Re-founding a Company for the AI Era | Shensi Ding, Merge

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About this episode

Shensi Ding is the co-founder and CEO of Merge, the connective infrastructure that plugs into every tool. Merge started in 2020 building 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. A lot of lessons for others trying to do the same. We get into why integrations turned out to be so important in AI, the night-shift 5-11pm build of their AI transformation, almost hiring 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, vibe coding a dinner bot that 10x'd their customer events, and…