Demo-led validation, charging from day 1, selling to AI-native companies, and finding resilient co-founders w/ Gil Feig @ Merge

Engineering Founders · 2026-03-19 · 43 min

Episode notes

Gil Feig (Co-Founder @ Merge) deconstructs the high-speed, tactical playbook for building a category-defining API company in the middle of the AI "space race." We discuss finding resilient co-founders who can handle the “trough of sorrow,” reimagining the Lean Startup Methodology through demo-led validation, and why charging for products from day one is the ultimate validation signal. Gil also shares frameworks for selling to AI-native companies, mental models for roadmap tradeoffs, and how to stay relevant as model capabilities shift. Plus, why you should skip avoid “brilliant jerks” and focus on hiring company builders instead. ABOUT GIL FEIG Gil Feig is the Co-Founder and CTO of Merge, which helps companies like Mistral, Ramp, and Perplexity integrate thousands of external apps into their products & AI agents. Previously, Gil was the Head of Engineering at Untapped and worked as a software engineer at Wealthfront and LinkedIn. A graduate of Columbia University, he now lives and works in San Francisco. ABOUT MERGE Merge is the leading provider of agentic tools and customer-facing integrations for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies.

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