Percolator offers access to programs, resources, and rich dynamic content designed to assist entrepreneurs on their startup journey. To learn more, go to startuppercolator.com and perkinscouie.com.

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