E174: Immad Akhund (Mercury) – The biggest risk in not capturing the upside

Hello and welcome.

I'm Alex Grodnick, and this is Moving Up, a podcast about secrets to success, struggles along the way, and life in general. Today on the pod, Imad Akhund, who's the founder of a super exciting fintech startup called Mercury. I think Imad has some great advice throughout the conversation, but especially around networking strategy. Before we get into the interview, let's talk about the journey. I know that everyone listens to this podcast. They've set some pretty high goals for themselves, and they're really motivated to achieve what our society says is success. I think a lot of people, they think about money and houses and cars, but have you actually thought about why you want to be successful? The why is really the most important part. If you're just hustling your ass off so you can have lots of money, and then you get some money, you're just going to want more of it. And the stuff you buy will be cool, but buying cool stuff, that makes you happy for like a day.

Yeah.

Also, money's a great motivator, but not as good as an actual purpose— solving a real problem in the world. If you can replicate that burning desire to be rich with a motivation to fix something, then you may be onto something. Finally, I think the most important thing here is just being present throughout your journey. Talk to someone who's made $1 million. I speak with lots on this podcast. Sure, maybe they have a fluffier mattress than you and a faster car, but— There's not much of a correlation between making millions and being really happy. Once you get the million, it's not as if something in your brain just switches and says, okay, now I'm good and now I'll be happy. It's how we're programmed to survive. We'll always want more and more and more. Think of a squirrel burying nuts for the winter. You think they're content with just a few? No. That squirrel is going to bury as many nuts as he can, as he can. And then even after he buries way more than he would ever need, he's still going to be busting his ass off burying nuts. So you all know that I like to golf and my game has not really been great recently. What's happened is, is that instead of enjoying being out in beautiful Los Angeles on a beautiful course, I'm so focused on playing well, impressing my friends, winning the $1 a hole that we play for, that my focus shifts away from having fun and onto the results. So it makes it that I can't enjoy something that really should just be pure fun. It's not until I start living in the moment, enjoying the beauty around me, hanging out and competing with my friends, doing something that I love, that then the results will just start to naturally come.

So that's it.

The harder I try to make the good golf come, the worse it gets. And that's life. You just have to find the pleasant parts of the ups and downs and stay present through it all.

Okay, enough from me.

Interview time.

Immad, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

You got a cool, cool, cool, cool fintech startup called Mercury now. Then we'll get into everything about Challenger, Neo, future of business banking. But let's get into how you got to this, how you got here. Have you always been a startup person? You've got a software background, right?

Yeah, so I've been doing some sort of little hacky PHP thing since I was a teenager kind of thing. And eventually I did computer science at a university in Cambridge in the UK. After that, I worked for about a year at Bloomberg, which is the only real job I've ever had. And since then, for the last 13 years, I've been doing startups. So this is actually my 4th company.

Did you grow up in the UK?

Yeah, mostly. I moved to the UK when I was 9. I was originally born in Pakistan. Okay.

So you moved there, you're tinkering with building things and starting things, and you go to work for Bloomberg. Why'd you do that?

I didn't necessarily know what I wanted to do at that stage. I was pretty good at programming. The main career path that seemed obvious back then was either management consultancy or investment banking. Bloomberg was somewhat close to investment banking. Actually, I applied for a lot of other jobs and did not get them.

You applied for those banking consulting jobs.

Yeah, exactly. I think the real underlying thing is I had absolutely no passion for them. It was just the default answer. Bloomberg does have more A lot of the other jobs that— even the investment banking jobs that have some level of programming, they're not really programming jobs. They're kind of a little bit of programming and finance kind of jobs, whereas the Bloomberg job was a real programming job. That's just something I've just naturally been good at, and obviously I studied it as well. So, it was easier for me to just get into that kind of job. That was probably the only one that I applied to that was more of a programming job than not.

It's funny how that works out because society pushed all this pressure on going to get that job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey or something.

Yeah, I mean, back then, this is 2005, there was no Google or Facebook in the UK, so there wasn't really interesting startups to work at. I think I would've done that instead. There were software companies, but they seemed like various IBM or Microsoft or something, which wasn't appealing to me.

Right. Yeah, I mean, I did the investment banking path because society said that's the path that I should do. It definitely was not right for me, and it took me time. But I mean, I'm happy I did it. It's a good skill set, but it's part of my journey. Okay, so anyway, so you're at Bloomberg, you're doing a real software programming job. Did you like it?

No, not at all. I was just really bored. You have this you don't really know what the thing you're building is for. You have a rough idea. Bloomberg has so many functionalities. The terminal can do anything. So I was in the fixed income group, something to do with mortgage fixed income, something. I really can't even remember what. It was the trading systems on fixed income, but there was a specific project I mostly worked on. It was very uninteresting to me, but it was also very draining, weirdly. I would go in for 9 hours. I'd come home, I would feel no energy to do side projects or anything like that. But me and my friend at Bloomberg, we used to read TechCrunch all the time. This is, in my opinion, the heyday of TechCrunch. That was pretty much the only tech news there was. And it was always very interesting. It was like someone's selling, someone's getting a startup funded, et cetera. And from our perspective, we're both programmers and it seemed like, oh, we could build that. We would see something and we would be like, okay, that doesn't seem that hard. It's got the user system and someone logs in. Obviously, we underestimated what it takes to make a real business. It was much more that we could do the software part of it. So we would share these links with each other and we would just fantasize about not working at Bloomberg. And then eventually after a year, we had an idea. The original idea was actually kind of different. It was like, People in the UK are pretty obsessed with properties, and we wanted to make a map where you could see all the different variables that come into a location. So, you could see house prices, crime rates, distance to public transport, restaurants, all that kind of stuff. So, that was the idea that we had, and we were like, oh, that's a good idea. Back then, actually, there was a company I can't even remember its name, but just IPO'd that was kind of doing a Trulia-type thing in the UK. Oh, it was called Realmove, I think. But anyway, so we were like, okay, this could be a real business. This company did okay in the UK. So yeah, on the 13th month of basically the job, we both quit and then we started working on this thing.

To go do this. I mean, did you like work a little bit on the side? Or you said you were so tired when you came home from work, so it was tough.

No, we just did it. You just did it. My view back then, the thing in the UK is it's actually very— it's not easy, but it's much easier to be a startup person than it is in the US. You have free healthcare. If you're actually not making money, the government will pay for your house mostly. They paid 80%. There's a housing benefit. And the only qualification is you're not making money. There doesn't have to be a good reason for why you're not making money. I actually didn't have much in savings when we quit. I had maybe £6,000 in savings, but I did the maths. I'm a very frugal guy, and if housing is mostly free, I thought I could survive for at least a year on that.

Take advantage.

Yeah, exactly. So we quit and we just started working on it. My view on it was I knew I could get another job, so I didn't think there was much of a risk in just quitting and doing it. I thought it would be fun. I could get another job if it doesn't work out. I'm also actually okay with kind of maxing out credit cards in these periods. I've done it multiple times. I don't recommend it, but yeah, I didn't live badly and we were able to kind of focus completely on this and it was fun. I mean, we were young as well. There's no responsibilities. There's no real risk of What would happen if it didn't work out, right?

You know, kids, family, all that stuff. Uh, okay, so what happened?

Yeah, it didn't work out basically. Uh, yeah, we eventually pivoted a little bit and decided to kind of go after Yelp. Back then Yelp was in the UK, but it wasn't really. Um, and that's the thing we launched after, I think, 4-ish months.

Um, it's pretty good, 4 months and get a product out there.

Yeah, I mean, I think the product was okay. It's just Yeah, we had no idea what to do next, basically. Overall, we ended up getting maybe 2,000 users. Then my co-founder wanted to get married and he was like, this isn't really working. So yeah, it basically didn't get anywhere. But what I did do in that time, which was really pivotal to what we continued doing, is I really immersed myself in the entrepreneurial community in London. So I don't do it that much anymore, but I would go to 3 or 4 events a week. Every event that was happening that had anything to do with entrepreneurism, I would be at. I would meet entrepreneurs, some that were more successful, some that were at the same level as I was. The London community is not that big, but at the end of the 7 months of RevMap, which is the name of that company, I just got to know pretty much everyone just by being there a lot, especially everyone that was kind of at my stage or close to it, like a young entrepreneur that was new to it. There's definitely a lot more successful people that I didn't have access to. But it really— many of them did raise money, so we never ended up raising money in that thing. But I felt like I learned a lot from just being out there and knowing a lot of people. And that's what kind of got me hooked into the idea of coming to San Francisco. So there was a few people there who had moved over. Colvir and Harj were— Harj does Triplebyte now and Colvir does Zeus, but they did a company in Y Combinator. I guess it was 2006 or something. But there was a few other examples of people who'd moved over. And I was like, okay, I'm going to move over. especially as this thing wasn't working. And Y Combinator seemed like the right path to do it. We had actually applied with that company for Y Combinator, but we hadn't got in. But there were 2 companies, and again, the whole industry was small enough that I knew everyone who had got into Y Combinator in the next batch. So there were 2 companies that got in. And basically, because I was an engineer, it was relatively easy to go like, yeah, in the end I went to one of them and was like, hey, I'll be your kind of engineering co-founder. And he was, one of them was an engineer, but yeah, that's what ended up happening. So I joined, that's how I originally came to YC. It was summer 2007 as a kind of co-founder to this company called ClickPass, which was my second company. You poached it.

You're like, they're in, I'm going to just go jump on.

Yeah. It's actually like, you know, I never, up until that point, I didn't really appreciate being an engineer very much. Like I was just like, it wasn't something I was like, I liked it, but I wasn't like that passionate as an engineer. Um, and I'd kind of just followed that career path because I was good at it and I couldn't think of anything better to do. But at that point, I was like, okay, actually it's a super valuable skill set that not that many people have, and just having it gives you access to a lot of things.

A lot of things. And you already said you had the confidence that you could go try something and then just easily get another job.

Yeah, exactly.

Not everybody has that. That's awesome.

Yeah. I mean, people, it's just a very valuable skill. I mean, I recommend everyone doing it if you can.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you come out to YC, you say, I'm going to be a Technical co-founder of a company doing something similar and what happened next?

Yeah, so the company, I mean, it wasn't something similar. It was called ClickPass. It was basically like a single sign-on mechanism, made it easy to log into websites. This is like '07 to '08. We did okay. We ended up being integrated into Hacker News. Anyone who used Hacker News back then might remember our annoying button that made it easy to log into Hacker News using your Facebook or Google. We also integrated into Scribd and Discuss. So we ended up getting 2 million users relatively quickly. But the issue is we had no monetization. So we had raised $300K at the same time as we did YC. That's mostly my co-founder did that. But when it came to the next stage, which this is 2007 or '08 or something, right? So the next stage was like a Series A of $3 million or something. But it was very hard to get traction on that without any monetization, especially as a B2B thing. And yeah, so we ended up pursuing trying to get a talent acquisition. I decided I didn't really want to go work for someone at that stage, so I split off. And actually, I had a friend who was kind of interning with me. His name is Jude, very smart guy. And he and I decided to do a new startup. So, this is my 3rd company. Basically, at the end of 2008, we decided to kind of kick off on it, and that was called Hazer App.

And this is the video game?

Well, it was all sorts of things. So, that company went from 2008 to 2016. Originally, we were doing Flash gaming, So that was a YC company as well. So we were doing a— back in 2008, 2009, Flash games were still the main way casual gaming happened. So we were distributing Flash games and then we— Flash games basically just gradually and mostly just completely died when mobile games became a thing and no one was playing Flash games anymore. And so we ended up pivoting from our flash games thing to a mobile game social network. And yeah, that's a long story. You want the whole story?

I mean, you can give us the shortened-up version of it.

The shortened-up version. Well, yeah, we just basically mostly, I would say, had a very good initial run where we raised from Union Square Ventures after YC, and then we did a And a Series A also with Union Square Ventures where we raised $3 million. But after that, we just kind of did this pivot, just struggled to have a retentive app. We ended up pivoting again to make an ad network, which got us profitable, but barely. So from like 2014, we were profitable, but we were not excited about doing an ad network. So eventually found another angle, which was still within our space called Mobile Mediation, which is a developer tool for advertisers, I mean, for developers who want to show ads. So if you wanna show video ads from like 6 different providers, we helped you optimize, integrate, optimize, and kind of show you good reports on what's happening. That did well. We were actually used by, I would say, like 2 or 3 of the top games in iOS. for the whole of 2015 or something. And we ended up selling to our main competitor, which is a public German company called Viber, for $45 million. But the whole process was super painful.

It was 8 years.

Yeah, that was 8 years.

But this is how startups go. Everything is painful. Society glamorizes, they're so easy. You get into YC, you raise lots of money. It's all just this golden road.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a— I've always considered it a privilege that I could work for myself. When I first quit, I really did expect it to be a 1-year thing, and I didn't necessarily think of entrepreneurship as a long-term path without success. The fact that I went from basically 2006 to 2016 without selling anything for money and continued to be an entrepreneur for all that time, I think that was a bit of a privilege. And it's nice to be in Silicon Valley where you can raise money and survive like that. And yeah, it was a struggle, but it was a much— at least I was passionate about the struggle. At Bloomberg, I was completely unpassionate. So I'd much rather fail with passion than just be normal.

While racking up credit card debt, but yeah.

Yeah, I mean, credit card debt's not that bad.

You can just pay it off. Once you sell your company for $35 million, then yeah, that Those things don't matter.

Well, you raise money and then you can pay it off. I mean, at Heyzap, right at the start, we did YC, and back then YC would give you like $15K. Actually, they gave us a little bit more than that, but we were like, okay, we have to pay for our visas. So we spent, I think, $10K or something trying to get visas done, like paying for the lawyers and all that stuff. And so I was back on credit card debt pretty quickly because we had basically, YC gave us actually $30K. So we had to survive 9 months with $30K where we'd spend half the money on just the freaking visa costs. And then we were flying back and forth and all this stuff. So yeah, but then we raised, you know, our community and school donations and that helped.

When you first linked up with that company that was in YC that you emailed, did you email several companies that were in YC and were like, hey, are you looking for an engineering co-founder? Or was it just that one?

I mean, I'd spent the 5 months before going to so many events that I just knew everyone. So I can't exactly remember how I knew them, but I think I just met them at some event. I'm sure it's true for smaller tech towns, but back then London was very much a small tech town. I know it's much bigger now, but there was just not that many companies, and there weren't that many people trying to do things.

But you're going to these events and you're Trying to network and get to know people at your level, not trying to crash the guy walking off the stage that's the big-time investor.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not a good networker at all. I'm not very— I'm an okay social person, but I've definitely met people that are much better at just trying to talk to more successful people and being good at that.

But it seems that your strategy has worked pretty well for you, just networking.

I think it's mostly just about persistence. I just did it a lot and I was I was also doing something, right? I was not just going to these network events. I was trying to do it in my own startup, so I had things to talk about and insights to give and learn from people. So it was not a totally one-way relationship, which I think is necessary to network successfully.

Well, yeah. I mean, these have to be authentic relationships. You can't just be transactional, like, hey, let me become your friend so that you can fund my business so that we can get rich. It's like, let's come up together.

Yeah. One thing that's interesting about Silicon Valley is that anyone can be successful here. When you meet someone, you don't know who they're going to be next. It doesn't matter where they are right now. Either their startup could do well, they could go join someone. Anything can happen. So I feel like people are generally very open to networking with people because of that.

That's interesting.

Yeah. If someone emails you, you just have to take the email a little seriously. You don't know who that person's going to be.

If you're a good person. I mean, if you could be a bad person, like, oh, they didn't come to me through the proper warm introduction.

Some people are just really busy. That's the reality of it. If you're a VC, you have hundreds of emails and it's hard for you to be on top of them. But most people are not that busy. So it's, you know, everyone has their level of like how much they can give. Okay.

So you're on this big-time journey. You sell the company for lots and lots of money. And so now it's like, okay, now you're set. So what'd you do next? You take some time off? You're like, I'm going to get right back into it? Buy a house?

Yeah. So we had a 1-year earnout. And I'd been like really excited about investing in companies for a really long time because I was actually in the same batch as both Airbnb and Dropbox. So I did the '07 batch and '09 batch. And I'd seen a lot of companies and I just wanted to see what investing was like. I'm also not very good at not doing anything. So while we were doing the earnout, I started investing fairly— I don't know if aggressive is the right word, but I was kind of fairly on top of it. So I invested, I think, like 30 companies in 2016. another 30 in 2017. And that was one of my primary hobbies, I guess. And during 2016, I also became a part-time partner at Y Combinator. And that was, yeah, I just wanted to kind of give back to YC and also just kind of always just enjoy talking to entrepreneurs. So, I was doing those 2 things, which was taking a lot of my time. And then I'd had this idea for Mercury for a really long time. So during Heyzap, actually, we were, you know, I was pretty good friends with one of the founders of Gusto before he started Gusto. Gusto is a payroll software. And we'd seen them, yeah. I remember when we started Heyzap, there was an ADP, ADP's an old-school payroll company. ADP representative had to come by, like literally They had to come to our office when there was 2 people at our office. It was where we lived, actually, with these binders and get us to sign up to ADB. And I just remember thinking, oh, this is just a ridiculous process. And then Gusto came along and it was all online. You sign online. It was just super easy.

Yeah, make payroll delightful.

Yeah, exactly. That's probably their slogan. And they really delivered on that. So just seeing them do that, really was inspirational. The only other big thing that just never improved was banking. Slack, and before that, HipChat improved communication. I remember when we first started Heyzap, it was all Skype and it was a pain. But banking was still a pain. It was basically the same. You had to know someone at SVB or something, or you had to of walk into a branch and then the websites weren't great. They never really improved. The products have been extremely static. So that was something, I don't know, it seemed kind of obvious to me and I'd been thinking about it for many years. And then on top of that, there was a company actually out of YC called Seed that did it. They were trying to do an SMB bank. So for a while I was like, oh, someone's doing it. Yeah, I'm gonna forget about this idea kind of thing. But they ended up not really executing on it. So, I was kind of like, okay, maybe I should think about it more. So, that was one kind of class of problems we had. Another class was we were making money via an ad network. So, we'd have maybe like 60 advertisers send us like $2 million at the start of the month. And then at the end of the month, we'd pay out 600, 700 developers. And that process with the bank was super manual. So we had someone log in every day, see who had paid us. And then at the end of the month, we had these crazy huge kind of admin pages that would be like, every time someone had changed an account number or routing number, we'd have to input it into the bank. So the whole thing was extremely manual and painful. And back then we used to use SVB and they just couldn't give us an API to this stuff. So that was kind of the second class of problems, not having an API. The third thing that bothered me, which seemed like, again, I say obvious, but maybe it's just obvious in retrospect, but we would get these Excel spreadsheets at the end of the month plus 15 days from our bookkeeper. And that would be when we would really have a holistic understanding of what happened the month before. I mean, obviously you have some dashboards and you can kind of see revenue, but they don't necessarily always match up to which invoices were paid. And it doesn't really have a good understanding of costs. Sometimes our AWS costs would go up from $50K to $100K for a few months and no one would notice until someone looked at this Excel spreadsheet and we didn't have a CFO or anyone. So it was very easy to miss these fairly impactful changes. So that was the last thing. I thought a bank has pretty much all the data already, all the money's going into it and leaving it, but they just have no insight into what's happening in your business. They could do a pretty good job of giving you real-time insight. Those were the 3 things I was like— For many years, I was interested in making this bank. Then when 2017 came along and we'd finished our earnout, my initial thought was I was supposed to take some time off, do a sabbatical, et cetera. But I was still in San Francisco. Actually had a— so from the start of January, I was free. And then I ended up, I had my second child in April. So I was kind of doing this other stuff, but I decided to just kind of go see if I could make this bank happen. So I just spent a lot of time basically just doing meetings after meetings. I tend to learn pretty well just by talking to people. That's my main kind of mode of learning, as it was. So I just talked to any fintech entrepreneur I could find, anyone that had previously done a challenger bank in Europe or the US. US has less, but I talked to the Monzo guys, the Tide guys, lots of different people who attempted something like this. And then talked to lots of lawyers, lots of bankers, people at Visa, Mastercard. Every time I talked to someone, I'd be like, okay, who else should I talk to? And there was some of these conversations I was like, yeah, I tracked it once. There was a really useful conversation I had with someone and I was like, where did this intro come from? And it was like 4 deep in my intro chain, which is kind of cool.

And it's easy to ask for introductions when you're just like, I just want knowledge. I just want information. I don't want anything.

Yeah. And I wasn't quite as vague as that. I would be, okay, yeah, I try to go deep on subjects. So I'd be like, okay, I'm talking to this lawyer. I want to learn what does it take to buy a bank? What are the legal restrictions? What do I need in place, et cetera? And then I talk to him and maybe he doesn't know about it, but he knows another lawyer that knows about it. So I had a class of things I wanted to figure out.

Right. But all information, not money or just, let me get you a coffee and let's pick your brain.

Yeah. It was all mostly phone calls, to be honest. Speaking to you. Sure. There's some. And I think with information, there tends to be The most valuable set of information is someone who tried to do something similar or the same thing but didn't do it. That's actually by far the most valuable set because they already did this learning tree and assembled into a cohesive answer. So, Zach and Dan tried to do this company called Standard Treasury. And they were super helpful. And they're also entrepreneurs, so they got it and they were kind of interested in me trying to do it. And yeah, so there was a few people that definitely were super helpful and made it easier. Yeah, so that was kind of my approach. I talked to a bunch of people, eventually figured out that it wasn't impossible, which was good enough for me. And then Then we kind of started going deeper, started some of the design, some of the programming, talking to partner banks, et cetera. So putting all this kind of stuff in place before we went and raised our seed round.

Right. Because starting a bank isn't exactly like starting a regular consumer company. You built your first app and your first product in 4 months. Banking's a little bit different.

Yeah. And actually, I probably underestimated some of that.

Everyone does.

That's just how startups are. 10 times harder than you think it's going to be?

Yeah, I think that it's hard to do things if you fully understand everything you have to do to do them. So, having ignorance of some of these things is probably the reason people do things and go like, oh shit, it's actually harder, but I'm halfway through, so I'm going to keep going. But yeah, I think it took us longer to finish the product, but it wasn't that bad. I talked to a lot of fintech entrepreneurs and there was definitely A class of entrepreneurs that were like, it's going to take you 2 years minimum and you better be prepared for it. So I was definitely in my— I tried to be optimistic about everything but prepared for the worst case. And the worst case was worse than what we ended up doing, which is we got to alpha in a year and a half. So it was better than the worst case, but it definitely felt like a really long time.

Yeah, I'm sure. Okay. So Let's— Immad, tell us about what Mercury is today, how it works, who your customers are, everything.

Sure. Mercury basically looks to solve the 3 classes of problems I mentioned. We're building a bank for startups. The idea right now is we give you a checking account, a debit card, and a savings account, mostly with 2% interest. It's all online. We're pretty much the only way you can sign up online for a business bank account in the US. For most people, they can get it done in 15 minutes, and we mostly give people bank accounts within 24 hours.

It's more complicated than just opening a personal bank account. Business bank accounts are.

Yeah, you need a little bit more information, an EIN number and incorporation docs. There's some level of diligence. There's certain types of companies we can't support. But there's also Yeah. Over time, there's going to be more complexity, but there's definitely multiple employees and they all have their own debit cards. There's access control between them. The needs for business banking tend to be more complicated than consumer banking, especially we deliberately set out to do startups, which is actually a harder set of people to do for various reasons. So with consumer banking, you can get away with not doing wires, not doing international wires.

Yeah.

Most consumer banks don't do joint accounts or anything like that, right? So it's kind of a simpler problem set. With startups, pretty much straight away people are wiring us $1 million and they expect wires, they expect international wires, they expect checks. There's plenty of other banks people could use. So you can't have a depleted feature set and say, hey, we can't do this, but you should use us because the website's nice. So it does put the onus of having a fairly complete banking solution. But that's also good because we're kind of being tested by the highest-pressure clients in some ways. So if you're an SMB and you want to use Mercury, which you can, we probably have most of the features that you need. So that's the idea of Mercury, give people a great bank account. We're also developing this API that we discussed, which should be out soon. And the analytics piece is harder to prioritize right now because we're growing so fast, but we definitely want to get to it. The other thing we've ended up doing that we're probably going to do more of is democratize financial products for businesses. So if you're a really big business and you have a treasury management team or something, you can normally get 2% interest savings account or more. Whereas if you're a smaller seed-stage company, it's really hard to access a good savings account. So we give you a 2% interest savings account, which is fairly competitive. I think over time there's other types of financial products we'll do something similar with and give you access to them at a smaller stage and give you tools around managing them.

Yeah, well, that's great. And so what do you attribute— you said you're growing so fast, it's tough to keep up. What do you attribute that growth to? It's like there's just this hole in the market where people want such a great a business bank account that's simple to use, or you guys have executed well, all of that?

Yeah, it's been a little bit of a surprise, I would say. I definitely felt the pain point as an entrepreneur myself, but when we talked to maybe 100+ startups that were at the right stage before we launched, and a couple were really excited about it, or maybe everyone was like, okay, I'm up for it, but it's hard to tell how much that will convert into. But the internet's a big place, right? So even if 1% of startups are excited about Mercury and that's enough for them to switch, as long as I get in front of 10,000 people, that's 100 people pretty quickly. So yeah, it turned out, I think there's just been a reasonable amount of pent-up frustration that people are just annoyed about the fees that they get charged. They're annoyed about Other banks not responding to their emails. There's enough stuff. These banks are just not run as modern software companies. They're run as, we've been around for 40 years and we'll just do whatever we want to do. And we'll treat the bigger clients really well. And these seed stage companies, we don't really care.

Right.

And we'll do the minimum possible for them. So there's just this inherent kind of gap in the market and people have just kind of come to us, which has been nice. We did only a couple of things really at the launch that went well. We have a few kind of well-known investors, obviously Andreessen Horowitz, but also Justin Kahn and Elad Gale. And those people probably have the biggest followers from our investors and they all tweeted about it. And that was kind of the initial set of users. And then we also hit the top of Product Hunt the next day. I think those 2 were pretty much the only real marketing things we've done. Oh, we were also on the front page of Hacker News. And after that, 4 months later, we're still growing and it's mostly from word of mouth and people keep tweeting about it.

That's great.

Yeah, it's fun.

I mean, Chase would kill for that. They're spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to acquire a single user.

Yeah, I mean, I guess at some point we might need to do something like that, but right now we're fortunate enough to have enough people that care about it. And a lot of our users are very passionate about Mercury too, so they share it with their friends.

That's awesome. Okay, so, Imad, last couple questions here. First one's about advice. You're talking to someone kind of early in their career, maybe they're at Bloomberg or something and they're like, This sucks, but I don't know what the hell I should be doing. Maybe there's something about passion, kind of like you said, but what do you tell someone like that?

Yeah, I always thought that my rough path, I thought, would be like I'd work at a job for a while, I'd maybe do an MBA, and maybe after that I'd be an entrepreneur or something. So I think if there is a final thing you want to do, it's probably better to just go do it. or go try to get closer to it. So, I did think I'd eventually want to be an entrepreneur. And at the time, I was like, oh, why did I even work a year here? In hindsight, it wasn't that bad. So, I think that's probably number one, just go do what you actually want to do rather than try to do these middle steps that aren't really necessary. I'm a big believer in immersion. So, I read a lot of biographies on people that are successful that, like, it's not that I want to emulate them, but I want to, like, learn to think like them. So, videos, podcasts, books, you know, articles, especially early on, I did a lot of that. And so, I think that, and actually Y Combinator has these dinner series where you can, like, talk to these really successful people. And I thought that was, like, really good to, like, see how they thought about things.

Right.

So I think that's useful. What other tips are useful? I think people worry about risk, and actually in life, the biggest risk is not capturing the upside, if that makes sense. The fact that I didn't have a job or money and I had credit card thing, none of that stuff really matters. But if I hadn't moved to San Francisco and did these things, I wouldn't be where I am. So I think it's especially, things get different obviously when you have family and kids.

Sure. But until you do, we overemphasize the downside. We think we'll fail, we'll be homeless, our family will desert us, and we'll have to—

Yeah. And I mean, most people probably have fairly supporting families anyway. My family at least didn't get me, didn't necessarily understand why I quit my well-paying job to go do these things, but they were like, not saying like, they were like, okay, if you need some food, come in the weekend. And I think most people would have hopefully a similar situation.

Cool.

That's great. And lastly here, anything the listeners can do that would help you, help Mercury? Now's your chance.

Yeah. I mean, mercury.co, if you're going to do a business, you should sign up or recommend us to people. And that's probably the most obvious thing.

What about startups? Maybe they'll show you some interesting investments or something? People reach out to you?

I'm so busy with Mercury that I just don't have much time for investment stuff. But yeah, if you sign up, I'm happy to advise if I can be useful.

Okay. Well, Imad, thanks so much for coming on. This was awesome speaking with you. Thanks for having me to your new office here. This was nice.

Yeah, this is our office that is maxed out. We are about to move, actually.

Cool.

All right. Thanks for having me.

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