Fez Zafar is Chief of Staff at Mercor, the AI talent marketplace that vets, matches, and pays experts powering frontier AI labs. A 2024 Harvard graduate who was elected First Marshal of his class, he helped scale Mercor through one of the fastest revenue ramps on record and now leads hiring and cross-functional operations across its San Francisco and New York teams. Before Mercor he was an analyst at Village Global, a research assistant to economist Larry Summers, and a campus builder known for comedy, community events, and a student interview podcast.
Lawrence Henry Summers is one of the most influential and combative American economists of his generation. He was the 71st U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, chief economist of the World Bank, the 27th president of Harvard University, and director of the National Economic Council under President Obama. A John Bates Clark Medal winner who earned tenure at Harvard at 28, he became famous for the 'secular stagnation' thesis and for loudly warning, against the consensus, that the 2021 stimulus would ignite inflation. In late 2025 and early 2026, the release of his email correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein triggered a rapid unwinding of his public roles.