Merge co-founders Shensi Ding (CEO) and Gil Feig (CTO) join Sourcery for a wide-ranging conversation on building AI infrastructure that quietly powers some of the biggest companies in tech — including OpenAI, Perplexity, Netflix, Uber, Mistral, and Dropbox.

They break down Merge's three-product suite (Unified, Agent Handler, and Gateway), the make-or-break month that pushed them to rebuild around AI, and why they now believe "English is your programming language." Gil gets candid on the state of AI security — supply chain attacks, agentic code flooding GitHub, and why the scariest threat is always internal. Shensi shares hard-won hiring philosophy (missionaries vs. mercenaries), her admiration for Benioff and the "beginner's mind," and a hot take on companies over-engineering their own models.

Plus: the SaaSpocalypse, the brutal reality of token-maxxing bills, governing employee AI access, headless Salesforce, and whether today's AI valuations make any sense at all.

Shensi Ding: https://x.com/shensi

Gil Feig: https://x.com/GilFeig

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒

YouTube: https://youtu.be/SjrejHEAdeg

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

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𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒

(00:00) Shensi Ding & Gil Feig, Co-Founders at Merge

(01:04) Three products. One big bet

(03:20) How Merge made the AI pivot

(04:42) The Classic Innovator’s Dilemma

(05:58) Building culture around AI

(07:10) The leverage nobody’s talking about

(08:52) Codex vs Claude Code

(09:15) The scale nobody knew about

(09:47) SaaS, Finance, and the Biggest AI Labs

(10:46) Why AI companies buy differently

(12:04) What AI sales actually looks like

(13:04) The Fastest sales cycles in the market

(14:35) Why is Cybersecurity broken

(15:59) Merge's solution to agent security

(19:16) Mythos, Wiz, and the GitHub Hack

(22:34) 1,000 Bot signups in one hour

(23:23) Real reason companies pay ransom to hackers

(25:43) The State of AI Infrastructure Costs

(26:41) Internal AI Governance is the next big problem