Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn | Immad Akhund (Co-founder and CEO of Mercury)

4 days after launch, someone like signed up, never spoke to us, and transferred $1 million into a Mercury bank account. And I was like, wow.

For today's episode, I'm excited to sit down with Immad Akhund. He's the CEO and co-founder of Mercury, a banking platform for startups. Mercury is Immad's 3rd company, and he's been a founder for the better part of the last 20 years.

What does it take for this to be your only bank account as a business, right? That was my level.

In our conversation, we dig into the squishier topic of company culture and how Immad's personality shows up in everything from product building to hiring.

I never understood culture for my first 3 companies. The way I describe it now, what is the personality that you have, like both you personally and then what is the personality you encourage in the company?

Imad then shares the founding story of Mercury and what he's learned about finding product-market fit on his 3rd go-around.

If you're actually a strong founder, you can sell anything. You'll get weak product-market fit almost out of any idea. And that's the problem.

Let's dive in. Well, I'm excited for the conversation. I appreciate you joining.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I was curious for you, what have you learned from starting multiple companies? Meaning like the most important things you figured out that you could have only learned as a founder of multiple companies.

So I've been doing startups for 18, 19 years, 19 years this year. And I feel like one of the things that's like fun about being a founder, CEO, but also annoying is that every year you have to learn new things, especially if you're progressing. Mercury's almost a 1,000-person company. So even the lessons I learned in my previous companies are not always applicable when it's a 1,000-person company versus a 10-person company, right? So I'll try to pull out some that I think were hard for me to learn that later on I have grokked. This is like a meta lesson, which really Took a while to truly learn, but it's quite an important lesson for me, which is you can't take other people's lessons and make them your own. So, you know, like what's the cool thing nowadays, like founder mode or something like that? I think it's very easy to take something that Brian Chesky says, or, you know, back in the day used to be all about MVP, like minimum viable product. And you're like, oh yeah, this is a great philosophy. Like it makes sense. And then you try to copy paste it and apply it to your situation. And you're like, this is now like a prescription for how I will run this business or come up with ideas. And I just think that never works. Like the lessons work in their particular way for that particular situation. And you have to adapt them to your situation. Like what's your kind of customer segment? What's your, I mean, even what's your personality? Like all of these like things. So there is still things to learn there, but the answer isn't to take a framework and copy it and apply it to yourself. The answer is to understand the framework. understand what was the specific situation that led to that working there, and then try to blend it into how you would compare it to your own situation. So I'll give a concrete example of this. So everyone, once we got to a certain size at Mercury, maybe 40 people, everyone's like, oh, you need an OKR framework. And when we were small, I was like, okay, this is just silly. We don't need it. We don't need a structure for objectives. There's just 5 people in the room. Let's just do this. But there was a certain point where, you know, when there's enough layers of like management and you do have to have some sort of way to like have a top-level goal and percolate that through. If you're like always like, if we measure it, we'll optimize and we only do the measurable things. Like, you know, like doing like an extra bit that like creates like a magical experience for customers. That's like very hard to measure a metric against, in my opinion. And it's dangerous to have like everything be like, must be driven by metrics.

Do you translate these things to your own company in like a taste-driven way? You go read books, talk to people, and then just sort of have a model of the company in your head and whatever feels intuitively right. Or if I were to study all the things that you do at the company and the related things that exist at other companies, there's more structure to the way that you figure out how these things apply in the context of Mercury.

I think some things like this probably have to be top-down, and the way they're translated is I go do this work, and then I talk to the exec team and collect their ideas, and then we percolate that down. But we also try to create a culture where people have their own ideas, and there's upward mobility of ideas, or they can— I want to make it so every team can run their team slightly differently as well.

If you continue to push down this set of ideas, it is definitely true that most of the remarkable companies are kind of their own unique organisms. And they're, particularly when they get started, they're a little bit weird. And the founder tends to invent as much around how the company is run and the choices they're making and how they recruit on and on and on as much as it is the product. There's sort of like this weirdness about it that it isn't copy paste. At the same time, like you look at most 50, 150, 200 person really good Silicon Valley companies, and they do tend to look more similar than different. Like they eventually have a managerial ladder. There's engineering management, you know, on and on and on. And some people push off hiring product people or this, but, but there is a thread that definitely runs across these companies. What do you sort of make of that? Is it just like that it is, there are certain things that are just broadly correct?

Yeah, I think it's not worth reinventing everything, right? And there's definitely a lot of osmosis in Silicon Valley, right? We have a bunch of people from Stripe and Block and Google or whatever. So people bring their ideas and the good ideas tend to be like memes that percolate. And that's good. I don't think anyone should go like, I am going to reject all ideas upfront, right? I think that's going to end up being pretty dysfunctional. I do think it's worth assessing each idea individually and not just saying we will get it because it exists and other people do it. And it's worth saying, okay, you know, does this actually make sense for us? And, you know, 90% of the time, yeah, if everyone else does it, you know, should you write tests when you like ship code? Everyone does it. Everyone says it's good. You know, I think it's good. Let's just do it, right? You don't need to go reinvent everything, but it is worth Checking with your gut, checking with what makes sense and making it slightly different if it makes sense for you. I do think one thing that is different pretty drastically between a lot of companies, and I think is particularly hard to copy paste, is culture. So this kind of goes back to your original thing of like, I never understood culture for my first 3 companies. People would say, do culture, it's so important. And I would say, what does it mean? Is it like, Whether you have beer in the fridge, those kind of things sound like culture. It's like, this is how people work. The way I describe it now, at least what makes sense to me, is what is the personality that you have, both you personally, and then what is the personality you encourage in the company? I find personality easier to think about than culture, and there's a set of personality traits that work well together. So for example, for Mercury, we look for humble people that are helpful, that are curious, that are customer-centric and product-minded. I think all of those traits actually work pretty well together, but it's almost completely in contrast to some other companies that look for like competitive people that are like very like goal-driven. And yeah, it's not that we don't want goal-driven and somewhat competitive people, but you know, we won't take that instead of, yeah, if there's ego associated with that and a lack of helpfulness, et cetera, we will like do that trade-off. But that's like very much like, that's my personality. That's the co-founder's personality. And we've kind of embedded that personality throughout the company. But yeah, you need to be consistent. I mean, in my last company, we just didn't have, like, I didn't understand it. And, you know, we had some people that were like very competitive alpha people and some people that were like this. And there's just like this continuous kind of inconsistency and clash of cultures. So I do think like that is very company specific. And yeah, there's a really good book by Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Actually, that was the other book, but That's also good, but the What You Do Is Who You Are, I think that's the best book on how to build a company culture that I've read. And I really liked it, but you know, that came out pretty late. So unfortunately I didn't have it in my earlier startups.

When you looked at the culture of your other companies, is the biggest difference that you weren't intentional about who the people you hired were, or it was other parts of this idea of culture and personality?

So first thing, we never wrote it down. So if you never write it down, no one knows what it's supposed to be. So I think the process for culture is like you write it down, what do you care about? How do you care about it? That's step 1. Step 2 is how do you then put a hiring process that tries to pick people who have that cultural attribute? And you try to come up with questions or like we have a product interview that we do for almost everyone, even non-product people get the product interview. So you write down those kind of hiring traits. Then within the company, you celebrate it. So you're like, when people do things in a certain way, you're like, oh, that's great. Like that really was helpful. And we have a channel called Grateful and people just post when someone does something nice and they're grateful for it. And that was like organically created. But you do these, like, because you've stated what you care about and you hire against it, then you start doing these things that reinforce it. That's why I think it really comes from the Founder's personalities, it's very hard to live something you're not. You know, I have 3 kids and when I imagined being a parent, I was always like, oh yeah, I'll be like, do things in this way or that way. But then once you have kids, you realize you spend 24/7 with them. Like, you are who you are. And if you want to be someone different for your kids, you have to like change yourself. And it's very similar in a company. If you, you are who you are and like, that is the culture of the company, even if you write down a different culture from who you are. So unless you're willing to change yourself to become that culture, it has to be true to you.

Do you find that it's relatively easy to hire for personality fit? Or said differently, when you think about all the people you've had to manage out of the company, is it a vast minority that the primary reason is that they were not aligned with the personality of the company or sort of vice versa and actually culture fit or whatever term you want to use, is surprisingly hard to actually get at the essence of in the interview process?

I think over time we've got better at it. I think we're pretty good at getting to the essence of it in the interview process. And the main thing is try to have ideally a whole 30-minute interview that's just on one particular cultural attribute. If you can pull that off, you have a pretty good sense of it after 30 minutes.

What does that look like?

I can't remember the exact wording on it, but We have a cultural attribute of wanting people who are curious. And the thing that we do to test that is we give people basically an hour to prepare a presentation on any subject they want. We're just like, hey, pick something non-work-related that you find really interesting, spend an hour, write a presentation, and then we spend 45 minutes kind of, I mean, they're supposed to do the presentation, but it's really just a conversation around that subject. And that tests actually a few different attributes, but you can see the curiosity in someone super quickly if they're talking about something they really care about and you're like, okay, Yeah, why do you care about this? And like, okay, tell me about this aspect. And you just keep asking questions. I feel like within 10 minutes, normally in those interviews, I'm like, wow, this person is super passionate about kayaking or gardening or whatever. I mean, these are often mundane everyday things, but curious people just have this weird level of detailed attention to some random things. It tests ego to some extent because sometimes people get defensive in those things when you ask them more detailed questions. tests that curiosity aspect. It tests communication skills. So I really liked that interview exercise. But yeah, maybe at many other companies, they wouldn't learn that much from that because it's very geared around our culture and what we're looking for.

I'm curious if you had any reflections about that. And I was really interested to hear your thinking because you've worked in the companies that you've started have been all very different. What sort of comes to mind for you around sort of the values and personality of you as the founder And what does it mean to harness them correctly in what the company is actually doing, or does it not really matter?

I think it matters. I don't know, like if I was an investor, whether I could judge it, right? I think it's, that's like a level of nuance that's like probably hard to pick up on. I do think it matters. I think, you know, our set of personality traits that the company has, culture is also aligned with the product we make. For example, we create like this high trust environment where we give a lot of responsibility to people, et cetera. And like, That's also how the product is. Like we give, you know, we try to speak to people very cleanly. We create transparency. You know, our fees are very clear. We don't want to like kind of hide details from people. We want to be like, hey, this is a wire and this is what a wire means. And this is how long it takes. And this is the system, right? Like we don't want to treat internally or externally. We don't want to treat people as like children. We want to treat them as adults and give them all the information and be very transparent about what's happening.

What else have you noticed across building these multiple companies. And I guess the thing I'm interested in is Mercury is on a trajectory to be the most important company I think that you've built thus far, meaningfully. And so like, what have you reasoned about that? Like, you're, it's the same founder of the company. Now you could say you're much wiser, you've learned so many things, but like, have you learned 50 times more than before? Like, what's the why behind the success of this company relative to the success of the other businesses you worked on?

I'd say there's 2 elements here that I think I would have liked to tell my younger self. Number one, I think the idea matters a lot. And there's this feeling in Silicon Valley sometimes that, yeah, if the entrepreneur is good enough, they'll figure out the idea or something. Actually, I'm not even sure exactly what the feeling is, but—

It's more like the idea doesn't matter, just iterate around.

But we iterated a lot. We actually pivoted 4 times in my previous company. But if you start in an idea with If there isn't a societal-level trend that's pushing your kind of space forward, which I think was true in fintech in 2017 or is true in AI now, it's very hard to iterate around it. And often people don't. And actually the right thing to do, and something else I would tell my younger self is, if the thing doesn't work, just go back to zero, right? I think one of your questions that you sent me was, why didn't I do Mercury earlier? Because I had this idea in 2013. And actually, we pivoted twice more in my previous company since 2013. I'm like, why didn't I just do Mercury then? And really, like, because people are often stuck in this pivot box, right? It's like, oh, I raised money against this. I understand this. And like, oh, now I have this other idea that's related to this, right? Like, you know, most of the time in that company, we were serving game publishers and we just like started with like Flash game publishers and ended up in mobile game publishers and then ended up in ad tech. It was often around like that core audience, but really I could have just done Mercury then. And yeah, it was a little easier maybe in 2017, but I think I could probably could have figured it out and made a lot of progress and, you know, would be 4 years younger or something. I do think idea matters a lot and I think people undervalue how much it matters. I think the second thing is when you have product market fit, it's like really blazingly obvious. I've had it twice. I eventually did get it in that Last company and obviously Mercury had it. And I think when you're a stubborn, like high grit founder, you just don't know when to give up, right? At least that's my experience. Yeah, I had this, like we had an idea and we would go like, you know, let's sell the hell out of it. And yeah, you can like, if you're stubborn and like willing to do whatever the hell it takes and do the things that don't scale, you can often sell the things and make progress, right? Like when we, Every idea we had, we spent like 2 years on it and we made some incremental progress. But in hindsight, I was like, oh, it's super obvious we did not have product market fit. Like product market fit is just so obvious when you get it. But when you've never had it before, you just don't know what it's like. You're like, oh yeah, of course I should wake up every day and sell the hell out of this thing or whatever. But the way I describe product market fit now, which to be fair, I think works in like consumer I presume an SMB and maybe doesn't work in enterprise sales, but it's like you wake up in the morning and you have more users and you don't know where they came from. Or like people sign up and they just, they want the thing and like they're like pulling the product out of you. And sure, like you still have to figure out distribution, all that in the long term, but at least initially, like the market should be so big and the demand for what you're being is like so interesting that people will just come to you and you just don't have to try that hard. And like, it's still a pain in the ass because then now you have to like keep up with this demand and there's, you know, features you don't have and support you haven't built up and all this stuff, but you don't have to work hard to like find people to want your product. That's how I describe product market fit at least. And that's been like, at least when I've had it, it's just been so obvious. And then, you know, when I did get it, I was like, why did I waste all this time trying to like sell this thing that no one really wanted that previously I could have just like learned and, you know, quickly moved on.

What did you observe in yourself? Like what, when you reflected on that, why?

I mean, honestly, it's just like, I didn't know what product market fit really was, right? Like you, it's like culture as well, right? Like you read these things and you're like, yeah, sure. Like, you know, this thing grew really fast and it was obvious, but you know, maybe I'm different and maybe I just have to like sell it and maybe I'll iterate my way to product market fit. I think that's the biggest element to it. And yeah, I mean, it's just as a founder, you do need all of that, right? You need the grit, you need the unwillingness to like give up and all those things. So it's, It's just one of those things that it's like hard to find the balance where you're like, okay, actually there are times where you should move on and give up and like do the next thing. And that is the best opportunity cost answer. But yeah, I have a tendency to just not want to give up. And I have like an infinite set of ideas to try. So I'm like, oh, why don't we just sell it this way? Or why don't we, you know, maybe we just don't have the right lead list. And yeah, you can just go on and on.

So in the last company you mentioned towards the end, you did get the company in the slot.

What was the the change?

Was it one click away? Was it a massive change and then it immediately started working? What's sort of like the pre to post product market fit in that company?

Without going like too detailed, we built a mobile ad network, which I would say did not have product market fit, but it got us profitable and it was working. And then we noticed the space that was adjacent to it, which is a developer tool around advertising to make it easy for Any app publisher to plug in like 5 or 6 different ad networks and optimize them for you, et cetera. And the 2 people in that space were both bought out. One was bought by Twitter at the time and the other one was bought by Apple. And they were both like these super clunky kind of enterprisey tools that didn't really work for just a normal app publisher. Ah, and because we were like so deep in that space, we saw, yeah, literally Apple had just bought out the second player, which was firstly, I think. It was very hard, like from the outside, no one would have like understood that this opportunity exists, but yeah, we were very deep in it. So we built the thing. So it's called Mobile Mediation. So we built the platform and it wasn't like instant product market fit because, you know, the initial version just didn't work that well. So we did have to like build out all the features that worked well enough. So it did take like launch and then 6 months of iterating, but 6 months later it was super obvious. It was just like, we'd wake up in the morning and like suddenly like the top iOS app in the App Store was using Haze app. That was the name of the company. And like, we literally hadn't even spoken to the developer. They just like found this and they started using it. And we were like, what the hell? Like, it's such a different feeling when like that kind of stuff happens. And, and yeah, it just like basically grew by, you know, fairly like 10x and then 10x again the next year. So that was like very strong product market fit, but, but in a space that maybe is not like, you know, huge enough. But yeah, so it did take some iteration. Mercury was pretty different. Mercury was product market fit from the day we launched. Like we just grew by like 30, 40% a month for the first year.

I think the biggest challenge is weak product market fit, which is what most reasonable founders have that don't fully have product market fit. And that's what I think someone can keep chasing down for 5 years. You know, if you have a widget and you talk to 100 people and they all slam the door in your face and say, I'm not interested in this, the reality is telling you I need to go in a different direction. But if you find a few people that are interested out of the 100 and they're kind of using like, That's, I think, the loop that gets someone.

That's what I was saying. Like, if you're actually a strong founder, you can sell anything, right? So you'll get weak product market fit almost out of any idea. And that's the problem. It is a tricky road to go down. And I see it a lot. Like, you know, sometimes people get to like a few million in ARR on weak product market fit too. It's like, you can reach a reasonable scale and like raise a Series A and like, that's almost worse. I feel like the worst for founders who actually Go raise a Series A that have weak product market fit.

And it's a slog for 9 years.

Yeah, it's just like a, and I look at it, I'm like, oh man, this is so painful.

Going back to this question about what you figured out and maybe why Mercury is so much more successful in so many different metrics than your previous companies, you were talking about the importance of the idea, what really strong product market fit.

Again, like not Silicon Valley wisdom and something that I fell for. Like we talked earlier about like MVP, et cetera. So I had this like real mindset that like, hey, I should just be launching things in like 3 months, right? I should have an idea, I should launch in 3 months and I should iterate, et cetera. And maybe that, A, that does work sometimes, a lot of the time maybe. And B, it probably did work way better in 2009 or '10 when social and mobile and all this stuff was like new and there was just a lot of idea space to explore. I think now things are more mature and it just like, I think it's better to spend more time and build a deeper better product in a space. So Mercury took a year and a half before we launched. And I really think it was, you know, maybe it could have launched a little earlier if everything had gone right, but it was minimum of one year to build this product end to end. And it was a complicated product when we launched, right? I had, we had like 4 different types of payments in and out. Like we had check and credit, debit card and wires and international wires and like non-immigrant support. Like we had a— pretty well-developed set of features. And then they also look great, which like, you know, to make things look great, you have to spend like twice as much as like making things look kind of shitty. And I remember like even talking to some VCs, like they were like, hey, why are you launching a neobank? Why not just, you know, like one of part of my pitch was like, hey, we'll give you analytics around your finances. They were like, oh, why don't you just use Plaid and like get some analytics around people's finances? I was like, that's really not the point. I was like, that's just like a feature of the bigger thing. But there was definitely like, that's what they felt. They were like, launch this thing in 3 months, you know, then you can iterate yourself to a neobank. And I was like, I don't think you can iterate yourself to a neobank. And like, one thing I have realized, you know, it's once you launch a thing, it's very hard to change it. If you just spend more time and just, you know, when you don't have any users and you just build, iterate a little bit more and you build the thing that you really want, it tends to survive. Like there's lots of features in Mercury today that were built pre-launch. And I think if we, like trying to move things now is much, much harder. We have 100,000 users, we have a bigger, like it just takes a lot more to change features once there's like real users and people around them. Another lesson for my old self would be just spend longer, like spend longer like thinking of the idea and spend longer implementing the idea. Like it's not always rushed to like, I come up with the idea in like 2 weeks and try to launch it in 3 months. And yeah, I did Y Combinator twice. So there's definitely like some of this is like Y Combinator philosophy. And obviously it works for a lot of companies, to be fair. But I do think big ideas take longer. They took longer to come up with, they take longer to execute. And I think a lot, especially like if you're a second-time entrepreneur, I think it's worth, you know, if you can raise more money and spend more time and build a bigger thing, this often like also has a bigger impact on the world, right? Like I think we're all somewhat here to like try to improve the world and like coming up with like bigger, scarier ideas that like have that impact, I think is more powerful.

Are you able to explain what you think makes a very good idea? Like the higher order bit, and I'm very well aligned with this, which we call internally the pick. What is the person choosing to do is not obsessed about, and we just do anything and iterate is just generally incorrect. And sure, there are examples of that, but I can just come up with an example of a successful company that did all sorts of random things. that the general population would not be served by sort of following that. So are you able to sort of unpack in your own mind what makes a very good idea or what makes a bad idea or sort of anywhere in between?

I think it's really hard, right? Like I think there is often early ideas sounds crazy. So I mean, a good example I have of this that gave me a lot of like humbleness around this is, you know, I was in the YC batch with Dropbox and I was like, okay, amazing idea, amazing founders. This is obviously going to be huge. And I actually did like 2 bets with people. that's going to be a unicorn in the batch. And yeah, I got, I guess in theory they owe me some money. But I was also in the batch with Airbnb. So that was my second YC company was in the Airbnb batch.

It's a good batch.

And I thought, what a silly idea. I was like, who's going to like trust people in their house? What are these people talking about? Yeah, obviously like they seem smart, but I was like, this is just like a, you know, and I was like, they've gone too far with the sharing economy. This is just obviously wrong. And I was so sure of it. It wasn't like I wasn't slightly wondering. I was like, this is just obviously not going to work. I mean, I didn't say that to them, but that's what I felt. So it goes to show you, it is very hard to judge ideas. Often at the start, they look silly. So you can come up with frameworks and I can come up with frameworks, but even today, I see ideas and I'm like, okay, this is silly. And then it works. And I'm like, okay, I was completely wrong. So I think you do have to, whether you're investor or a founder, you have to have the humbleness behind it. So it is tricky. So I guess to answer your question, you know, I like, I'm also an investor. So I have a shape of things that I think works. One of the criteria is, you know, if this thing really, really worked, you know, could this be like a game-changing huge company, right? If everything went right, like, is this a $10 billion, $100 billion opportunity? Again, you can't oversee it, but you can kind of imagine it's like, okay, you know, like in the Airbnb case, it was like, okay, you know, lots of people do have an extra room and, you know, lots of people have second houses and people go on holiday and like hotels are like not always the best experience. So you could, I mean, even if you were like, this is never going to work, you could kind of imagine there's a path that they would have. So that's one way I approached the idea. And, you know, that's also how I thought about Mercury. I was like, okay, you know, if this worked, right? Like, is banking going to be mostly digital in the future? I was like, yes. And, you know, do entrepreneurs really want to have a better banking experience? I was like, yes. Is this a market that's like big enough, right? Like, that's like kind of like a combination of this kind of top-down, like TAM kind of approach and like bottom-up, like, could this thing be the thing that like breaks into it? And then sometimes actually, like, you look at an idea, you're like, okay, you know, even if this worked, it couldn't be that big because it's a niche market and, or. Whatever. So that's definitely like an analysis that can help. But yeah, I don't think there's like a surefire way. And often I find, you know, like even if you take Mercury, like I was just so annoyed using the business banks that I used as an entrepreneur. And like a lot of the things I did afterwards were like, you know, TAM analysis and this kind of post-ad hoc justification to like get myself comfortable with actually like doing it and persuading investors and things like that. But in some ways it was an intuitive kind of idea that like I just wanted to build this product for myself.

You know, obviously many years later, Mercury has turned out to be a very good idea. And even if you didn't know all this back when you started the company, maybe explain to people in as much fine-grained detail why you think it was a good, correct idea to pursue.

I think there's like a top-down way to look at it and a bottom-up way to look at it. So let's just do top-down for a second. Top-down, It's banking, huge category, but it used to make sense to go to a bank branch, right? Now money's mostly digital. Entrepreneurs especially, I think actually everyone eventually want to just interact with their bank from the computer, from the laptop, from their mobile phone. So that's like a huge trend. And it's pretty obvious that kind of incumbent banks are not ready for that trend. Like they, most of them don't build their own apps. They don't build their own website. Yeah, it's a, it's kind of a secondary thought. They still think of themselves as a branch network and an app or digital experience secondary. So that's kind of like the, and obviously fintech was happening, right? Like I started this in 2017 and there was already Stripe and Square and PayPal and things like that. In 2006, it wasn't surprising that banking was bad, right? Everything was bad, right? There was no Slack, no Stripe, no Gusto. So I remember as an entrepreneur going like, oh, it's just like one more slog is like my bank account, but it wasn't like. That was the only suck. But yeah, by the time 2013 was around, which is when I had this idea, I was like, okay, you know, actually all of those experiences have improved, but banking's still basically the same.

Tell the story about the sort of original moment that you thought, huh, maybe I could build what then became Mercury.

I guess like because my previous company, we used to pivot a lot and I was just like very interested in entrepreneurship in general. I always had a list of like things that, you know, someone should build. It wasn't like It wasn't like, I will build these. It was just like, oh, someone should do this. And this idea of like looking at tools that we used as a business going like, okay, you know, someone should, like we started my previous company in 2008. So there was no Gusto, for example. And I like, I literally had a list, which was like, someone should build a better payroll provider because, you know, someone from ADP literally came to our live workspace when there was only 2 people and with a literal file, like a, you know, old school. file that they made us sign and all this to set up payroll. I was like, this is insane that people do this. But I had a similar experience with banking. I was like, okay, it's insane. Like I want to send a wire and like it's not enabled on my account. I have to go to the bank branch and spend 3 hours to like get it enabled. And yeah, everyone has these kinds of frustrating experiences with banking. So I just literally had a list and it was, I mean, longest list of like 10 ideas that I was like, okay. And you know, what made the banking one like a little more real for me is I think it was around 2013 when like I was like, okay, this isn't just an idea someone should do, but it's an idea maybe I could do is I met this guy called Kai and the startup's name was Trulink, I think. And it was a fintech company for seniors and they basically issued debit cards to seniors because seniors often get taken advantage of and the kids want to be able to set controls and things like that on cards. And it was just like 2 kids, right? It was a Y Combinator company. And I was like, I guess they weren't kids, they were adults, but they weren't any different from me. And I was like, wow, these people, went and did a deal with a bank partner and chatted to them and it was demo day or whatever. I was like, okay, if they can do that, maybe I could just do this at some point if no one else does it. So I think that's actually the power of Silicon Valley. Often you find it hard to imagine how something is even possible, whereas when you come here, you're like, okay, just everyone. When I first came here in 2007, there was a Facebook apps craze. I was like, everyone had like a million plus users. And I was like, wow, it must be easy to get millions of users. But, you know, in London, which is where I'm from, it seemed like impossible to get a million users because like I had a consumer idea that only had like 4,000 users. But yeah, I feel like there's this like cauldron of like people and ideas and like it just makes unimaginable things real seeming. So that was like the thing that's flipped it from just an idea to like something I could like probably do. I kind of assumed someone else would do it since I was busy, but it changed it from like, no one, I could never do this to like, maybe I could do this.

What is the context on when you decided, okay, I'm going to go start this company? What was happening like 6 months before that decision?

So I sold my previous company in start of 2016. I had to work at that company for a year, the acquirer. So at the start of 2017, I was just like, okay, you know, what should I do? So that was the start of it. And, you know, I was like, oh, maybe I want to be a VC, but then I kind of decided not to do that. And then I had a list of ideas to go down. And I feel like those were my top 3 ideas, the bank, the API for CRM, and like a kind of like a hardware tool for remote work. But this, like the bank one had been in my head for years, right? At that point it had been there for 4 years. So I was like, okay, you know, let me just explore this. And the more I explored it, the more it turned from like impossible to doable but hard. And doable but hard is like, you know, I'm in. How did you explore it? I mostly just talked to a lot of people. I talked to every single fintech entrepreneur I could find. And, you know, I like, especially the Y Combinator fintech founders were particularly helpful. Like they're very open to chatting and, you know, laid out like, you know, when you first explore an idea, you feel really stupid. And, you know, people like fintech is full of acronyms. People are like, oh, you know, you need to worry about like KYC. I'm like, what is KYC? It's whatever. Like there's a whole list. And I would just, I would make a list of like everything. I was like, I don't know what this is about, but I'll, I'll, I'll just run a list until I like figure it out. And yeah, people are just very generous with their time. So fintech entrepreneurs, fintech VCs and investors, and then lawyers. Actually lawyers were like probably the surprisingly most useful set of people. Most lawyers will do a 30-minute call with you for free. And there's a lot of fintech slash financial services lawyers out there. So I wrote a list once. I did like 90 conversations like this. And like often some of the most useful ones were like 4 intro chains down. Like I talked to someone. They'd introduce me to someone, they'd introduce me. But it was a fun, it was a fun process. Like, I, you know, I'm curious, I like learning, and this was like a completely new space to me. And I think often I tell people, it's like, you know, yes, I could have gone and like built the code or like tried to do something else. But, you know, everyone knew I could build a product. And I was like, I knew I could build a product. The hard bit was like proving that I could get a bank sponsorship. I could figure out like, you know, what is the framework for compliance and risk and legal and all these things. So. I think it's like, especially at the start, like to spend all your time doing the thing that like you're the least capable of doing and the least capable of proving to the world that you can do. Yeah. After 4-ish months of doing this process, I had a pretty good framework that, I mean, another interesting thing is like when you're in a space that's like somewhat new, which fintech in 2017 was still pretty new, you can quite quickly become almost an expert in the space.

Maybe talk a little bit more when you think about the 3 types of people that you talk to. One were fintech founders, 2 fintech investors, and 3 were fintech lawyers or financial services lawyers. What was like the texture of those buckets of conversations? Like what in each of those were you trying to understand about the opportunity?

Entrepreneurs, I really wanted to see like, you know, how did they build it? And, you know, many of these were failed entrepreneurs, some were successful. So I wanted to see, okay, you know, if they failed at their idea, like what failed, right? Where was the failure cases? And Like, how long did it take to build it? Like, what was the— the entrepreneurs, you can learn so much from entrepreneurs, right? Like, what was the— and like, these weren't people building like neobanks for businesses. They were like, you know, consumer credit card or whatever, but like similar shapes. Like, what is the, you know, what were the first 5 employees they had? You can get like pretty nitty-gritty. And, you know, generally speaking with entrepreneurs, there's no bad questions, no like dumb questions. Like, they're all like, hey, yeah, I was just like you. I was trying to figure this out. Super helpful people. I think the ideal thing is if you can find someone who literally tried to build what you were building. With investors, I was trying to figure out, okay, you know, what is fundable here? Investors tend to be really good connectors as well. So, you know, they connected me to other entrepreneurs or other lawyers, et cetera. And the lawyers are also like pretty good connectors as well. Yeah. Just like, you know, trying to understand like, what is the legal framework for this? Like, yeah, the ideal of law sits Upstream from compliance.

When you think about yourself before that 4-month sprint and yourself after that 4-month sprint, what were the most important things that that work taught you that then informed what you ended up doing in the, in the early months and years of Mercury?

You know, one thing I decided in that process is that like, hey, this is not going to be easy. And I was like, you know, potentially it'll take 3 years to get this live, get enough customers and make enough progress that I could raise a future round. So when I set out to raise money, I was like, I need to raise at least $5 million. So I have 3 years with a small team to go execute this. So it changed my mindset from like, this is not going to be easy. I'm going to do it for the long run. And that was an important kind of mindset shift for me to think of this as like a longer execution period to get it done. One thing that someone said to me, and This was like really stuck with me. I wish I could remember who told me this because I think it was a valuable lesson. It was like, hey, you know, the fintech piece and like compliance and bank sponsor, all that stuff is hard, but it's all pointless if no one likes your product, right? So I think sometimes people, and I often talk to people, you know, they get like really hung up on getting, you know, being compliant or like sometimes they'll get hung up on some technology, et cetera. And like at the end of the day, if customers don't want your thing, it doesn't matter what like what great technology you use. And that was like a powerful thing. And like, and that person actually said to me, hey, like, if people want your product, you'll figure out everything else. Like, but if no one wants your product, it doesn't matter what else you figure out. And I was like, okay, you know, that got me in the mindset of going like, okay, like it's all about the product and I should focus on making that like an amazing kind of experience for people. One thing that stuck obviously is we went with the sponsor bank model and there was other people at that time, you know, There's a bunch of fintechs that went with the sponsor bank model, and there was a bunch of fintechs that actually did try to get a charter. And I think most of the ones that went with the charter model either failed to get a charter, or even when they got the charter, like there's a company called Varo that was like a Chime competitor, and Chime went with the sponsor bank model and Varo went with the bank charter model. And I would say most people think, well, valuation-wise, it definitely was a better idea to go with the sponsor bank model. And that's something we decided early on. And, you know, I even talked to people that had, that were thinking about building something like Mercury going down the bank charter model, and most of them did not work out. So that was a big and important decision that we made early on that stuck with us.

You didn't talk about spending a lot of time with potential customers. And is that because you just knew the problem so well because you were, you modeled the customer in your head because you were the customer? Or, and it was obvious that there was, quote, little market risk that like if you built this magical, delightful business bank that the customers would be there, or was that a part of it in any way?

Yeah, I didn't talk to customers that much. It just seemed obvious to me. Funnily enough, like, you know, after we raised money and we started building the product, it took a year and a half. So there was a time during that time, I was like, you know, I think we thought we were like 6 months away from launching. I was like, okay, let me go talk to a bunch of people. collect customer interest. So I talked to about 100 founders at that point. And this is obviously, I was like pretty committed to the idea at that point. And honestly, it was a little depressing because everyone was like, yeah, it sounds cool. Yeah. Tell me when you launch. I was like, yeah, there wasn't like, I think only 2 of the 100 people were like, yeah, like I love this. Like, you know, it was like extremely enthusiastic. Most people were like, okay, you know, sounds interesting. And I think it's like, I think it's very hard when you abstractly talk to someone and you're like, would you use this thing? It's very hard to like reliably believe their feedback. At least that's what I've found. And maybe there's like ideas where it's like, you know, some people are like, yeah, I talked to 10 people and that's how I, and they prepaid for something. And yeah, so there's probably like some ideas where it is a little more obvious, but at least for these types of things, like people can't imagine what a better banking experience is.

How did you figure out what the first version of the product was going to be? Because I feel like that also you run into this dangerous territory when you go into build mode with this type of product, which is you have infinite roadmap. Like there's an infinite amount of things you could build.

Honestly, it was very simple because I was like, what does it take for this to be your only bank account as a business? Right. That was my level. And I was like, and I mean, that was a high bar, right? It's like, obviously you need to be able to sign up. You need to have multiple owners, right? Often businesses have multiple owners, which, you know, gets a whole infrastructure around that. This was probably like an unusual thing for me that I really insisted on. I was like, I was an immigrant when I moved here. I want to be able to support immigrant founders. And I was also like, hey, actually a lot of Silicon Valley companies are immigrant founders, but it was kind of an annoying requirement, like getting the infrastructure around like supporting a non-US person. Like, you know, you don't have a Social Security number, you don't have a US ID. Like that was, and getting a sponsor bank to be on board with that was an infrastructure that was like not easy to do. But I insisted on it, a fully digital experience, obviously. And then I was like, you need checks, you need wire, you need international wire, you need ACH. All right. So that was like the basic framework. And I was like, if we, if in my opinion, at least, and I think this actually bared out that if any of these things were missing, people would not adopt it. And I didn't think there was any point in launching with one of these things missing because the only thing we'd learn is we need to go build this thing. So I was like, okay, there's no point in launching until we have all of this. But there was no point in building anything more than that either. I was, yeah, I wasn't going to go like, oh yeah, also debit cards, but I wasn't going to go build a credit card or, I don't know, build like really fancy analytics before we had all those features. I was just like, let's just build all of that. And the thing we did end up doing, which I think is pretty unusual for most startups, but we, yeah, we actually built the whole thing and we had one sponsor bank lined up. But they kept like, they were supposed to build some extra features for us, like give us wires and things like that. And every month they'd be like, yeah, it's coming. It's coming. And it's just like 5 months later, we were like, this isn't working. We need to go find someone else just because they kept saying it's coming and they would never like deliver. So we basically scrapped that and did a whole new fresh sponsor bank deal. So that took an extra 6 months. So we built the whole thing and it was ready to launch basically. And then we had another 6 months to go. So we actually ended up like redoing a bunch of our designs and our front end for for some of these like core experiences for like sending money and like onboarding, which made them way better. But I guess in theory, we could have built some new features, but we, I guess to some extent we were like perfectionists. So we were like, oh, let's just make the existing stuff really, really good. And it actually really made a difference to our launch because people went through that new user onboarding experience. And, you know, most people expect when they're like getting onboarded to a new bank account, it will be like so painful. But we'd spent so much time, like we did it like twice that it was like this, you know, really, really high level. quality experience and it gave people a very strong first impression because a lot of people just wanted to try it out. They're like, oh yeah, I'll try it out. And they're like, wow, this is just so good. Like maybe the rest of the product's really amazing.

It was just about how did you figure out what V1 ready to ship was, which I think you did a good job of explaining.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, I don't know, just being insistent on it being like pretty broad and not going like too much beyond that broadness.

Did you start to onboard early customers to test the entire product before you launched? And was there a iterative process or it was obvious you were dogfooding the product and you just decided we're ready to launch now?

No, we had a 4-month period where mostly friends of mine that I'd invested in, like, used the product. They didn't really use it for everything. They were just like, hey, yeah, sure, I'll put $50K and I'll like test some stuff out. But really, like, it, you know, even some really basic stuff didn't work until like the week of the launch.

When they were tinkering with it, did you get a sense that they were delighted by it or still you were like, I don't know?

I didn't know at all. Uh, 'cause they were really trying it with like a small set of things. I was like, hey, like—

But it only really, you get the sense of it if you're running your whole—

Yes, exactly. Yeah, it was funny. I mean, a lot of things just didn't work as well. Like it was during that 4-month period, I was like, you know, please try out this, but don't try this out because like this doesn't work yet. And it was, you know, it was literally the week before that probably wires started working. Uh, and then actually we launched and we thought international wires worked, but they didn't work. And it took us 4 extra weeks after we'd gone live with the feature that we thought worked, but didn't work. And then we had to like go get it working in the next 4 weeks. And people were like shockingly patient with us because, yeah, I guess everyone was like somewhat sold that like it was a, it was, you know, new product, but also like it was just me and my co-founder were doing all this customer support. So I think everyone was like, yeah, these are like real founders, like trying to figure stuff out. So they, they were like very patient with like things that just didn't work. But yeah, but it was, yeah, we were, we were working all the way to like the launch to get it like enough well that like we could really learn about like whether people loved it. But we did need those initial customers just to test things out. And this fintech is like full of edge cases. There's just so many edge cases that like all have like specific ways to deal with them.

What's the story behind the launch?

The biggest part of the launch was like having these 60 people kind of blasted out. And that worked really well because A, there was kind of trust that people had in those people that was kind of then leaked onto Mercury. Yeah, again, trust is like probably the most important thing initially for us especially. And having, yeah, Andreessen Horowitz say like, hey, we backed this thing, this is great. Or, um, Elad Gil was our investor and he, you know, he was, he was supportive on the launch. So that was really like the initial kind of initial spark, uh, what came from those 60 investors.

Did you launch it in a waitlist style product or just anybody could come and sign up? So what was interesting about the first 50 people that signed up, if anything?

There were people who wanted the bank. I mean, it was really like, it grew by, like they didn't speak to us. Like we had no sales team. Like this was the, like we, 4 days after launch, someone like signed up, never spoke to us and transferred $1 million into a Mercury bank account. And I was like, wow, like that blew my mind because, you know, my assumption was always like, yeah, maybe some small people would just self-service, but I always thought I'd have to build a sales team. Like who's going to, I never thought someone with $1 million would move money into Mercury without speaking to a sales team. And even today, our sales team is only Does about 5% of our accounts. They tend to do bigger accounts, but most people just self-service. And that was really surprising to me. I did not expect that.

So in those first couple of weeks, did, did, did you go from this mentality of questioning whether there was a customer base that would really love this to instantly, I know what we're doing is going to lead to something very interesting? Or at what point, going back to your original definition of how you think about product market fit, Did you think we really have something here?

You know, I was very skeptical of not like wanting to believe it just because I don't know why exactly. I didn't want to go like say, hey, we have product market fit and let's like go higher and like, you know, go— I didn't want to be like extended over our skis just because we felt we had product market fit. There's also, you know, there's this famous kind of thing, you know, the trough of disillusion, right? I was like, is this just like the launch? But like it went on for a long time, but I was like, okay, maybe this is just like, because it's fintech and people aren't ready for it. Like maybe this is a really long launch and like there's going to be a trough of disillusion. And we never had a trough of disillusion. We just had a launch and then it kept growing kind of thing. But like first 6 months, I was very much like, hey, this is just like, uh, this is just a launch. And like, we just have a really prolonged growth period after the launch, but it's just like, you know, not necessarily real. And, you know, honestly, like when, when things are going like that, you're just like, there's so many fires to deal with. You're just like, hey, like we had no customer support and we were just like, yeah, we were like me and my co-founder was completely overloaded with just talking to customers and answering their questions. So, you know, we have to go hire people like that. And then international wires didn't work. We had to fix that. So, yeah, there's just so much stuff to do. And I was, yeah, I was still, I'd up until launch and like probably until like 2-ish months afterwards, I was still one of the only frontend engineers. There was like 3 of us doing most of the frontend. So that's like, you don't have time to necessarily go think, but I was hesitant actually. Like then COVID happened. We launched in April 2019 and COVID happened obviously March 2020. And COVID initially was like, seemed like a disaster. We lost 60% of our revenue. Obviously no one was starting new businesses in March 2020. So at that point I was like, Yeah, thank God we didn't spend much money. I never believed in product-market fit anyway. I was like, I was like, I've proven it. And then literally that was March. And then April, we like doubled, like it was insane. April and May 2020 was this like insane growth spurt because, you know, e-commerce kind of blew up, bank branches were shut down. So people had to go to a digital experience. And at that point I was like, okay, you know, if we can survive COVID, we probably have product-market fit. So it took me like a solid year to like really believe That we had it because I just, I just didn't want to take it for granted. I wanted it to be like 100% sure before, like, yeah, because like part of it was also like, now we had to go hire enough people. And like, for the first year, especially, we were like always behind on having enough people to go, you know, serve all the customers we were getting. And, you know, as soon as my mindset shifted at that point, I was like, okay, now we should like go hire ahead of our growth rather than behind our growth.

What are the things when you think back to those first couple of years post-launch, so your years 3 and 4 of the company, what are the most important things that you got right that have sort of served the company incredibly well?

You know, we grew the team pretty fast, right? We went from like 40 to 70 one year and then 70 to 100. Like, we, you know, more than 40% a year is probably like a consistent pace. But we were always very strict on the culture side of things. Like, Having that culture upfront and like, you know, always going like, hey, we have to keep that hiring bar. Like it's, especially when you're growing fast, it's easy to be, try to start being flexible on it. And we weren't. And I think that, that served us really well. And we've, we still have like a very strong culture and a very strong kind of team around that culture.

How has your thinking about competition changed over the course of the life of the company?

So actually a lot of my thinking on competition came from a previous company. So I feel like every, you know, we did those 4 pivots in my previous company. And I remember every single time we were working on something, there was always like competition, right? And they were always like better funded than us. They seemed to do things really great. And like, you know, it was very like, I feel like you were always worried about it and you're like, oh, what did they launch? Like, let me go look at that, et cetera. And then, you know, I realized over all that time that it never really mattered. Right? Like whatever they did, it was almost always distracting to even think about them. Because what mattered is like just talking to customers, delivering a great product and iterating on that and having a long-term kind of vision behind it. And the competition was always like distracting, kind of reduces your team morale when you talk about competition. You know, if you copy anything, like you're, you're like, you're not following your vision, you're following their vision at that point. So when I, when it came to Mercury, I was just like, hey, competition doesn't matter. Like just focus on customers, focus on product. I mean, even where it does matter, which like, hey, maybe the competition does do something really interesting. You're going to learn it from your customers, right? They'll be like, hey, you know, what I really want is X and like blah is doing X. Like, why don't you guys build it? And yep. So we do learn from competition, but it's not because we're looking at their PR or their websites. We learn from it just by talking to customers and building the product and this. Some things that they do are smart and we will build those eventually because we will just talk to customers or we'll have the ideas ourselves. Some things they do are dumb and customers aren't talking about the dumb things, right? So I've always felt like at Mercury that competition is not that important and it's distracting and we shouldn't think about it. Actually, the funny thing is the only time I have to think about competition is when I'm raising a round from VCs. VCs are freaking obsessed with competition, but I'm like, Customers don't care. Like the customers are really comparing us against like JPMC or Bank of America. And like, that's who they're thinking about.

Explain more why you believe this other than we have ignored it and it's worked. Like what's the underpinnings of it?

I just think most of the time, if a company doesn't work, it's because the whole idea was bad. The whole space was bad, which, you know, I've had plenty of experiences with, or they were doing the wrong things. And it's very, very rarely that they got killed by competition. I'm sure it happens, but at least like I haven't seen it that much. And my experience has also been like, if you just keep doing the thing that you feel you believe in for a really long time, like eventually you will win. It's been my experience.

If the market's there.

If the market's there, like it's not going to be because the competition got in the way or didn't get in the way. That's been my experience. I think the negative ways it plays out is Yeah. Number one, I think you get distracted from your vision, right? Like we always wanted to build this like core operational bank account. And, you know, literally even our VCs were saying like, hey, look at how well Brex is doing. Like, why don't you go build a credit card instead? Like at day zero before we'd even launched. And yeah, I was like, well, you know, good for them. Like I'm not thinking I need to build a credit card. I want to build like this amazing banking experience. And like, yeah, eventually we did get to credit card, but it was just not like the core part of my vision. I think it would have been a complete mistake to have done that. Like, I don't think I would have built a company that I was excited about. And I, you know, I think it's hard to go from credit card to banking. At least that's been proven out so far. So yeah, you build up some, you end up being distracted and doing someone else's vision. And I think like from a team morale perspective, no one wants to be copying people, right? Like it's not, that's not what we actually, I really wonder about like Meta where like a lot of the time they are copying. But like, what is the morale at that company when like, they're like, hey, Zuckerberg saw like Snap do this really cool thing and now we're copying them? That's the morale of late. Yeah, maybe. But maybe this just comes back to our previous thing about like, I am fine with like copying things because like customers are asking for something and like we're just building the things customers are asking for. But like seeing someone launch something and going like, oh yeah, you know what, let's change, let's drop what you're doing. Like, let's go copy that thing. That's just like, I would be like extremely depressing to me. So maybe it's just like a A personality thing again, but I think it would be depressing to a lot of people that work at Mercury because like, yeah, we want to go, like, we have a vision, we have a plan, let's go execute that. Yes, that changes based on like what people are asking for, but that shouldn't change based on like what competitors do. I'd also say like, you know, these are big spaces, right? Like, you know, there's $2 trillion in US banking. I don't think it means like we have to all crush each other, right? Like we'll probably all build like $10, $100 billion companies and we still have space to grow. So I do, yeah, there's like a zero-sum mindset to the whole like competitors thinking about competitors, et cetera, that at least like hasn't played out in my opinion.

What was the story of the SVB crisis in the context of Mercury?

Every conversation we had with VCs everywhere, we thought of ourselves as like a counterposition to SVB, right? The question that everyone asked me, which was a very reasonable question, is like, hey, if my money wasn't safe at SVB, why is it safe at Mercury? And, you know, really brought this question of trust to people's forefront. It's like, oh, you know, for a long time people weren't worrying about bank failures, but suddenly, you know, SVB and there was Silvergate, there was a lot of stuff around it. So what we built over the weekend was this product called Mercury Vault, which A, we extended FDIC insurance with our partner banks from $1 million to $5 million. And that product really resonated with people because, you know, It wasn't just like, Imad says it's safe. And yeah, I could say that all day long. It was like, hey, look at this product. This is where your money is in, you know, between FDIC insurance and US government T-bill mutual funds. Yeah, the US government is like backing hopefully 100% of the deposits you have on Mercury.

And you as a team all shipped that on Friday or Saturday or Sunday?

We started on it on Saturday and we shipped it on Monday, at least the initial version. And then, then we fixed it for the rest of the week.

insane, intense 4 or 5 days in the company, like one of these just defining moments?

We were actually like bigger than SVB at that point in terms of number of customers because SVB was really focused on like venture-backed startups, whereas we had like a broader set of SMBs. But still, like we had like 8,000 customers sign up in like a week or two. It was actually one of our weeks, uh, or one of our months recently was as big as that month. But by that, that was like by far the biggest thing that had ever happened in terms of signups. You know, we had to really like have a lot of the team like focus on like, on like we deprioritized everything else basically. And we were like, hey, let's just get these customers on board. Obviously a lot of questions come along with that. And then the product teams were working on Mercury Vault. It was nice though. It was like a galvanizing event because most of the time when you're at that point, we were probably like a 300-person company or 200-person company. You know, everyone's not working on the same thing. We're all working on our own things, but this was like, there's only one thing to work on. It's like everyone's doing this and like, It's very clear what we have to do. And every day that was like a, this is what, these are the 5 things we have to get done. Like whoever's available, let's go do it. Right. We had, you know, our whole team was helping on onboarding and the whole team was helping with customer support and shipping these products. So in its own way, like at least in hindsight, it was fun. At the time it was like stressful.

Is there anything else you did over those couple of weeks that kind of are a part of the way that you think about how do you respond to these extraordinary events when you're building a company?

I think the most important thing as a CEO especially is to be like a leveling function. Actually, like there's various parts to this, right? As an entrepreneur in general, like, yeah, either shit is amazing or shit is like awful, right? Like, it's like, and like you have to, whenever like things are amazing, you have to like go like, okay, you know, I'm not going to like get stuck in that euphoria. I just have to execute. And when things are awful, you have to be optimistic. So. I think you in general have to like try to path, like when things are like that, you have to kind of path a course that's like more, more level. But then you have to then project that out to the whole company. So, you know, when in these kinds of situations, I'm like, hey, it's fine. Like we'll be okay. You know, here's the plan. Like always have a plan, even if it's a plan to make a plan. I'm like, hey, we don't know what's happening, but these are the 5 things we're going to do to figure it out kind of thing. I think being calm, having a plan, and then like just, you know, being driving with urgency around that plan. It's like, okay, you know, these are the people who are leading up these parts of the plan. And, you know, we try to create a culture both actually internally and with our customers around transparency. So we're like, you know, I spent a lot of that time just talking to customers. I was like on Twitter responding to people. There's like people calling me up saying like, what's happening with this? When can I get this account? And I was like, hey, you know, let me look into that. And so I was trying to be out there to create this kind of culture of transparency. But we do that internally as well. We're not like, it's not that I have all the answers, but I'm out there saying like, this is what I think right now. This is the plan right now. And like, let's go deal with it. But yeah, I think being calm even when like, and projecting calm. I mean, and it's not like I felt it all the time either, right? I was like, oh my God, the world is falling apart. But it's like, you just gotta wake up in the morning and be optimistic and calm for people.

So to wrap up, who is the person that has taught you the most about being a founder or has imparted something that's a big part of the way that you think about building Mercury and what's sort of the thing they imparted on you?

So, you know, I did Y Combinator in 2007 and back then it was mostly a Paul Graham show. And yeah, just like, I think the biggest thing that I feel like I learned there is just thinking big. Like I remember this is 2007 and Paul Graham was like, hey, you know, Like, there's gonna be a company in this batch that'll be like a unicorn, a billion-dollar company. I don't actually, the unicorn word didn't exist, a billion-dollar company, I think it was. And I was like, what are you talking about, Paul? Like, these are like kids. Like literally back then it was like half the people were like off for the summer from like university, right? And, you know, billion-dollar companies did not just happen with people who were like off for the summer. But he just had this like such strong belief. And then every time someone like pitched an idea or every time I pitched an idea, it was always like, okay, you know, how is this gonna disrupt Google? Like, what's the big thing here? And it just gets you in this mindset of going like, yeah, maybe I can do that. And like, it just gives you this confidence. I think that's like probably PG's superpower is like having this like way of seeing like how something really small could be huge and like making you believe that that is possible for you.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for spending the time.

Yeah, thanks for having me.