Immad Akhund: How Mercury Saved The Day For Startups

I just don't think people want bad experiences when they're running their business. Like, they want to get on with it. They have a lot to do. You know, in some ways the idea seems obvious to me. There's no reason that banking has to be broken.

That's Immad Akhund, founder and CEO of Mercury, a banking platform over 200,000 of the world's most ambitious companies now trust with their money. Mercury didn't compete with the old world of startup banking.

Instead, it made the old world look broken by taking the friction out of it.

This is Mike Maples Jr. of Floodgate, and it's go time with Immad Akhund. This is Mike Maples Jr., and welcome to the Pattern Breakers Podcast, where we explore why some founders radically change the future and how they stand apart. Together, we'll learn about the counterintuitive mindsets and actions behind their remarkable success. Brace yourself for a world where chaos is welcome, naysayers are often a positive signal, and movements galvanize misfits who transform the impossible to the inevitable. Before starting Mercury, Immad was a prolific angel investor, backing over 350 startups. Including Rippling, Airtable, Substack, and many others. He was living inside the startup ecosystem, experiencing the banking problem firsthand again and again. It's what I like to call living in the future, not imagining what founders need, but being one and feeling the need in his own lived experience. When SVB collapsed in 48 hours in March 2023, Mercury was ready. Over a single weekend, the team shipped Mercury Vault. $2 billion in new deposits arrived in 5 days. That's what it looks like when a founder who thinks about a problem all the time is ready to seize the moment when it arrives.

Let's talk to him. Immad, welcome to the podcast.

Excited to be here.

Yeah, so sometimes I like to start Before the beginning. And so how long have you been interested in computers? You know, what got you into this whole gig to begin with?

You know, it's probably the age of 7. My dad, I don't even know quite why, he's just like into this idea of like providing the future to his kids or whatever. And he bought like Apple Mac, I think it was Apple II or something. And then around the age of 14, this was kind of the dot-com bubble for me. I kind of saw it as an opportunity to potentially make some money. I came from fairly humble beginnings and I've basically been working since the age of 14. So I had a newspaper round and I worked in a grocery store and I started doing websites to try to make some money. I had a website with homework topics and I had ads around it and I was trying to make money on that. And we had a blog and things like that. My initial introduction to programming was very much around, let's do something with it rather than learn it for the sake of it. But I realized I was pretty good at it. Like it came very naturally to me. I've always been quite mathematical and programming was like, it was a nice outlet for me. There's not many other ways that I build. Like I've never been into Lego or whatever, but I was really into like, and it was like, there's something magical about like your first kind of programming. You build something and then like it exists afterwards, right? If you build a website, you can go to it. So then I ended up doing computer science at Cambridge because I was like, oh, I'm good at this. And to some extent there was like a vocational path that I could see doing. it rather than like a purely theoretical thing. So that was kind of my entry. And then I ended up getting a programming job at Bloomberg, which is my only real job I've had. I did that for a year. By this time, it's like 2006. And, you know, me and my friend would look at TechCrunch and like something fun would launch and we'd be like, oh, we could build that ourselves. And that was like kind of my kind of naive introduction to like startup life where we just looked at things and we're like, oh, we could do this ourselves. And we had this kind of idea around building a Yelp for London. So that was like my first idea and my first Combination of like having the skills of being able to build it and like feeling like it was achievable for us and we could be like successful, like these kind of Silicon Valley companies we heard of.

And so was there anything that triggered your interest in Silicon Valley startups? You know, obviously a lot of people study programming. You graduated college probably mid-2000s, right? Like kind of 2005, 2006 kind of timeframe?

2005, yeah.

So that wasn't, you know, to be an entrepreneur at the time wasn't quite as fashionable as it is now.

I was interested in programming. And when you're interested in programming and you're using the internet, like you do come across like, oh, what are the new stuff happening? Right? Like, and a lot of the new stuff is like, you know, someone's building a website, someone's building a programming language, like, you know, Ruby on Rails existed. So I think like just being around programming, like, and being curious, like, unless you're and hold, you'll start thinking even in 2006, like, yeah, this was like this kind of reawakening of Silicon Valley around 2006. You were here, so I'm sure you felt it as well, right? Like, there was like this kind of feeling that everything is dead from like 2002 to 2005 or something. And then 2006 and '07, there was this kind of reawakening and like, we started reading TechCrunch like every day.

And people don't remember now, right? But TechCrunch was basically Michael Arrington's blog. And so, you know, he had this house across the way in Atherton and I remember having lunch with him at Cafe Barone and he'd be like, okay, I gotta go 'cause I gotta update TechCrunch for today. He was just every day, whatever was new in Web 2.0, you'd submit it to him and he would format it and off he went, you know? And so then what got you down the path of doing ClickPass and coming to the US?

Yeah, so I did my first startup and, you know, obviously there was a lot of enthusiasm, but, you know, we didn't know how to get users, we didn't know how to raise money. So it like quite quickly faltered, but I just like had such a lot of fun doing it. Like it's hard to explain why like something can fail, but like you can feel like this is your mission in life. And like, that's kind of what I felt at the end of it. It was, you know, I started talking to a lot of the other entrepreneurial community in London. We were not that successful, but other young entrepreneurs were being successful here. Like, you know, the fact that we could build something and, you know, we got 4,000 users, but there was something there. Like, you know, I just felt like this is what I wanted to do. the rest of my life. When I decided that, then I was like, okay, if I'm going to do this for the rest of my life, I need to move to San Francisco. So when I was in London in 2006, I basically in like 2, 3 months, I met every single young entrepreneur there. Literally anyone that had anything live, I met because I just went to a ton of events. It was just a small ecosystem. Whereas it was so obvious that in San Francisco, there was this huge ecosystem. And before us in 2006, there was a few other people that had moved over that were kind of, you know, that started in London and then moved to San Francisco. So Kulveer and Harj did that with Y Combinator. The founder of Quid, Bob, I don't remember his last name, but anyway, he moved over. So there was a couple of examples of entrepreneurs that moved over and did Y Combinator. And I was like, okay, you know, this is what I need to do. Another thing I learned is, you know, the fact that I was a programmer and I could be the engineering co-founder of a team, was quite a powerful skill set. So back then, all the entrepreneurs in London, I don't know why, but all of them were like kind of business people and not programmers. So they were all looking for like an engineering co-founder. So that's kind of how I got attached to ClickPass. Peter Nixie, my co-founder there, he was actually an engineer as well, but he was looking for an engineering co-founder and he had already got into Y Combinator. And I was like, okay, let's go. I want to go to San Francisco. So this is like my kind of ticket to getting here. That was my path.

The YC was kind of your path into the Silicon Valley ecosystem. You just kind of never looked back from there.

Yeah. And it was an amazing path. I mean, back then there weren't that many Y Combinator founders. We were like super close-knit. You know, we ended up staying, I don't know if you know the Spice Scraper, like it was— Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So North San Francisco.

The guys from Scribd were there and Weebly and all those guys.

Yes. There was like Dropbox. There was like 8 or 9 apartments that were like, you know, not only did people like live there, but they actually worked from the apartment. So it was like a little, it was like a little office building, but it was just so fun. Like, I would finish work at like whatever, 8:00 PM, and then I'd just go to everyone else's office and we'd just hang out for a bit. And it was just like such a fun community to kind of join as like a first-time resident of, you know.

I remember right after, um, we'd invested some money in Weebly, visiting them in the Y Scraper, and I think they raised like $640,000. And I, and I asked them, okay, you know, what do you think we need to do to get ready for Series A, and how long is our runway, and all this? And They look at me like, what are you talking about? And I realize like to David Rosenco, like $640,000 might as well have been $640 million, right? It was more money than he could ever conceive of having.

Well, YC gave us $15K, right?

Yeah.

$640K. Yeah. I mean, the Weebly office was always fun. Like they had that, I don't know how many times you went in there, but they always had like a monitor up on the wall with like a graph of their growth rate. And it was always fun to kind of pop by there and see like what's the latest in the numbers.

Okay. So you had a couple of startup attempts. You had ClickPass, you had Heyzap, and kind of hung out in the YC ecosystem. What led you to Mercury?

I think these are both what led me there is also part of why I think it was successful. I had obviously started as an entrepreneur in 2006, and I had this idea for Mercury in 2013. In some ways, the idea seems obvious to me. There's all these tools that I used as an entrepreneur, And when I first started being an entrepreneur, I remember just everything being really difficult. Like there was no Slack, there was no Stripe, there was no Gusto. I had this like visceral pain and like every time I had to set up a business, I had to set up all these services and it was just going to be, I knew it'd be so annoying every time I had to do anything with them. But over time, by 2013, we had like kind of pretty strong startups that were serving a lot of these different verticals. And I just thought there's no reason that banking has to be broken. Also, because I moved from the UK for various reasons, British banking was better. Like the apps were better, the fees were better, the money movement was instant. So I felt like I'd gone like backward in banking when I moved to the US.

Yeah.

My first thought in 2013 was very much someone else was going to fix this because, you know, I'd never done anything in fintech or banking and I was busy doing my startup, Haze App. So it was much more of this kind of theoretical concept that like, hey, this is an obvious idea, someone will go do it. I wonder who will do it kind of thing. But I kind of stewed on this idea. So, from 2013 to 4 years later, I kind of sold my company. So, I was like, I want to do something really hard, really meaningful, something I could do for a very long time. And this seemed like actually the hardest idea I had. So, I was like, okay, someone's going to do it, but maybe I could do it. So, I wanted to basically see what was possible and whether I could do it.

And I'm curious, what was the thing that you observed that just jumped out at you as unacceptable? You know, why not just deal with the status quo?

So there was a few ideas here. I just don't think people want bad experiences when they're running their business. Like, they want to get on with it. They have a lot to do. They want tools that like make it easier for them to run their business. So, and that you could apply that to every single like tool someone uses in their business. So that's one point. I think another point, which, you know, it took us a while to deliver on this idea, but I always thought banking could do a lot more. Before Mercury, like, you'd— a bank account was just like a checking account. It was kind of like a dumb pipe, right?

Yeah.

In the dumb pipe world, like, yeah, maybe it's annoying, but like, you kind of don't use it that much. Like, you know, using something else for credit cards, using something else for invoicing, using something else for bill pay. But I actually thought that in a world that I could see the future was like that banking would be done by tech companies and these tech companies would reimagine what a full software suite around your bank account looks like. And that actually kind of got me pretty excited about the idea because I really wanted to do something I could do for like 10, 20 years. And I was like, if I just build a bank account, that's fun. And maybe it'll be successful, but I wanted to do something that actually you could redefine a category. And to some extent, we're still early, I would say, in that redefinition. But I think people who use Mercury don't think about using something else for invoicing or using something else for employee spend. I think there's probably early entrepreneurs who've never had to experience another bank and they just think like, this is what you do when you use a banking service. You also do invoicing and you also have all your team log into it and all of these things. So if you connect the software and think about it as a tech problem, that there's something much deeper to be built here. Yeah.

The other thing I wonder sometimes is it almost seems like you and a bunch of entrepreneurs were of a generation of people who were programmers by sensibility. And so, you know, you look at banking services and you're kind of young as business people and you're like, well, why, why aren't banking services as easy to interact with as web services? You know, like, why, why wouldn't you just assume that that's how it is? And like, why is it that— Whereas people who sort of grew up in business before the internet or Web 1.0, We're just like, well, ADP does payroll and the bank is the bank and you do the ACH thing and they're open at these hours and maybe they'll have a web interface that sucks, but how often do I think about my bank anyway? Not that big of a deal. And so I wonder if you were on a footing to understand the anomaly in a way that normal-wise—

Yeah, I think there's a real— it's important to look at the world as an outsider. I sometimes do this. I have a 14-year-old kid and I always say this to her and it always annoys her. I'm like, what would an alien think about what you're doing right now? Would an alien look at the banking system and go like, wow, this is the best banking system? I just think it's fun to try to think of an outsider's perspective on how the world works and say, does it really make sense from a completely outsider perspective? Or is it just these kind of set of the way it is and people grew up with that? And I think it helps. I think that's one of the hidden reasons immigrants often do well. It's like everything they view is from an outsider perspective because they're kind of outside the culture. And one of the ways you try to assimilate into a society is you try to understand the culture in a way that everyone else takes for granted. But I think the tools that people use are also part of that.

So then you had this idea then for Mercury. It had been percolating for a while. How did you stress test the insight behind Mercury? How did you decide whether to pursue it or not? Did, you know, did you interview a bunch of customers or did you just kind of know and there was no way to prove it other than just to do it?

So I really, there was like 2 things, maybe 3 things that gave me confidence. Number one was just my personal experience. I was just like, I know something needs to exist here and I know I would use it. And I felt like I was like not that different from other entrepreneurs. Number 2, there was a reasonable amount of success that other neobanks has had, especially in the UK and Europe. So Several business banks at that time. There was Tide Bank and Quanto. There was many consumer banks, Monzo, N26. So I was like, okay, this is a movement that will happen here. And I felt like this, the fact that it was successful outside the US made me get confidence in it happening in the US. You know, one thing that was like a little hard right at the start is like I could not get any fintech VC to invest initially. So I had Andreessen Horowitz come in on the round like very quickly. And I was like, oh, you know, it'd be nice to get like a fintech VC, like fintech fund to invest. But it was just funny. It was just like completely impossible to get them to invest, even though Andreessen Horowitz had already committed. Back then, fintech VCs were very focused on like building infrastructure and tools that would sell into banks. Like that was the main thing they invested in. So this idea that like someone could disrupt banking and, you know, I was like laughed out by like several fintech VCs. That was like a little disheartening because I was like, oh, these people, like, you know, maybe they know something I don't. You know, it took a really long time. time to launch. It took a year and a half for us to go from this funding round to launching, just because we had to do like bank partnerships and it took a long time to kind of get them in place. Like we did one and that one didn't work out. So we had to kind of strip it out and do something else. You can't launch half a bank, right? Like you need to launch like the full service for someone to actually like want to use it. And I had this like idea of like a pretty broad feature set that I thought was the minimum spec to like build a great product. So we were kind of in this hole for a year and a half. And, you know, I did this, the general Valley consensus of like, go talk to a lot of customers. I remember I talked to like 100 startups that could like use Mercury. I remember after that process being like a little bit depressed and worried because, you know, we were in this hole building something. I talked to like 100 people and I remember like 2 of them were very excited about it. They were like, yeah, I'd love to use it. Like, tell me how I sign up. And the others were like very lukewarm about it. Like, you know, not that many people like against it, but it wasn't like— It wasn't this like exuberance of like, I can't wait to sign up that I kind of wanted and expected. So I remember at that point being like kind of worried about it. But, you know, when we finally did launch in April 2019, like this was the first time I launched something which was just like an explosive launch. Like it was basically successful from day one and people started signing up. And like, you know, we had this moment like 4 days after we launched where like someone I'd never met before, never spoken to, like transferred $1 million into a Mercury account. And I was like, I don't even know who this person is. And my mind was blown because, you know, I thought every single person that does like something significant like that, like I would know and I talked to and kind of, you know, get them sold on the product.

So what do you think explains that? You know, why do you think just immediately after you launched, people just glommed onto it, right? They just Gravitated to it immediately.

So I think like one thing that's funny is like if you go talk to 100 people and 2 people are really, really excited, you know, that sounds small to you, but if the market is big enough, and for us it's like every single, you know, especially when we were tiny, we didn't require millions of people. We required like, you know, a few hundred people to get really— so the 2% of people that are really excited when we launched this thing, they were like, oh my God, I've been waiting for this thing my whole life. Right? So that actually got the snowball going where it's As long as you get in front of enough people, then they become advocates to the next set of people because they were the most excited. And as long as you deliver on that, they can become strong advocates going forward. We were doing something audacious. And I actually think people underestimate how much just doing something audacious has its own kind of power to it. People want to talk about it. There's this marketing value built in. People get excited about it. It's easier to hire people when you're doing something ambitious. And I think another thing that people underestimate is like, there's been accumulation of like these bad experiences that people have with like these incumbent banks. Yeah, everyone's got a story about like how it, you know, something simple just took so long. You know, we thought about banking like end to end, right? Like I was the one and me and my co-founder were the ones that were responding to every single customer support ticket. Like we were like there to like really deliver this like great experience. So. The contrast was huge, right? Like even today, I try to be really accessible to people if they have like problems with Mercury. And yeah, no one's talking to like Jamie Dimon and like saying like, this isn't working for me. Being this like strong contrast to like what was out there was a big differentiator.

So these 2% early folks who were really excited, or the guy that gave you a million bucks after a few days, what was it about them that got them so energized compared to the other 98%, do you think?

There's element of it that's like risk-taking nature. Like in terms of product, Mercury was obviously better even from the start, but banking is like this very high trust service, right? Like there's, you're putting your money inside a startup bank account. Like you gotta trust that they're gonna keep that safe. So we did a bunch of things to try to like engender trust in the system. Like, you know, we had Andreessen Horowitz, we had like the original founder of SVB was an investor. So we had like this Like I had 60 investors in my like seed round because I wanted to like kind of project trust. And then we'd built a really good website and really good app that would also kind of engender trust. But there's still like an element, like even from my perspective, this person who transferred $1 million without talking to us was like a little crazy. Like they were willing to take a risk on this like early stage startup. And I really appreciate them to be clear. But it did require like some element of like risk-taking. Most of the other people that started were like very small, right? So I think when you're like really early in your business, it's less of a risk. You're just like, hey, you know, sure, this service seems better than my local bank and I'll just sign up to Mercury. And if there's a problem, I can always move kind of thing. And yeah, when you are like a more established business, it's much more of a pain to move banking. But when you're really small and you're not doing that much, something that's quick and online is like a nice, easy way to start. So it's definitely like on the whole, it was smaller companies at the start. Early on, it was like, you know, if you ever raised more than $5 million, you would move off Mercury. Then it was like $10 million, then it was $20 million. And now we have like many companies that have raised more than $200 million using Mercury and are happy with it. But, you know, if you raise $1 billion, you'd probably still leave Mercury. So like, you know, there's still kind of this, how big we are and who would trust us, like changes as we kind of establish ourselves over time.

And did you have a way of Making it more palatable to take the risk. Like the— like, for example, the Lyft guys, when we were working with them, John had this idea for the pink mustache and you put it on the cars. The reason he did that was he thought, okay, people are gonna be afraid to get in a stranger's car. And so if you see these cars riding around San Francisco with the big pink furry mustaches, that's not a long-term thing. But in the short term, it'll cause people to say, hey, what's up with that? And they'll be more likely to give it a try or the benefit of the doubt. Are there things that you did to make it feel less risky, right? Like open a tiny account with Mercury first before you open a bigger one, or, you know, ways that you could prove that it would work, that they could trust you before they had to trust you all the way?

I really think that— I mean, this one is like unintuitive, and I didn't think this would be the case, but it turned out to be the case is like actually just building like this amazing onboarding process. Engender trust a lot. People are used to having a very painful experience when you're signing up to a financial service. You know you're going to walk to the bank branch, it's going to take you 3 hours, and they're going to tell you you're missing some document. You're going to have to go back and dig out your utility bill or something like that. But we made this really smooth process, and we would do all sorts of things. So we scraped all of the Crunchbase investors. So as part of the onboarding process, you could type Mike, and they would pop up with like, oh, is Mike Maples an investor? So we'd have a form that's like invest. So we did all these like little touches to make it like much, much easier to sign up. Unexpectedly to me, at least, like people were like, wow, this is like so good and so well built that like they must really care. And it created this like really strong lasting first impression. And literally a lot of the people that like, you know, then went on to like tweet about it or like post about it were like saying like, wow, this is just the most amazing signup process. I mean, even now we get these, like it's the most amazing signup process. I've ever had for a service. You know, when you build this like really focused on like product and design, it can be like a true differentiator and like the reason that people like actually trust you in the long term.

Was there anything in the early days then that was an existential problem? Or like, did you, did you have any near-death experiences? Or did you just kind of launch? You know, like when I talked to Kevin and Mike over at Instagram, they're just like, well, we launched it, it blew up and That's that, right? You know, and it's like, how about with you guys?

I was really worried about like, do we really have product market fit? Or is this like a, just like a prolonged kind of, you know, there's the thing before the trough of disillusion or whatever. There's like the, you know, the launch energy or whatever. And I just thought maybe like people are just excited, but it's going to die out. And I really didn't want to like take it for granted that we had product market fit because I, you know, I've done a lot of companies like At Heyzap, at one point we had like a mobile gaming social network and we would just like, we pushed distribution so hard. We had like 10 million installs for this mobile app and we just never had any retention, but it took like a long time to figure that out because the retention would like die off like steadily over like 12 months. But we would be so good at like getting distribution for this thing that like all the numbers look great. Like it's like everything's going great. I really wanted to like not delude myself into thinking I had product market fit. And actually, like in some ways, I actually held back Mercury for a bit because we just wouldn't, we would hire always behind our growth. Like we wouldn't invest in engineers that much. We wouldn't get customer support, like all the things that we really needed. Like ideally, you know, you try to go like, okay, I'm going to grow this much and I'm going to try to hire like one month ahead of that so that like everyone's not like freaking stressed out because they're like underwater and everything. So for the first year, I was like very scared we didn't have product market fit. And then what happened is COVID hit on like March 2020. So we launched April 2019 and then COVID hit March 2020. And that was probably the most existential moment, at least for a month and a half, because we basically lost half our revenue because we used to make money on kind of float on the deposits and that disappeared because interest rates went to zero. Also, everyone, everything just froze for like a month and every, yeah, back then everyone was freaking out. Like they thought this was the end of the world. Thankfully, we had raised a bunch of money. We'd raised $20 million, which we hadn't really spent. And then the month after that, e-commerce blew up for us. And e-commerce wasn't even our primary target, like early-stage startups were, but we were in this kind of perfect moment where e-commerce companies were blowing up and they needed a bank account. And you could literally not walk to a bank branch in March or April 2020. So the only way they could get a bank account was with Mercury. So actually our revenue ended up doubling the month after, which was insane. Like it halved and then it doubled back to its previous pace and then grew like an insane amount in 2020 and 2021. And at that point I was like, okay, if we can take a global pandemic, we probably do have like really, really strong product market fit and we should like start like investing into the future a lot more. Almost every year at Mercury, like some really crazy things have happened. And like most of them have been like these macro events, whether it's like COVID or the the 2021 bubble and the 2022 bust and then the SVB. And most of these in the end have turned out to be kind of a positive force for Mercury. But at the time, it was definitely every one of them, you were like, oh, what's going to happen now? I feel like most startups are not as affected every year by some crazy macro things. Maybe it's the times we live in, but there's something about Mercury that because banking is such a fundamental tool for For businesses and the startup ecosystem that like we're sensitive to like what's happening in that ecosystem in a way that maybe other companies are not.

Yeah. And I've heard you say this before, when your product is kind of on the right side of history, things can kind of go unexpectedly your way. And I think that this is kind of, I think COVID and some of these other things that happened more recently might be good illustrations of that. So, uh, could you elaborate on that a little bit?

Yeah. I mean, a part of my pitch was always like, hey, this is a secular trend. Entrepreneurship is mostly digital now. People are going to run businesses online. And then the second trend is like, these banks just don't know how to build great products for these businesses. And it was obvious to me, and I think everyone would agree now, but it was obvious to me that most of the interactions that people would have with the financial services will be via tech companies. And some of that will be like banks become tech companies, but I thought a lot of it would be tech companies end up dominating financial services. So that was kind of the— those were like the 2 kind of underlying secular trends. As long as the trend is in the right place, like most things that happen tend to accelerate the trend when it comes to like, when you are a startup in that trend, if that makes sense. So the trend is like more digital businesses and more tech companies offering financial services. And like, yeah, COVID is a perfect example that like massively accelerated it. The SVB crash, I don't have anything against the SVB folks, but we were already replacing them in the early-stage startup ecosystem. And when this happened to them, it just allowed us to kind of have a higher inflection point and kind of grow much faster than we were before it. But yeah, as a startup, you kind of have to be ready for this change and you have to be continuously adaptive. But as long as you are nimble, you have this kind of advantage that like you can just move fast and you can react to things and you can adapt to whatever, you know, whatever comes your way. And as long as you're on the right side of history and right side of these trends, you will generally like have some advantage from them.

Yeah, it's almost like a positive rendering of what Nassim Taleb talks about with being antifragile, right? You're not just being resilient, right?

I actually, it's not one of our core cultural attributes, but I talk about it a lot at the company. Like, how do we build an antifragile company? And like, actually you can think about it in lots of different dimensions, right? Like, I think part of antifragility is like, I shouldn't be the only one that comes up with ideas and like, you should try to build and like, we call these autonomous product teams. Like, I want every team to be like continuously iterating and have ideas and talking to customers and like own a domain where they can they can innovate and it's not just through me. I think sometimes I talk to CEOs and they're just like, it seems like everything is bottlenecking through them. They are deciding everything. I actually see my role at Mercury as accelerating things when I get involved, but nothing should be blocked by me. Great things should happen whether I'm involved or not. Sometimes I can step on the scales and try to move them faster. I want Mercury to last 100 years. And it's not going to do that if it's like something that's like super dependent on just me or like super fragile and like things can break it. Like it has to be something that can last. Yeah.

And one of the things I think I've learned is that part of being antifragile is a culture that accepts criticism. So I know that you and I both read David Deutsch's book, The Beginning of Infinity. One of the things that Deutsch talks a lot about is how criticism is a form of error correction, right? So it's, it's almost like you have a conjecture about reality and you're exposing it to criticism, and the criticism hones your explanation to ever better versions of the explanation. And so a lot of the companies that seem to do well are antifragile in the sense that they're not being resilient to criticism. They look at criticism as a positive input to error correction. that they in turn use to make their products better. And so the more they get criticized, the more they improve. And so to me, on some level, that's kind of an abstract way of framing antifragility, right? Is it's like, yeah, you're not just resilient, you're not just withstanding pressure or criticism, you're actually improving in the face of it. It's actually a positive input variable for you relative to the other folks.

I think one thing that we look for when we hire people, and this is like super important for leadership and exec roles, is like who are humble. Yeah, as co-founders, like we were quite humble and we can't stand like very high ego people. But it gets tricky when you're hiring like really senior people and they've done a lot and they like come and they're like, yeah, I know how, you know, I know this, I can build this. And you feel like, oh wow, like the, you know, ego can feel like confidence and I can feel like they know what they're doing and you should hire these people. But I have found like again and again that like actually like hiring people that like are open to learning and open to criticism and open to growth is just so much better because whatever experience they might have, like the Mercury situation will be different. And whatever we want to do in the future will be different. And you need people who can learn and adapt and grow rather than people who are stuck with, I've done this before and this is how you do it kind of thing. I don't think Mercury has made it in any way. I think we're still just at the start. I don't take our success for granted. I'm sure whether it's the incumbent banks or like the next startup, like, you know, we are not safe. This book has like an amazing title. It's Andy Grove's book, like Only the Paranoid Survive. I'm optimistic and I love what we are doing, but I don't take it for granted that we will like survive. I think we have to fight every day to do that.

Is there anything you'd do differently? You know, are there any major mistakes that you made that you think people can learn from where you're like, oh, wouldn't do that again?

Honestly, things went pretty well. So I'm not like, oh wow, if only you'd done this. So most of these changes, like micro. I think one thing that I do feel like we should have done differently is we launched in 2019. And at that point, I felt like the corporate card game was done. Like Brex was already a unicorn. They ended up launching a competitor to Mercury like 4 months after we launched. So that was also kind of a scary moment for us because this was We were like a tiny startup at the time and they launched a, basically like a bank account that was competing against us. They were already a unicorn. So that was like a scary moment as well. But at that point, I definitely thought like corporate card is done. Let's not try to compete against Brex and let's like focus on banking and do, you know, we ended up doing treasury and a few other things. But then Ramp like actually launched after us as a corporate card. And, you know, we ended up launching our corporate card product in 2022. But there was this 3-year period where like there was, you know, actually like, although I thought it was done, it was like everything was still in play. And I think we, you know, now we've done pretty well in the corporate card. And actually for Mercury customers, they use the Mercury.io corporate card more than they use Ramp or Brex or Amex. But I still like kind of regret like giving them this like kind of 3-year head start or 3-year time where like I wasn't in the game. And yeah, I really, it's a really interesting lesson because it really felt like it was done. Like, Brex was just like so dominant and like Ramp just came along and completely whooped them. And it turned out like that whole market was like huge, just as big as banking. Now we play in it, but I just kind of regret not playing earlier. I don't know what the lesson is quite here. Like, it's, I think sometimes you look at people and they seem really successful and impenetrable, but like actually if you if you do have a good wedge and you feel strongly about your product and skills, that maybe it's just not as impenetrable as it seems, I guess. Often I feel like I do this a lot in the— I'm also an investor, but I do this a lot. I sometimes think of spaces as done. I'm like, this player, this company is a winner. That space is kind of done. But then something crazy happens. Someone else comes along and kind of blows it away. And actually, it turns out the space was 10x bigger. And the, like, even though we thought it was done, it was very much not done.

And do you think there is a way to tell the difference, right? Like, is there, are there some markets where they really probably are done and the leader is achieving escape velocity and, you know, creating barriers along the way versus, you know, some markets it's got a lot more room to play out?

I think it's a good question. I think to some extent, maybe just like Software in Silicon Valley is just continuously being reinvented. And you have these kind of new hyper trends, whether it's mobile or cloud or AI, that create these opportunities to kind of reimagine what that product could be. And at least historically, incumbents haven't been good to adapt to these new trends. And I think it seems like in AI, they're doing a better job maybe. But yeah, I think it's probably, if no one has really innovated and the space is big enough, it probably isn't done. It's like probably my conclusion. And there's always like ideas, but it doesn't mean anyone can break into it. But I think if you have like a unique approach and a unique insight and like you are kind of maniacally focused on product and iteration, then you can probably build a new company there.

So I like to ask this towards the end. What do you think your experience lends to other really ambitious founders who are listening to this?

I think people should think about entrepreneurship as like, what is the sustainable fun thing you can do in life? And think about it with that mindset. And I think sometimes people get a little bit too stuck on they're trying to make money or they're trying to copy someone else's way of doing things or whatever. And I really feel like a lot of the times I have been most successful and had the most fun when I'm trying to think about what is my purpose and why what's going to keep me doing this for the next 10 years? And I have to relearn this lesson often because sometimes you can end up doing, especially as a CEO, end up doing things that you feel like you have to do. You have to go. And there is an element of you just have to go do fundraising or whatever it is. But I think it's important to actually step back and go like, okay, what do I actually enjoy doing? And I personally enjoy talking to customers and building products and thinking of ideas and being in the weeds on these things. And I have to kind of often step back and say, okay, am I doing enough of that? That are like things that actually energize me. Especially when you're young, you just think like, you're good in 2 years, you're going to be so successful. And like, you know, you have this like very short-term mindset, but like, I think anything good takes like a long time to build. And you have to have that like long-term mindset of like, how could you do this for 10 years? And it's, I think it's important to like always go back to that.

All right. Well, thanks, Imad. I want to respect your time. I know, Got lots going on, and congrats on all the success you've had with Mercury. I mean, amazing success story, right? It's been fun to watch from the very beginning, and every time I hear about you guys, you just surprise people on the upside of how big it's gotten.

Yes, lots more to come.

Thanks for listening to the Pattern Breakers podcast. You can follow me on X @m2jr, and I encourage you to check out our newsletter at patternbreakers.com. I'd love to have you subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode. And if you like the show, I'd be grateful if you could leave us a review. Until our paths cross again, I hope you embrace the power of thinking and acting beyond the conventional boundaries. It's the people who dare to be different who truly make a difference.

Thank you.