Hi, I'm Surya.
My parents immigrated to the US from New Delhi, India. I was born in Mountain View and raised in San Jose, California.
I attended Bellarmine College Preparatory from 2017 to 2021 and spent most of high school thinking about policy debate. My partner and I were the first team in history to win all three national tournaments in policy debate: the Tournament of Champions (TOC), the National Debate Coaches Association Tournament (NDCA), and the National Speech and Debate Association Tournament (NSDA). I was also individually ranked as the best speaker at both the TOC and NDCA.
I graduated as salutatorian from Bellarmine in 2021 and matriculated to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. I stumbled around for two years in a college designed to train diplomats, mostly taking courses in international relations, math, and economics.
During college, I was an Assistant Debate Coach at Bellarmine, Intern to Eswar Prasad in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution, and Research Assistant to Caitlin Talmadge in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown.
I took academic leave in 2023 to co-found Mercor, a labor aggregator, with my high-school friends Adarsh and Brendan. After bootstrapping the business to a seven-figure run rate, we raised a $3.6m seed round led by General Catalyst and moved to San Francisco (after one unfortunate month in New York City).
In March of 2024, I was named a Thiel Fellow. In September, we announced our $30m Series A at a $250m valuation led by Benchmark, with participation from General Catalyst, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey, Adam D'Angelo, and Larry Summers.
