Episode 249: Shensi Ding - Co-Founder, Merge

One of the common mistakes that entrepreneurs make is failing to discovery the true market need for an idea by talking to potential customers. Entrepreneurs sometimes fall in love with their idea and go off to build it but to only find out that it’s not a pain point for customer who are willing to pay money to solve. This was definitely not the case for Shensi and Gil Feig, the Co-Founders of Merge. While they were still employed, they spent 6-9 months talking to at least 100 different companies to validate the problem, their potential solution, and of course the long term opportunity in terms of the addressable market. At that point, the due diligence was done and it was time to leave their jobs and go all in on building the company. Merge is revolutionizing the way B2B companies integrate with their Unified API for payroll, HR, recruiting and accounting. The company announced a $15M Series A round of funding towards the end of last year led by Addition, with participation from existing investor NEA. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Advice on raising funding for first-time founders. * Shensi’s initial experience in investment banking & technology investing, plus her role as the Chief of Staff at a startup and what this experience taught her about running a company. * The aha moment that led Shensi and Gil to work on Merge and how they got started. * All the details on Merge today, the platform, use cases, funding, and growth plans ahead. * What positions were the most challenging to hire for in the early days of the company. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.