Building a Billion Dollar Startup | Immad Akhund on Mercury, Building a Product & Scaling a Business

would say like, this is what we're working on, this is what's not working. And yeah, we were like very open about it and we talked about it, and that helped like keep everyone kind of accountable. I have a massive bias towards entrepreneurs as investors, so every one of the VCs that invested in Mercury was an entrepreneur. Every time a team has to work with each other is a bug in the system, so I am against having like platform teams. The main aim is to create situations where The smaller the collaboration space, the better the outcome in general.

The thing I actually want to start with is there's this huge dichotomy in any sort of field, which is the creative or the business person, or in tech, there's the software engineers and the business people, right? I'm curious now, because you give a really interesting answer to this, how do you think about that for yourself? On one side being more of a creative person, and on another side being a business person in terms of your skills and then how you work?

Yeah, I think as an entrepreneur, you can't really believe in that dichotomy too much. You have to be a creator, you have to come up with ideas, you have to build them, you have to believe in them, and you also have to care about the business side. And I'm an engineer originally, and actually before we launched Mercury, I was still doing a ton of programming on our front end. And I really enjoy that. But, you know, so I did my first startup in the UK and maybe this would be a nice kind of analogy. What was really interesting, so this was 2006, first company, and all the entrepreneurs I met, and I did a bunch of this networking and all this stuff, I just started my first startup. All the entrepreneurs I met were business people, but they couldn't make the thing. So there was this like kind of weird pressure where everyone was like, oh, how do I get this built? Like, how do I make the first version of this? And, you know, I was like, oh, I can just build this myself and I don't need to raise much money because, you know, I can just do that. So it is a superpower if you can combine those 2 things. And it is actually, I would say, one of the reasons I have been successful is because, you know, I've had a balance of like, I care about making things and I like that creative process, but I also— I wouldn't say I was naturally good at it, but I've had to learn to sell, raise investment, do all of that, and I was never scared of doing that. And generally speaking, I think everything is learnable. You can learn anything that you really try at, but it is harder to learn the engineering, making, creating side. It's a little easier to learn the business side, I think. That's been my experience. A lot of the good companies I've invested in have been engineers or other types of creators, but they've been able to learn the business side. I think generally it's actually a little harder to learn to create a great product than learn to sell a product that you've created. Yeah.

And I think part of it is because also, I think what I've learned about selling is to be a really great salesman, you really do have to believe in the product. So I think for a lot of creators or founders, because they're so involved in creating the product and they believe in it so much, it almost overcomes their weak sales ability.

Yeah, for sure.

It gets them better at sales, right? And also, I know you look at a lot of trends and stuff and invest in a lot of companies. With the rise of no-code tools and stuff, do you almost think the founding and creating the product part has gotten both easier and harder now because there's so much competition? Or sort of like, do you see that as a trend?

I think it comes down to what are you creating and what is the differentiator around what you're creating? So, you know, if you're selling something online, like maybe 10 years ago, you would've had to like go figure out how to integrate with like some card processor and like how to make a website, blah, blah. And all of those things you can now use Shopify for, right? If you're gonna be a writer, you can use Substack. It just depends on what the core thing that is your differentiator and what does that involve. With Mercury, our differentiator is a new type of product that's very integrated and great to use and doesn't exist in banking. So no no-code tool would've helped us make that. But yes, I think if you're the little, like the quantum of creation, you don't need to do as much other stuff. Like you can use a no-code thing to start selling something online or get something live. And actually, there's a reasonable amount of businesses that just don't involve that much unique tech, right? There's no reason why you can't set up a reasonably complicated business with these no-code things, and the differentiator was never in the programming anyway. So it has made it easier to get those things live, but actually, I would say the bit that has always been hard is coming up with an idea and a product that people care about. And that bit's not got any easier, really. It's just got a little easier to deliver it.

It's almost like if you look at actually, especially the last 2 years with the explosion in funding of companies, it almost created a lot of false positives, right? Because a lot of companies raised a bunch of money without really having that product-market fit or something that people actually wanted.

Yeah, for sure. And a lot of, I think a lot of money and actually entrepreneurs' time has also been wasted. You know, when you get that early signal, you're like, oh wow, I raised money. Like, I'm going to spend X years of my life doing this. And actually it wasn't even a good idea. That's not actually that good for the entrepreneur either. Right. And I, yeah, that is, this year has been hard for entrepreneurs. I think it's been much harder to raise money and build a company, but at the same time. I think true value will be valuable and it'll be easier to figure out what that is without all this noise.

So when you're looking at trends in the market and let's say either deciding what to build yourself or evaluating companies, what do you look at? And I'm asking this more for more of a personal reason where especially last year it was the rise of the creator economy, right? And I saw all of these companies raising money and I was like, wait, Am I missing something? Because I've been in this creative world for a long time, but I don't really see how this is going to be venture scale or it can work. So I'm curious, when you're looking at a market, we can take the creator economy as an example. What are the trends or signals you're looking at to decide what to build and also to raise or not, depending on how big it can get?

Yeah, there's kind of 2 angles I look at it, and both of them are like, kind of opposites and almost contradictory. Angle number one is kind of like, I look at it from a pain point perspective and a customer perspective. So I'll give you an example. I'm an investor in Substack. And when they started, I don't know when it was, 2017 maybe, there was no newsletter ecosystem, right? There was like Stratechery, was one and there was maybe one other. But I just thought it was like, hey, there is something here. The newsletter thing is happening. And wouldn't it be cool if we could actually enable citizen journalism and get people like authors' ability to make money? Wouldn't that be an interesting world? So that's one side of the analysis. It's seeing an interesting initial trend and going like, okay, how do we extrapolate that out? Which, yeah, honestly, there's a bunch of leaps of faith there that sometimes do work. Sometimes I get really excited about an idea and then 5 years later, nothing was there, or 10 years later, nothing was there. And there's been tons of that. But that is, I think, really important and was a part of me creating Mercury. I was like, okay, banks suck and I hate cheesing my bank. Wouldn't it be cool if someone just made it good? That's one side. And the second side I look at it is really like, yeah, I'm a little extreme about it. It's like, if everything went right, could this be a $10 billion company? And I don't know about what ideas you were thinking about in the creator space, but yeah, it's very hard to see. Most ideas cannot be $10 billion companies, which is fine. And I personally want to build something that's really, really big and that'll be impactful. And I think that'll be fun. And as an investor, I want to invest in those things. I want to go like, yeah, this is awesome. I can see how it'll be huge. And that, lots of leaps of faith required. This is a very low probability when you're investing at a seed stage where someone's got an idea that's going to be that huge. But I do want that. But yeah, that's not right for every entrepreneur. There's plenty of ideas out there that are not $10 billion ideas and are very good businesses to build. It's just how I think about it just from a personal perspective. And I do think from an investor perspective, if you are a seed stage investor, it's much better to try to get ideas that are going to be really, really big. That's where most of the returns are.

It's that classic bootstrapping versus raising funding debate. It's a great way to start a storm on Twitter. One of the things that keeps coming up on Twitter as an example in the creator economy is this idea for building a YC for creators, right? And I'm curious, like, let's say like if I was like building that, like how would you evaluate that to see if it was actually like a fundable thing or more of a company that shouldn't raise money? Um, just because investing in creators is so different from investing in companies, right? So like how would you like start looking at that idea?

Yeah, I think the, the things Like if you start with the YC for Creator, right? Like if you look at YC and most investing firms, all the returns are in the top companies, right? Like Airbnb, Coinbase, like the companies making $10 billion. Like a company making $100 million versus a company making $10 billion is 100x difference, right?

Mm-hmm.

And even $100 million is quite hard to achieve, but The maths works out to be like almost all, like 99% of the returns will go end up being like to those top, top 2% of companies in YC. Uh, I don't think that dynamic exists in the creator space, or if it does, the upside isn't quite as huge. I guess if you could get like a Joe Rogan and there's a $100 million revenue line kind of thing. Uh, uh, so I think there's that one element that makes it a little trickier where like the model doesn't quite apply directly. I think the second thing that's a little trickier is, yeah, businesses are like this raw unit that like an entrepreneur does a business and then if that business fails, they move on. Whereas creators are kind of not quite that kind of raw unit. It's like a human. So like, I guess you'd be buying into like the YouTube channel subscription and like extrapolating that out. But it is different. But anyway, so worth looking at what are the differences. And then I think this is probably not advice most people would give, but I would probably just go do a quick model, not a complicated thing. I'd be like, how many creators does it take? What's the potential business model here? How would you scale that business model? And if everything went right, what would it look like in 5 years' time? And like, yeah, and that doesn't have to be venture scale. Maybe that is venture scale. Maybe this is like, you know, a great business, but not venture scale. Maybe, I guess you'd have to think about fund economics there because you might be raising a fund from someone else to invest in this. So if you think about fund economics, it's not quite the same as this like $10 billion thing. You just have to make a story about how you can like at least 3x and maybe on the upside, 10x the fund. So you'll have to run the maths through, but I would definitely do a model. That's one part of it. The second thing I would do is just go talk to a lot of creators, like both creators that have already been successful, but you, and you can't get them and talk about like the struggles they had and then creators that would be within the target group and like, you know, what would it take for them to do it? And yeah, if you're really into it, maybe go like one step further and just do like a test cohort, 5 creators, probably doesn't take that much money. And you can just see what it's like and learn a lot from that. So that would be my approach. I think it's an interesting idea. I wouldn't necessarily go like, let's go do every type of creator. I think you'd want to go like, let's go do TikTok creators, or let's do YouTube creators, or let's do Substack writers. You'd want to have a thing where, A, they talk to each other in a way that they can learn. A lot of the power of YC and these accelerators is that peer network effect. And B, you can provide a lot of value because if you collect together enough YouTube creators, maybe you can get discounts on production and you can have learnings around distribution and you could apply that to them as well. Yeah. What's your thinking?

It was interesting watching you go through it because you're looking at price points and what the product is. And I think in a company that's so important, right? It's like, what abstraction are you building at? And then what is actually the model in terms of what you're charging? So for example, Substack, they're not really investing in owning creators, but they're taking a percentage. And so they're going the Shopify model. And I think a lot of creator economy companies, they're really targeting the mass creator and more of the, we want to get the long tail. And I think on the opposite end with a YC for creators, they're almost like YC Growth. There actually might be an opportunity where I think there's this— the way creators can scale, I think is underappreciated. For example, we have a client where she has a following of less than 10,000 people. Her business did over $10 million, or she's grown to $16 million total, did more than $10 million a year. And sort of like the upside is way bigger than I think anything anyone realizes about the creator economy. So it was just interesting watching.

It's not just The way you describe it actually sounds more like a record label rather than accelerator.

Right.

And I know record labels nowadays kind of have a bad name because they take advantage of musicians or whatever, but I think maybe going and researching how did they start and why did they work, that would maybe be an interesting approach because it is much more similar to you find a star You bet on them early and that turns out to be a good bet, which is slightly different from a normal kind of business-style bet.

One thing this also brings up for me, I remember in one of our earlier conversations you mentioned that when you were building Mercury, you almost went into a cave for you and your team and really spent a lot of time building the product, which kind of goes against a lot of the either building public or start small and test. I'm curious, from a product standpoint, how did you decide to do that and what did that look like?

Yeah, I think it comes back to our earlier thing where you really have to understand what is different about you, right? And banks have existed for a while. They do work even if they suck, but there was a pretty high kind of bar we had to hit. It wasn't just We had to build all the features that you would want in a bank, which is a lot of features actually, especially when I started, I didn't think, oh, there's so many features, but just payment types. We had to do ACH, wire, checks. Freaking checks are a thing in the US, and we had to do both depositing and sending them. There's like 4 or 5. Oh, and then there's cards, right? So there's 4 or 5 just payment types, and that's just one part of it. There's onboarding, compliance. I could keep going on about how complicated it is, but there's a reasonable set of features, and then we had to go 10x better, right? We have to build all those features, but then we have to go, okay, just building the features is not something people will use. What's the reason people actually use this? Which is really easy online signup, made a bunch of improvements around user permissioning, and it just made it a really nice magical experience for people. And it wasn't that tricky for us to know what features were required. It's not rocket science to go, you need cards, you need to be able to do wires, right? So, there's, in some ways, it was easy in the sense that we had a pretty long checklist of things we needed to do and then things that we wanted to do to make it 10x better. But it was hard in the sense that it took a long time to build all of that. And we had Thankfully, we'd raised like $6 million seed round and we had the luxury to spend that time. And honestly, it wasn't like I was like, I'm going to sit at a cave for 1.5 years to build this. I was like, how do we get it right in 3 months? And then we were like, how do we get it out in 3 months? Like, you know, you had to keep that urgency, even if it took a long time to get it out. And I had a really good sense of like what the product requirements were because I'd been doing startups for 10 years already by then. Yeah. And that works, like that process works for a lot of companies, a lot of product-led growth companies, whether it's Figma or Airtable or Notion, they have a similar story of kind of going in a cave for a year, 2 years, 3 years sometimes to really build that fully fledged product because, you know, they're ambitious ideas where there's already something that exists. So you need to be way beyond what that something is. And that's hard to do. But yeah, I think the advice, like all advice, the reason it's advice is because it's not obvious. If it was very obvious, it wouldn't be advice. So because of that, there's a nuance to it and people often lose the nuance when you read a Twitter thread. So the MVP advice is advice because it's good advice, but there's a nuance to when you should go do 6 weeks and go test things out with customers. And that nuance often gets lost in these kind of Twitter threads. I think the reality is all advice exists because there's a trade-off and you should understand the trade-off and then pick the right side of that trade-off that makes sense for your business.

And I love that you mentioned Airtable and Figma and I think Notion too, because as I've sort of started researching the earlier phases of these companies that really built creative tools, it's a very similar story of they went in their cave and then they launched and they weren't charging and they just kind of made the product better over time till they started, right? Can you quickly define for those who don't know what product-led growth is?

And I'll ask the follow-up. Yeah. Honestly, the answer to that is not actually that obvious because everyone says they're product-led growth. I'd say there's 2 main things. Number one, it's self-service signup. So anyone can show up to the website and sign up and start using the product, which Nowadays seems a little more obvious, but especially with enterprise business-to-business tools, like 5 years ago or 10 years ago, it was almost unheard of. So that's number one. Number 2, generally they have some sort of network effect. So if you get one person using it at a company, they can share it with someone else, and that person will share it with someone else. So you can have this kind of bottoms-up growth. And then the 3rd thing, because the distribution is kind of the self-service network effect-based distribution, they tend to be heavily differentiated with product. So they try to build these kind of magical product experiences with really good onboarding and things like that. Whereas the previous era of enterprise tools was sales-led, so the product wasn't as important. A sales team would go sell it and there'd be a bunch of checkboxes that the CIO at a big company would click on, check on. So that's kind of the wave though. I think it's the formation of those 3 things kind of combined together that people call a product-led company.

I love that you defined it because you're right. I've heard this term so many times and I never was like, what does it actually mean? What are the specifics? And there's really interesting parallels in sort of what's happening in courses and info where a lot of it in the past was really started by marketers. So the courses were really bad and now people are actually working on the courses and the product and making that better. So I think a lot of creators can learn from how you build product. Earlier you mentioned that you're really looking for a 10x improvement, right? So maybe with an example, can you share when you were building the early stages of building Mercury, what is something that was a 10x improvement and how did you know it was a 10x improvement?

I mean, some of this stuff just seems so silly to me that it didn't exist, but banking is just so backwards that the bar is quite low. I would say there was 3 kind of initial things that we did right that are not huge, but together were impactful. Number one, it was all online signup. So even today, if you want to sign up to most banks, if you want to sign up to Bank of America or Wells Fargo, you have to walk into a bank branch, which as an online entrepreneur, it's crazy. I don't want to get up from my seat to go sign up for a service. That's just insane. But that's just how banks have been and they haven't bank branches. You walk into bank branches, you sit around, talk to someone that doesn't know anything about your business, and then maybe you'll get a bank account after an hour or two. So that was one thing, all online. Second thing is we were the first. So there was a couple of online business banks, but no one that targeted quite the same customer. But we were the first that had wire support, both international and domestic wires, which is kind of like a base requirement in my mind for like, who's going to use a business bank account that doesn't have wire support? But a lot of the previous ones did not. And I think we were maybe the first kind of challenger bank, like one of these kind of startup banks that had any sort of wire support. And we really had to push for that. And then the third thing, which actually turned out to be even more important than I thought, is I'm an immigrant to the US. I came from the UK. So it was really important for me to have like, yes, you need a US entity, but like, I wanted to be able to support an immigrant founder moving here. And it turned out that that was actually quite impactful. So even to this day, half our customers don't live in the US. So they have US entities and they don't live here. And yeah, just especially with COVID you just don't need to live in the US in order to run a US business, whether it's Selling courses online or doing a startup or whatever it is. So that was actually the third thing that was pretty impactful. I mean, there's a whole set of other things that make the product and we spend a lot of time on customer support as well and made that seamless. But I would say those 3 things were things that no one had done together very well.

Can you talk about, so let's say I'm building a company and I want to have that level of product insight and iteration happening in my team. How do you think about structuring the production function or the product function, whatever you want to call it, to be able to deliver that where you're not the one who has to, as a founder, always be in and coming up with the insight yourself?

I mean, there's kind of 2 phases to a company. I would say there's that pre-product market fit phase where you're exploring and it's a small team.

Can you also define product market fit? Because I think that's another thing a lot of people get wrong.

Again, it's one of those things that probably doesn't have a perfect definition, but yeah, product-market fit, as I think about it, and I've maybe had it twice in my life, so it's not something I have a ton of experience of, but most people have never had it. But product-market fit is when the product really works to an extent where distribution is so easy that you just have a product, And it doesn't mean there's no sales or no other kind of ads or things like that, but the conversion rates are really good. The users refer it to other people and it just fills this need enough for at least a niche set of the market that distribution becomes easy. I think that's how I define it, at least. There's a few other kind of definitions online about it, but yeah, there's a point where the product really works and distribution becomes easy. And it is actually really important to get to that point if you really want to build a huge, huge company. Because, you know, like, we have 100,000 customers. There's just no way I could have talked to 100,000 people to get them to use Mercury. Like, the reason we have 100,000 people is because, like, there's just this real pull that people really wanted Mercury, and they've shared it with their friends, and it's just out there. Uh, so to get something really huge, you do, you do need that, like, strong kind of distribution pull and And by distribution pull, like, it really, like, the distribution is kind of the result of like the package, right? The package has to really work, has to really resonate with people and people have to share it. And that's how distribution happens. So that's why like distribution is kind of the result of a successful kind of thing. So anyway, I was going to say there's like pre-product market fit and post-product market fit. And I do think you have to think very differently and you have to be very sure which one you're in. Then pre-product market fit, I think product insights, ideas probably should and do come from the founder. Yes, you empower your designers and engineers and the real specific implementation details and things like that will come from them. But when it comes to big things, like here's the set of features we need, here's the market we're going to go after, I think founders can't be lacks on that and you have to be like very opinionated as a founder there. So yeah, I don't, I think the important thing is to have, and to come back to your previous conversation, is like your pre-product market fit, keep that team small, keep it mostly engineers and designers, like people who can really build the company and really empower them and try to not build other things, other functions. We'd raised $6 million, but actually most of that 1.5 years, we were 8 people. We could have hired more people, but actually more people, more problems, as they say. But not just that, I actually think your iteration speed does go down and eventually you need more people. We have 400 now, but you really have to keep it small and iterate really fast and be very opinionated as a founder in that phase. I guess to speak to your question about on the later phase, when you do have your post-product market fit, I'm a really big believer in having autonomous product teams. That's my little pet phrase. Basically, product teams that can have all the skills, like they have design, engineering, data science, and And they can iterate and build things without talking to anyone else at the company. So, if you think about it, most companies, you just can't get anything done at— if you work at Google, I haven't worked at Google, but if I talk to people there, it just seems really hard to get things done. You have to talk to so many people, get so many approvals, blah, blah, blah. I think it's really important if an engineer or designer has an idea and they want to ship it, They should be able to ship it without talking to anyone but the people in their team, and they should be empowered to do that. So, that's kind of how we think about it, from how to enable people to actually come up with ideas, be insightful. I mean, everyone has ideas. Sometimes people say ideas are cheap, and I think that's partly why they say that. It's not hard to have ideas, but enabling people to actually take that idea and be able to execute on it is The hard bit. And most companies make it so hard that most people give up on having ideas, which is, I think, a real shame.

This is really insightful because it's funny, we've had conversations offline about potentially how to build a podcast, right? And I realized that's a product I'm selling because that's what everyone asks about. And this is really helpful to think about, okay, do we do it as a service, which we might have product-market fit in? but it's less scalable, and what other way we can do it which creates product-market fit. First of all, I love this framing of pre and post product-market fit because I think if I look at my online creator world, a lot of creators will just launch a product, it does okay, and then they just launch another product and then launch another product because that's how creators are, right?

Yeah.

So I think this discussion of pre and post is really good to decide what a creator should focus on and also where are the signals Where they should double down on something versus creating new stuff.

Sorry, I was just going to add, yeah, it does require iteration. I think sometimes people think, oh, I did this thing, it didn't work, let me move on kind of thing. But sometimes you launch something, it just works and it's like a magic experience. And yeah, I've definitely had that. But sometimes you require— my previous company, we spent— we launched this thing, I won't bore you with what it was, but it took us I think a good 9 months for it to actually work. We just kept listening to customers going, okay, what do you actually want? And then fixing it and then keep iterating. And I think one thing I have noticed is some people just give up too easily, but there's also the reverse problem of people not giving up quickly enough as well. So, there is a balance to it. I normally say give it at least 6 months and iterate for that 6 months. But yeah, obviously people will have—

And this is why this nuance can't be captured in a Twitter thread, right? Can you share some stories from your experience building both Mercury or HazeApp of the trough of sorrow in that pre-product market fit stage where you're like, this isn't working, I'm going to give up? Do you have those kinds of moments and what do those look like?

I have an unusual amount of not giving up in me. But there's definitely always troughs of sorrow. I mean, we spent 1.5 years building Mercury, and it wasn't obvious that— I would say in that time, I probably spoke to 100+ entrepreneurs, right? And when you ask them, oh, would you use this? Maybe from the 100, 2 were like, yeah, definitely use it. Give it to me now. And a lot of them were like, oh yeah, I mean, it sounds interesting.

Mm-hmm.

And I was just like, I had so little data apart from my instinct on whether people would care, right? Because it's like, it turns out that even if 2% of people really, really would use it, that's enough because the market was big enough. But it wasn't obvious. I was like, God, I just spent, I'm spending a year and a half building this thing. It kept taking longer than I thought because it was more complicated than I thought. And we ended up doing 2 integrations with partner banks and it was definitely hard. So I wouldn't say at any point I was like, let's give up, but it wasn't obvious, right? It was definitely going like, what am I doing here? How do I push this forward kind of thing? It's taking a long time, et cetera. One thing that really helped me is for the first 6 months or so, I was like, okay, I did the fundraise, I did the bank partner thing. And then I was like, now what? I'd done all of the things and now we just had to build it. And I hadn't actually programmed or coded. So I'm an engineer originally, but I was also the CEO of my previous company. So I hadn't really coded for like 3, 4 years, but I was like, how do I push this forward more? And I'd already talked to as many people as it made sense to talk to, et cetera. So eventually I was just like, okay, I'm just going to relearn to code. And that actually helped a lot, just getting in there and being in the zone and helping build it. really helped alleviate my angst and it was kind of fun to learn frontend programming again and build the product. So that helps. I think generally speaking, the sorrow or the troughs of sorrow are the worst when you're not doing something, right? When you're just worrying and thinking, oh, this isn't working for this reason, et cetera. I think the best thing to do is actually turn it into an action plan. It's like, okay, In my previous company, Heyzap, we went for 8 years and it basically didn't work for the first 6 years, right? So that's like a really, really long time. But every time it wasn't working, we were just like, okay, we're going to make this other thing work and we're going to spend a lot of time making this other thing work. And then we were like, okay, we launched it. And there's always rays of sunshine in the troughs of sorrow, right? It's like you launch something, it has a little bit of traction, but it takes another 6 weeks to figure out it doesn't work. And you Yeah, after all of that, I realized, and actually I always have to remind myself of this, is you have to really enjoy that journey. I think if you're too focused on success and you don't enjoy programming or you don't enjoy talking to customers and building things or whatever it is that you're doing, I think it's just really hard. And I think I was kind of fortunate that I do really enjoy programming and I think it's a real privilege to make things for life. I could have easily had another life where I was just working at a big company and a programmer there and not really passionate about what I was doing. I've only had one job in my life and that's what it was like. So I think it's a privilege to make something. So I try to remind myself of that and go like, okay, we're making something. That's the fun part. And let's just keep the action and momentum going rather than fixate on the things that aren't working.

It's really like you really have to enjoy the daily aspect of it without falling into the ruminating loops of why isn't this working.

Yeah, exactly.

Another interesting thing is you sort of mentioned a few different elements and I'll combine them. You mentioned having the urgency and the speed, right? In the case of Mercury, you weren't really getting customer feedback, it seems like, because we're just building. You're constantly iterating to build something new and then If you have a small team, you're also really making sure everyone can come up with new ideas and stuff. And then especially for something creative as coming up with new ideas, it requires space, right? So how do you balance that with still keeping the urgency and the speed and the iteration, especially when you're not really getting feedback from customers? You don't really have a positive feedback loop that you can create. So how did you balance that or think about that?

It's a good question. I think rituals help, right? So I think it's important to have what we did, and people should come up with their own rituals. We would do a weekly all-hands. I mean, there was only 8 of us, but we still do weekly all-hands. And in the weekly all-hands, we'd say, this is what we're working on, this is what's not working. And we were very open about it and we talked about it, and that helped keep everyone kind of accountable. Like with 8 people, you can literally say, here's what you were working on, how's it going, et cetera, right? Like, you know, it doesn't have to be like super, like non, yeah, super high level. It can be very granular. So that was one thing we did. Every 2 months I would do an investor update. And in that, yeah, we had a lot of investors. We had about 60 seed investors, but I would really do it for myself and the team, and the seed investors were just a consequence of that. And yeah, they were pretty detailed. I'd be like, this is what we want to do in the next 2 months. This is what we said we were going to do in the last 2 months, but this didn't work, that didn't work, and these are my general thoughts on it. And yeah, it forced me to step back and think about how things are going at the high level and also set objectives for the next 2 months. So every mountain is climbed with every step or whatever the best phrase is there. But yeah, that's how I thought about it. Like, okay, Building Mercury is complicated. There's lots and lots of steps to doing it, but you could break those apart, right? You're like, okay, we need a great onboarding, and as part of the onboarding, we need to collect passports. Yeah, there's all of these steps to get to a great experience, so you could break those out and set yourself targets, set team targets, and force yourself to step back and look at the whole. And then having People who, yeah, we spent a lot of time initially like writing out a company culture. Like there was 3 of us and then, I mean, there was almost no company, but we still wrote down like, this is the culture we want and these are the types of people we hire. And it was very like deliberate and meaningful, but it did lead to like us being like a fairly cohesive set of people that had like similar values and Yeah, we wanted humble people that were low ego. We wanted curious people that cared about product. And yeah, it meant that even though we weren't live with customers, we were still pushing to this common objective and focused on it.

I love the idea of creating values because I think a lot of times that gets pushed out until maybe it's too late. What are other things that you did in that pre-product market fit stage? that maybe a lot of, let's say, first-time founders miss, that now that you think back, you're like, oh, that was really cool that we did that, or that was really valuable and it's paying dividends now in terms of compounding itself?

Good question. I mean, the culture thing is actually crucial because the first, let's say, 20 people really define the culture for the next 200 people. It's very hard to change without getting into current affairs too much. We're seeing Elon Musk trying to change the culture at Twitter. It's just very hard to do that when you are at scale, and I don't know if that would be successful. So I think that was really key, and I often advise people that. One other thing we did is we had a pretty large set of seed investors. So I've always said Mercury, for it to be successful, it's not just about the product, it's also the community. Like, we want to help entrepreneurs succeed. We want the whole community to be part of that mission. And we've tried to do that like many layers, right? So one of the layers is like, who are your investors? So we had a seed round that was led by Andreessen Horowitz, but we had about 60 other seed investors. Most of them, not all of them, but a lot of them were other entrepreneurs. And yeah, I would say a lot of our initial success came because we had this distribution engine around them. And also, yeah, a lot of these people are customers as well. So we had like, actually, I'll call them out because they were super useful at the start. Like Justin Kan was a seed investor and Elad Gil was a seed investor and both of them helped spread the message when we first launched. And I think with Mercury, we needed to be really part of the community. And we thought about developing that community from day zero with these seed investors. And when we did our Series B recently, we actually did a community round where 3,000 of our customers invested, which is part of the same thing. It's like giving more, I'm like, how can I have the most number of people with skin in the game to help me be successful?

Yeah.

I think that's really important. And they also held me accountable and helped while we were building it. So that's something I'm really happy that we did. Third thing, which we touched on already, is like, keep the team small, really be very focused on like building and not doing too much other stuff. You know, it's very tempting to do bullshit, like go to conferences. Yeah, none of that stuff really matters. The only thing that matters is like building a great product. And I would say lastly, and this bit was quite tricky, is having quite a high bar for who we hired and worked with. And as a startup, it's really hard because it's especially— I remember having lots of conversations with friends or friends of friends that worked at Google or Facebook or Apple, and just getting them to leave those cushy jobs. and to work at a startup where they get paid less, the equity is very uncertain, it's not liquid. I mean, that was really hard. So I would say we almost had zero of those. And you end up actually, 5 of the initial 8 were people that worked with me, including myself, were people that worked with me at Paysapp for many years. And we worked well together and they knew me and that's partly why they joined. And then I guess one was from my network and 2 were people we found. But yeah, getting, even with all of that, it's very tempting to lower your bar, right? To be like, oh, maybe this person's not that good, but... But I think that's super dangerous. It's better to go early in people's careers and maybe take a bet on someone that is an engineer or a designer and has a few years experience and Maybe you'd like someone with 10 years experience, but they're working at Google and very hard to get. But this person could be good enough to be like that person with 10 years experience, but they're just early in their career. I think that's one way to make a bet on people and keep a high bar. And just like, you really have to spend a lot of time on hiring. I mentioned 6 months of doing stuff before I was back in coding world. And part of the reason was I was like, okay, we want to, we need to get that initial team of 8, 9 people. Uh, like, how do we get them? And like, we were really, really focused on like hiring and spending time hiring and having a really high bar. Uh, and all of those 8 people still work at Mercury. Uh, and they're like a very impactful part of like Mercury, even, even at scale.

Um, this, this is so helpful because I'm realizing like, while we can do building podcasts for people as a service. to make it really scalable, we're almost building a product company. And so these are all the lenses that I need to evaluate things with. You mentioned how the culture gets set with the early people and you were looking for people that were maybe early on. What are other things that you're either looking at or evaluating to see if someone is going to be that first 5-person team member and a really good fit for that versus someone who maybe just has worked at a Google or Facebook and has the resume, But can't really cut it at a startup? And I think there's a better way to phrase it, but yeah, how did you evaluate that difference, especially as a second-time founder now?

Yeah, I mean, I would say the 2 main things are, are their skills good enough? And I'm not that big on great interview questions. I just think interview questions are a hard way to really evaluate people. I'm all about, let's do exercise together, let's do a coding challenge, let's do a design exercise, whatever it is. So you want to have a pretty good way of testing against that, and I think I have quite a high bar there. And then the second thing is the culture fit stuff and having a very specific way to test against those as well. If you want curious people, how do you tell whether someone's curious or not? That's a series of questions and experiences that they can talk about that kind of speak to that. And you want people that have a little bit of a can-do attitude. You know what I mean? You just talk to someone and they're like, yeah, that's not a problem. We just make it kind of thing. You want that kind of person where that's like, can take something really hard sounding and wants to go attack it. And it's not going to like be very like focused on all the reasons that it's not possible, but be very focused on the reasons they can do it and they'll just get on with it. Um, and I would say, actually, we ended up avoiding this, but, you know, no hiring process is perfect and you just have to be willing to like fire people if it doesn't work out. And I think it's actually, yeah, especially with startups, like not everyone is suited to that startup environment. So it's good for them as well to go like, hey, this isn't working out. It's actually better to do that earlier on so that they can go back to their job hunt or whatever it was. I mean, ideally you avoid that. And I think actually, I don't think we had to fire anyone at this for quite a while at Mercury. So maybe we were good at it. But it is important to be really realistic and act quickly if there is an issue.

That's amazing. And one of the things you also mentioned, because I want to just quickly touch on this, which is You talked about how the early investors like Justin, and I think Elad you mentioned, were really helpful. I think it's almost like a meme at this point where I think Vinod Khosla said that most investors aren't really that helpful. I think especially in the last few years we've seen so many new people enter. There was all this money, all these companies raised without any due diligence and all this stuff. So it's actually a double-headed question, which is how do you decide what investors to pick and that invest in your company? And then when you look at the best investors that you have now, and also being invested in companies, what separates the great investors from everyone else who can just give you money?

I have a massive bias towards entrepreneurs as investors. So every one of the VCs that invested in Mercury was an entrepreneur previously. Almost everyone that was a seed investor was an entrepreneur. I just think they've gone through the journey. especially active entrepreneurs, they're like, you know, if you're like, hey, how did you go hire your first salesperson? Like they have opinions about that. I have opinions about that. So, whereas like if you go to an investor that's been invested for like 20 years, I mean, they might have opinions about it, but they're not like from direct recent experience. It's hard to like really draw from that. So, I think that's one bias I have. Number 2, if they're active entrepreneurs or just successful people, they're not going to bug you, generally speaking. You don't want to go to people who have the time to be annoying, right? You want to go to people who are so busy that you are lucky to have some time with them. And I mean, generally speaking, if they're investors, they will make themselves available if you ask them good questions. But I think that there's that's my second bias, to go towards people who are busy and don't necessarily— aren't going to waste your time. And I wouldn't say— I mean, there's definitely some investors that have been very, very useful, but if I make an ask of an investor, if I'm like, oh, I'm looking to hire a designer, who knows a designer? Most investors don't, but if you have 120 of them, which we do at this stage, Yeah. Let's say there's a 2% chance they do, that's still 3 people that'll respond to that email. So it's not always actually like quantity does help is kind of what I'm saying. It's like, I think as long as you do a good job of communicating with them, you don't know when someone can be helpful and will be helpful. And yeah, even to this day, if I send an email, I'll have some investor be helpful that hasn't been very active and helpful so far, but they do that one thing and it can be quite impactful to the company. I would say lastly, you want to avoid investors that trigger your asshole radar, if that's the right way to say it. If they've got too much ego, if they're just annoying to talk to. Yeah. There's definitely been investors where I've been like, oh man, this person, maybe they have a good reputation, but that interaction was really off-putting and I have not pursued them. And I think actually that's a reasonable thing to do. And you really are committing, what would it be, like 5 years in and I still talk to many of these investors. So you're really committing to work with this person for a long time. So it shouldn't just be them judging you, you should be judging them as well.

I love that. Especially I think as these powers always oscillate in terms of who has the power, I think it's important for founders to know that. So let's switch back to product-led growth. You've built a small team, you've raised some money, you're building the product. How did you decide to focus on growth? Because you guys grew really fast, I think like 100,000 customers in 3 years. So what was that transition from building product in isolation to now we're going to open it up and focus on growth?

I really hate waitlists. I didn't want to go like, oh, let's keep this quiet. I mean, there was definitely a period, I think about 4 months, where we had some customers, but it was just not working fully, like an alpha product, and we wanted to test it. But I wasn't— when we launched, we launched. We were like, we're ready, let's go. And at that point, we started growing. This was April 2019. Yeah, we spent basically the next 6 months just dealing with the growth. It was literally me and my co-founder on the phone for customer support all the time until we hired our first customer support rep. And there was just, I mean, there was a bunch of things that just didn't work, right? Like, you just launched this thing and I remember for the first 4 weeks or something, international wires basically didn't work and we had to really work hard to get those working. And then we realized actually we didn't have a Plaid integration, for example, and a QuickBooks integration, which isn't something I thought about. I was like, oh yeah, we need to have that. But everyone was like, I can't use this thing. It doesn't integrate to anything I use. So we had to do a big hustle to get those things working. But at the same time, we were actually quite hesitant to call it product market fit and go try to scale up the team really fast and really focus on growth. We were just like, kind of doing the minimal possible to hire enough people that we could just fill in the gaps that were like Greenestry. And then freaking COVID happened, like 11 months later. And there was at least one month of like, March, April actually was kind of slow for us. And we were like, oh, maybe we should pause. And we paused hiring anyone and things like that. And then post-COVID, it came back. And I remember at this point, like, I guess it was like summer of 2020. I was like, yeah, even COVID didn't stop it. Like, it seems like this is a real thing. And like, now we should really, really like go instead of like being on the back foot and like not hiring enough people for support and onboarding and engineering, we should just really like focus on doubling down and like hiring enough people. And we did like a little internal round at that point with our investors, but. Yeah, it took a while for me to convince myself that we should be hiring because this growth won't just stop. Because it's scary, right? You launch something and you just think, oh yeah, maybe this is just a flash and it'll stop. And then it took a good year of pretty continuous growth where we were like, okay, this is actually real. People really love this. And I should really start planning for a little bit more long-term rather than just enough to keep going.

So what were some of the— in that growth phase, What are some of the either elements or best practices in terms of— I know one of the things you mentioned in our research was how founders can improve by fostering a product-first mindset. So what are some of those best practices in product-first growth mindset?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think number one, and this obviously makes a little bit more sense for a product Like a product that's got engineers and things like that. But it's really important, I think, to use engineering, design, product as your lever. So for example, there's a lot of companies that are like, oh, this is working. Let's go hire a ton of salespeople, or let's go hire a ton of X or Y. And your company culture and everything about the way you develop product becomes about satisfying— if half your company is salespeople or 80% of your company is salespeople, basically the rest of the company is servicing those salespeople, right? It's very hard to build a company that has a product-led culture when most of it, the company, is sales. Not that there's anything wrong with sales, but it's just the nature of the beast. You become led by the group that's the biggest group at your company. So, if you want to be really product-led, you really have to not go You have to throw engineers at a problem rather than throw sales, ops, other things at the problem. One thing we did at Mercury, and we did it from really early on, is for every single big ops team, so we have an onboarding team, we have a risk team, we have a support team, we actually have a product team that works with that team. We have engineers, designers that their whole task is, Either build tools for those teams or work on the flows that customers care about that interact with those teams so that instead of solving everything by hiring more support people, more risk people, or whatever, we can actually go fix the problem and make it so it just doesn't exist anymore, which is the best thing for customers and best thing for those teams. So, that's one, how we think about being really product-led on all of that stuff.

Real quick question on that. So, what you're saying is you have all these different teams like support and whatever. Is it like each of them have engineers embedded and they report to those teams, or is it there's a separate team of engineers that have people that go into those teams?

Yeah. So let's just take the support example. There's a support team. I think there's like 30 of them now or something like that, and they have their own hierarchy. And then there's an engineering team which has a designer, and one of the, I guess, ex-support people is now the We call it business lead, but basically like product manager on that team. So there's, I think, 7 or so there, and they determine their own roadmap, but it's heavily influenced by what's happening at support. So sometimes it is like support going like, oh man, I just can't do this thing without having this tool. Can you make it for me? Sometimes it's literally looking at all the support tickets and saying, the biggest thing customers complain about is X. Why don't we just go build a thing to fix X so that customers stop complaining about it and support volume goes down? So, they have their own remit. It's driven by support, but it's not just like, let's just do what support asks us to do. Because support is sometimes very, very granular. They don't necessarily step back and go like, what is the total support volume and how do I go fix this? Although, obviously, they can do that as well. So, yeah, that's how it— We literally have 4 teams or something that work with these other ops teams to continuously improve the product, improve the user experience, and improve the tools that those teams use so that they don't have a shitty time either. I don't want people doing dumb things at Mercury that an engineer could easily fix or make it easier for them to do.

This is, by the way, really fascinating to me because as we're talking, I'm realizing if I look at what we're building as a podcast, as a product, there's audio, video as a product, and they're building sales around it. And there's so many parallels in here, right? But when you sort of have these different parts of the organization, how do you enable a culture of them supporting each other and helping without it turning into which I think Microsoft is the meme with all these different fiefdoms basically pointing a gun at each other. So how do you enable that within a company, especially when I think Mercury is remote, right?

Yeah.

Especially as a new organization.

That's an interesting question. I mean, I would say Bezos has a fun quote that maybe you can find, but basically it's like, for a question like that, it's like, oh, how do we make sure they work well together? I do think to a little bit of an extent, his quote is very extreme, but to a little bit of an extent, every time a team has to work with each other, there's a bug in the system. I am against having platform teams, platform product teams especially, where Team X can't get their feature shipped because they need to wait for Team Y to ship it. Team Y has their own product roadmaps and they have to keep collaborating with each other to get this product shipped. I don't want that at Mercury. And sometimes it does happen, but the main aim is to create situations where The smaller the collaboration space, the better the outcome in general. If you take that support team, if a customer support person had to go to every single engineer at Mercury and say, oh, man, I just can't get this fixed. Can anyone get this fixed? That would be a massive difficulty. They won't know who to go to. They'll be kind of reticent to go spam so many people. All the other people, even if they want to be helpful, they have their own agenda and priorities. It'll be hard for them to help. If you can constrain the collaboration collaboration space to— I mean, there will be collaboration, but if you can make it so the person that has a lot of context, that has the agency to go fix this, which is the engineer on that customer support product team, and the customer support team know each other. They're ideally friends, but at least they know each other on Slack and they could just talk to each other and get it done. You want to keep these collaboration spaces as small as possible to get things done. So, that's the real aim, and it's hard to do, right?

Yeah.

There's a tendency to actually make it so These things become, especially as a company scales, you're like, oh, this team knows most about this, let them do that. And then, oh, you have to talk to this person. You have to be really deliberate about making it so you can keep these collaborations tight, make it so you don't add a bunch of processes so that everything needs to go through some other team. But we try.

Is there anything we didn't cover in terms of best practices for Product-led growth. Are there other points in there before I move on to the next topic?

I do think when it comes to distribution, and I think you will really resonate with this, Sachit, since you're great at distribution, you can't rely too much on just the one thing. You kind of have to do a lot. Just because we're product-led growth doesn't mean we just rely on that. We also have a partnership team, and that's like 20% of our growth. We have Now we have an ads team that does performance marketing, and that's a significant part of our growth. So, even though we are product-led growth, and that is still the majority of our growth, it's a bit more than 50%, we really think about, like, hey, how do we make it so we can try, experiment, and also succeed at multiple channels of distribution? Because if we're not doing it, one of our competitors is. And also, these things don't scale forever. You have to go, like, okay, what is the next level of distribution going to be, and what can I learn from doing different things. So I think it has to be a combination. It's not just like, oh, I do product-led growth, that's all I'm going to do, and I'm not going to build a sales team, or I'm not going to do ads. Some people, again, on Twitter will take some extreme angle and say, just do X. I'm not a believer in that. I'm like, do everything, but do it well. And actually, not everything will work, but the things that work will hopefully be impactful.

Yeah, and I think that's, again, the nuance that doesn't get captured, right? You have to try a bunch of things, and then when something works, really pick that and double down. But if you only do one thing, then if something happens to that platform or whatever, then you're screwed. So you also have to have other irons in the fire.

Yeah.

And it's a very nuanced thing of how to actually pick ones and which ones to keep going. I think in the same way, something that you're really great at is helping startups and founders build and scale their businesses. So I'll just throw out a few different topics. And then you can tell me how you think about that. I think the first one is, and I think a lot of creators really struggle with this, which is what first hires to make. And I know you have insight into this that depends on the core differentiators. So can you talk about how you think about that?

I would say 2 things. Number one, try to do it yourself first for a reasonably long time. I think it actually helps you learn what you'd be looking for in that hire. It helps you actually understand, do you really, really need the hire or do you just think you need the hire? And then see when you do have that person, you will know whether they're actually doing a good job or not because it's very easy to go like, oh, I've never done that job and maybe they're not doing a good job, but I don't know, blah, blah, blah. So that's one thing. Number 2, I've generally speaking, try to wait until it's painful to not have the hire. You don't want to be hiring in front of your need in a small company, in my opinion. I think this is probably a little controversial. I think you'd want to be hiring after it's so painful that you don't have this person. If you combine that 1 and 2, actually, you often end up with hiring the right person at the right time because it's painful not to and you know exactly what the role is. And then 3 goes back to have a pretty high bar, make sure you Don't just go pick the first person. You want to have a high understanding of who can you work with and then also make sure their skills are really strong. That's how I've mostly approached this at the early stage. I think it changes a little bit at later stages.

And there's a sort of the Silicon Valley trope of the 10x engineer, right? I'm curious, have you ever worked or hired 10x engineers? How do you know if someone's going to be that during hiring or when they're working, maybe?

Yeah, I mean, 100%, there are 10x engineers. And how do you know? It's a good question. I don't think you know, no. Yeah, what makes a 10x engineer is not just their work. They do 10x more code or something like that. Part of the reason I think someone is a 10x engineer, and actually this is not just engineering, I think it's true for sales and design and a bunch of other things, is they do the right thing at the right time at the right level of detail, if that makes sense. It's very easy to spend a lot of time working but be doing the wrong thing, and then you haven't achieved that much at the end of the day. Whereas if you do the right thing, you can spend less hours working and you achieve the right result.

Mm-hmm.

So that's really hard to judge for. I think actually mostly you You learn the difference between a 10x or 3x or whatever it is. I don't love the phrase 10x, but there are exceptional people. And I think sometimes people try to deny that. They're like, oh, everyone's the same. That's just not true. There are exceptional people and they do exist. And you definitely know when you have someone. It's not a question mark after you see them work for a few months. You're like, wow, they just got this done and it's great. The result's great. Whether you can test for it successfully, I actually don't know. I think there's a question mark on whether you could spend 6 hours, 7 hours in an interview process or exercise or whatever and really know. If you have the privilege of it, and we've had that sometimes, you can work with someone for 2, 3 weeks, then you can get a sense of it, I think. But without that, I don't know if you can get it upfront.

It's the same thing that I found with media and podcasting and stuff too, which is The best people have just like have a knack for storytelling and they have taste. And it's funny, when I interviewed Sonal from a16z about podcasting, she said the same thing, which is the best people have taste and it's really hard to train. And it's really hard to figure out, but when you know, you know that that person has that.

Yeah. And it's actually like, even when it comes to engineering or whatever, actually taste is a really good way to describe it. taste to what they do and how they do it. That is a very hard skill to learn. And I do think it's learnable to some extent, but there's also inherent things that come from people who just are good at it.

Yeah. Switching back to scaling, another topic that comes up, and again, this has created a lot of Twitter people going against each other, is this concept of Remote versus in person, right? And Mercury scaled from that pre-product market fit of 6 people to now, I think, 300 or 400 plus. How do you think about building a company and culture that can innovate at scale while being remote and still keeping a strong culture?

I think it's tricky. It's actually kind of being invented right now, right? There was definitely a couple of companies that were scaled-up remote companies, but it's not It's not common knowledge how to do it. So, we were about 30 people before COVID and we still had a little bit of remote. We were about, I think, 30, 40% remote and the rest in person. And now we're 400 people and fully remote. And I think, so number one, you have to be really deliberate and be trying pretty hard. This is not free. So we, I think any remote culture needs to have some in-person components. So we have, we actually let, and we're very generous on it, I think. So we have a company-wide get-together at least once a year. We have specific teams, like if you're on a product team or support team or whatever, most teams we are like, hey, you should get together twice a year. And a lot of people on multiple teams, like you'd be on a If you're a designer, you'd be both on the design team and you'd be on the specific product team you're on. So altogether, there's between 3 and 6 opportunities for people to get together in person to collaborate. And it's not— I mean, there is an element of brainstorming collaboration that's harder to do remotely, but it's also making a slightly deeper connection. When you're getting on a Zoom call or Huddle or whatever, It's always planned and a little transactional. It's very hard to make it very non-transactional. Whereas when you get together and you go for dinner, that's where you learn about someone's family or whatever. It's a very different kind of interaction. So I don't think you could completely replace that. And this is part of the reason we only have US, Canada mostly. We have a couple of other countries, but almost everyone we have is US and Canada because you need to be kind of close together. to do that kind of in-person interaction. So that's one thing we focus on. Number 2—

Yeah.

You do need to have, I think, a very strong Slack culture. We do a ton of stuff. We call them call signs, but we have basically emojis that are associated with every single person that works at Mercury. We have a lot of just chatter, both work-related but also non-work-related on Slack. And it could, for people who come from a non-chat-based culture, it can seem a bit weird to suddenly have all of this Slack communication, et cetera, but it works. And then, I'd say third thing, we have a pretty good, not always great, but reasonably good Notion-based documentation practice. So most bigger meetings we do, we don't tell people, we're like, don't present. We don't want to have slides. We want you to prepare a document which talks about what you're working on, and it's pretty detailed. This is kind of like an Amazon idea. They call it a 6-pager, but we don't determine how many pages exactly. But we'll spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of the meeting just going through this document, making notes. Just because it's just so boring when someone's reading out the slides, right? It's just like, oh my God, I'm sitting through them reading the bullet points. That's just boring. I'd much rather we all read the same thing, we had the same context, and now we could talk about the real meaty discussions. And it just leads to, I think, much better kind of practice. And that works really well on Zoom because it actually would be worse to try to do that in person because everyone's sitting on their laptop doing it. It works much better to just be on your laptop computer at home and doing it. So those 3 things. But I do worry, it's not— I worry that people feel a little lonely and do they have that interaction with someone? But at the same time, I really enjoy being remote, right? I just wake up in the morning, I can get on with it. I don't have to do a commute. Most of my meetings are online and it's comfortable and I do think I'm more productive because of it. But yeah, it isn't an obvious thing. We do actually have 4 offices. So if you do want to work and you live in New York, SF, Toronto, or Portland, we have offices there and people do work from them. And I guess if someone joins Margrethe, they can move to one of those places and work from those offices as well. So I do think some people do prefer an office. I'm not like a I'm not religious about one or the other. I think I mostly have the opinion to let people do what they want to do and judge them on their output rather than whether they're spending enough hours in an office. But yeah, you have to be really deliberate about how you make remote work scale and keep it actually a fun environment for everyone where they feel connected with everyone.

Yeah, and it's definitely something we're all discovering together.

Yeah.

One of the things that you mentioned in your research, and I was really curious to dig into how you think about Mercury as a product. You were talking about how really the way you think about it is the bank account is a platform, and then on top of that you build all these different things like treasury, venture debt, credit cards, raise. Can you actually start by explaining what you mean by Mercury as a bank account as a platform, and then how you actually think about building and expanding the product? In terms of all the different things that you've built?

Yeah, when I thought about Mercury and what got me excited about it is if you think about what— yeah, this is getting into abstract thought a little bit, but if you think about it, what is a bank account, right? And I mean the depository side of banking, not the lending side of banking. So what is a bank account? It's like a place where you store your money. So money shows up and that's just a counter basically. It's a set of payments that go in and out, so both receiving money and sending money. And then it's the software that sits on top of it, whether it's user permissions, graphs, tables, QuickBooks integration, blah, blah, blah. Those are kind of the 3 pieces to it. But the interesting thing about it is all your money, almost by definition, all your money flows through your bank account. So that kind of lends itself to building a lot of stuff. So if you kind of go, And you're like, imagine you're MR in 2017 when you're first like going exploring this idea. If you're like, what if, right? You're like, what if like this was a very successful bank account and you were a Google and you were thinking like the early Google that was still innovative, not the Google today. But if you were like an early Google and saying like, what are all the things you can build once you have a bank account? That's like a core of like all the business operation. You know, you kind of end up with a set of like financial services and software that you build on top of it. So the financial services would be Yeah. Now it took us like, basically we launched it and like for the first 2 years we were just a bank account, right? Like it was a bank account and we kept improving it, but it was mostly just a bank account. It was only in the last year and a bit that we've had the time and the privilege and to like really invest in these other things. So like number one, it's like financial services that can sit on top of this, which is like credit card, venture debt. And there'll be like a few others in the future. And then there's the software tools that can sit on top of it, which like we launched a bill pay thing and we've got, how do we make analytics easier around your company and all that kind of stuff. So that's kind of how I think about it in terms of platform that like, hey, yeah, bank account is where your money's gonna be, but if that's where your money is, there's a lot of interesting things you can build on top of that to make it easier for entrepreneurs to run their business, to understand their business, to grow their business.

Mm-hmm.

And yeah, that's what kind of made it fun for me because I was like, I feel like one of the slightly sadder things about the world is like, you have an entrepreneur, they have a great idea, they launch it, and then like 10 years later, like the company is basically the same company with the exact same idea and they haven't done anything new. And that just seems like boring to me. Like, I want to be like, yeah, I'd much rather build like you launch something and then actually it like gets more and more interesting over time. It's like—

Yeah.

Now you can build extra features on top of it, extra tools, extra things that really make it a differentiated thing, which you can't do with every company. A lot of companies are these kind of single-feature companies, but I think that business bank account is actually this core unit that you can build a ton of stuff on top of.

That's so fascinating. Taking this abstraction maybe one level further, or maybe even in a more lateral sense, I know you're really interested in sci-fi and worldbuilding. How has that influenced how you think about either building company culture or team or products? Because everything you're building is in a way an ecosystem, right? And sci-fi is all about worldbuilding. How has sci-fi influenced the product and team and company building for you?

I think the thing that I really like about sci-fi is it just opens you up to Possibilities, right? Like, it's very easy to like spend your day in like the constraints that exist in the world and go like, these are the constraints and like we can't be outside that constraint. I think, you know, like the initial 8 people that built Mercury, like none of us were fintech people or banking people. Actually, one of us did work at a previous fintech company, but you know, we were like very much like going like, these are the pain points we felt as an entrepreneur or as a human, and how do we just reimagine this? And I think that a lot of sci-fi is like that, right? It's just like, the world could be this, how do you reimagine it? And I think that that's a really fun process, actually. I enjoy going, reimagining how it could be. And yeah, there's a lot of things that people do at Mercury where they go, take something and not— we never look at our competitors' products, right? Even if a competitor exists or banks exist, we'll be like, just forget all that. What do customers really want and how do we build the best thing for customers and reimagine it? So that's unusual. I think other people do get really focused on competitors, but I'm like, I get annoyed if someone's like, oh, we looked at a competitor's product. I'm like, I don't Why didn't you go talk to customers? Or, that's what you should be doing. It would be fine to go talk to a customer and then ask them, what did you really like about this competitor? I don't mind that, but I don't want to go look at competitors' products. Anyway, that's just like, if you are willing to look at things from first principles, which is also one of our core attributes, and go reimagine it, you end up with lots of interesting things. I'll give you a very specific example. We launched bill pay recently.

Yeah.

So, in your Mercury bank account, you can drag in an invoice and you can pay that vendor. Yeah, bill pay has existed for many years. It's not like we were the first person to make it so you can pay an invoice. We were probably the first person to make it so you can pay an invoice directly in your bank account. We also did some really cool stuff. We made it so When you click on— so we OCR the invoice, and when you click on one of the text fields that we've OCR'd, it zooms into the PDF. So instead of trying to scan to see, oh, did the OCR make a mistake or get the wrong field, which does happen with OCR, we made it so you zoom into the PDF and do it. And it wasn't my idea.

I do.

Yeah. It was just some engineer's idea, but Yeah, I think being a space where everything is on the table and you can go explore anything and think about it from that first principles is the kind of environment we would like. And I don't know if sci-fi is the reason we have that, but I would like to think that's partly why I think like that. And I would like to think that influences the culture at Mapfre.

And that's really cool to keep that, again, keep that going at Because it's easy when you're a few people, but it's really hard when you're a scaled company.

I think another thing that's really interesting and important that it's very easy to overlook in business is ethics. And I don't mean just obvious ethics, like it's like I'm going to steal or murder or whatever, right? That's just obvious. But there's a lot of subtle ethics in business. Yeah, it's like if you think about banking, one of the things that sucks in banking is banks just have this thing of subtle unethicalness, whether it's overdraft fees or charging lots of small customers these kind of onerous things. And people feel it, but they're not like— it's not like people say, oh, banks are evil. I mean, sometimes people do, but— But there's just like this kind of, one of the reasons I think Mercury works well is like, we're just very transparent about what we charge you and we try to make it so it's not complicated and we don't charge for many things. Uh, and I do think sci-fi has this like real, if you think about like what makes like a sci-fi thing interesting, there's this like a deep kind of thread of ethics in sci-fi and like probably true for other types of books as well. I'm just like really into sci-fi so I could talk about it more, but yeah, there's often like a—

Yeah.

Some sort of complicated villain. There's an— one of the things that sci-fi and worldbuilding allows you to do is really explore some weird ethics, right? What happens if aliens existed and they were doing this? Or what happens if humans had the ability to do X and they were exploiting that? I do think it's a very interesting— I guess most people maybe who don't read sci-fi wouldn't Realize this, but I do think a lot of the things that make sci-fi interesting is ethics being applied to an abnormal future situation and how that plays out. I think a lot of sci-fi is actually that. It's ethics and thinking about it and thinking about how messed up it might be if people lived forever and got super duper rich and had lots of power and there's lots of wealth inequality. All of these things are abstract ideas, but sci-fi goes really deep into the ethics of it. And I think that's an important thing in business to actually think about ethics. And I do think one of the differentiators of Mercury is we have a strong ethical basis of why we do things. And I mean, it doesn't mean that we just give away everything for free and don't make any money and build a shitty business. It means that you're just thoughtful about it and Don't screw over people and actually have that as a very core part of our culture.

It's funny that you said that it's abstract because I think it's abstract, but it isn't, especially now when you're seeing the extremes of compounding and people becoming these powerful companies with what's happening with Twitter and all these things. It's just a lot of fighting that's happening, right? I'm curious for you, so obviously you had that ethical core from Sci-Fi Aware when you started building it, the company. How have you propagated that throughout the company? Was there a deliberate thing that you did to propagate that strong ethical and values core to people who joined and as you grew?

I mean, there's definitely, A, it's like the choices that you make, right? And then explaining why you make those choices. So for example, If you— this is a little reductionist, but if you think about like the problems in banking are like a lot of it comes down to transparency. It's like, like kind of like tricking people into charging fees, not being very transparent about what's happening, kind of dumbing things down. And we take transparency to every level, right? Like every person that joins Mercury gets a login to the Mercury bank account for Mercury.

Yeah.

I share the board decks with people. I'm like, If anything's happening, I'll tell people about it and I'm not like sugarcoating it. I'm like saying, this is the raw thing. These are the problems. Let's go try to fix it kind of thing. So I'm very, very transparent. And like, yeah, we try to go all the way through with transparency. It's like transparent at a company level, have employees be transparent and think about the product in terms of how it is transparent. Think about customer support, about how we are transparent, think about what's wrong and what's happening and think about marketing in terms of how do we explain things? How do we educate people about them? Banking is kind of tricky. There's a lot of weird stuff in here, but it's not rocket science. We can explain it and we try to make it so— I always think about Mercury providing people power user features, but with very simple interface. And we try to think about that end-to-end. So, I do think that's probably the main way that We try to percolate these kind of ethical frameworks. I'd say the other thing is we're just very open about talking about things and just being nuanced about it. We haven't banned politics or anything, but we're not— if there is a topic, we will have people give both sides to it if there are 2 good sides to it. Yeah, we'll let people talk about it. And I think that's part of it being transparent and open to that conversation and not having too much egos. So we try to hire humble people and I'd say that is a really important attribute to leading to good ethics. If you have too much ego and you're too headstrong and you can't have a real conversation about things, that's where I think— Ethics could slip up.

Before we move on to the 5 questions we always end with that are really quick, I have to ask you about this because you mentioned it on the not talking about politics thing, because again, that was a huge debate in Silicon Valley. I'm curious as a founder and CEO how you thought about it, and also did actually being an immigrant play a role in what you decided in terms of letting people talk about it? Because it was a huge debate. Over the last 6 to 12 months?

Yeah, I think it's, you know, it kind of comes back to this nuance thing. It's, uh, I think the debate kind of loses the nuance a little bit. Uh, I, you know, I do think giving people a bank account is, uh, it's not like a utility to the world, but it's an— yeah, stopping a business getting a bank account because you don't agree with their politics or something like that. Like, I don't think that's good. Like, and, you know, if some, if there was a proponent of that within Mercury, it's like, oh, we should not give any, uh, Republican organizations or whatever a bank account. Like, I would, yeah, we would be very clear and we have been very clear that like, hey, that's not, yeah, if someone's actually being illegal, it's a hate group or whatever, like that makes sense. And we are very strong against that. But if it's like, you just don't agree with someone's politics, like we're not, not going to give them a bank account. people a bank account. So that's one level, right? Do you actually change your service based on some views? And we've pretty hardline on that's just not how we operate. Then it's like, hey, do we just let people talk about things that are happening in the real world? It's like, oh, Trump is running for election or whatever. And I'm fine with that personally, as long as people are doing it in a thoughtful way and We will call people out if they're being rude about it or whatever. But I just, yeah, that kind of stuff would normally happen in an office, right? Where it's like everyone's remote.

Yeah.

So I do think, I'm not completely in bring your full self to work, but I do think people should be allowed to have a normal conversation about things they would do it in person in an office. If people were getting carried away with it, my main thing is let's treat everyone as an adult and have expectations for how they should behave. And I think that's very reasonable, but let them— having these kind of rules that don't talk about your ex, don't talk about why, it's kind of like babying people. And I'm not into that personally.

Yeah. So, so much of it just comes down to treating people like an adult.

Yeah. And giving them that responsibility, but also holding them accountable to that.

Cool. Okay. So I want to respect your time. So we'll just go with the last 5 questions and we'll end in 10 minutes. And I'll actually modify these based on what we've discussed so far. So I usually ask about books, but I'll ask in your case, what are 3 to 4 sci-fi books that have been really impactful for you? And if you want to include other books too, go for it. But I'm very curious about the sci-fi because I'm going to go get them and read them after. Yeah.

Let's see. I think Three-Body Problem is a great book. Actually, all 3 of the books. It's a trilogy. I think some people just stop at 1 and 2, but the 3rd one's really interesting as well. And it talks a lot about the future and it has this whole ethics thing. It's a great book. Number 2, there's both Snow Crash and Ready Player One, which explore VR and these potential futures that are interesting. There's a series called The Culture Series, and you really want to go beyond the first book if you're going to read that series, but it's all about a post-abundance culture and what do people really care about if they have enough material things and what comes after. Oh man, there's a series I just finished reading. It's got a really good TV show attached to it as well called The Expanse. The TV show is amazing. I actually read the TV— I watched the TV show first and I just finished the books recently. But just like, yeah, I think there's just a ton about like human nature and like, yeah, how like we're kind of like, I don't know, even with all we get, like we'll still fight and things like that. And like how that might develop once we're like a kind of like a galactic kind of human species. I guess those are some, but I could keep going. There's just so many good sci-fi books out there.

I'm excited to check those out. I just got— I don't even know if he's sci-fi. Buckminster Fuller, I think is how you say his name. He wrote this book called Oblivion or Utopia. And I feel like it's going to be similar to that post-abundance thing you talked about. So excited to check those out. What's one piece of wisdom that changed the game for you?

One piece of wisdom. Hmm. I don't know if there's one, but I'll give you one that I learned, which was actually quite impactful. Honestly, I can't remember who told me this, which I feel really sad about because it did have such a big impact. So I went through this process when I was first starting Mercury, where I talked to maybe 90 people that were fintech, regulatory, entrepreneurs, VCs, et cetera, just to like, yeah, I was like, I know how to build a product, but I had no idea how to build a fintech thing. And I, you know, it seems scary, right? Like, it's like, it was a big unknown. Like, how do you actually build a fintech thing? And someone said this to me, which like really helped. It was like, actually the fintech part of building a fintech product is not the hard part. The hard part is like building the product that people actually want. And like the fintech stuff you can figure out if you actually build a product people want. And most things in fintech don't fail because the fintech was hard. I mean, there's probably some, but actually, like, they built a product that no one really wanted. Like, that's the real failure problem. And that really helped me because I was like, you know, I was complicating this fintech part. And like, in the end, I think that was really true. Like, yes, the fintech part requires like deliberate thought and like you have to think about regulations and being compliant and like how you do that. But The hard bit is actually building a product that people actually want, and everything else you can figure out around that. So yeah, there's the whole Y Combinator thing of build something people want. But really, just going back to that, at whatever point you are, you have to go back to that and just say, what is the thing that you're building, and do people really want it? Whether you're a scaled-up company and building a new feature, or whether you're going from 0 to 1, actually reminding yourself of that is really important. Yeah.

Yeah, it always goes back to the basics, right? Who's one person that you're grateful for? So that's like, if you could give credit or thanks to one person you haven't had a chance to thank or you haven't given enough credit, who would that be and why?

This is going to sound a little cheesy, but I would definitely say Paul Graham. I did Y Combinator in summer 2007. And I think that was like the 3rd or maybe 4th Y Combinator batch. But that was, you know, I was in the UK before that. I'd basically done a startup that was failed. I had no idea like how to move to Silicon Valley. And, you know, it was such a game changer for me to move here. All my initial friends were because of that. PG also funded my 2nd company, like After that one had failed, and this was ASAP. So yeah, just both inventing this program and also supporting me multiple times in it at a time where it wasn't obvious that I had done anything successful or anything like that. Yeah, that was a real enabler and significantly changed my life. So I gotta give him kudos for that.

You've helped a lot of founders. When you think about sort of like the first company and then HazeApp and now Mercury, how do you think you've evolved as an entrepreneur from like first, second, to third time?

Yeah, I mean, HazeApp was a long time ago. Like the first 3 companies I did were like basically like 7 months, 18 months, and then HazeApp, which was like 6 years, sorry, 8 years long. So, you know, all of these were like, basically I'm like, I was a kid back then. And I think, I would say like a bunch of things I've developed. Like, I did, yeah. One thing that's kind of funny is like, I used to think ideas were not that important. And like, when I started HazeApp, it was just like, it was kind of the first idea that I had that sounded kind of good. And I was like, okay, let's just go do that. And then I'll iterate and figure it out. And we did iterate and figure it out, but it fricking took like 6 years. With Mercury, I had had this idea in 2013 and I didn't start working on it Until 2017. So it had fermented for 4 years and it was a much more well-formed, well-thought-about idea where I believed in the idea and I thought a lot about the market and what we'd do in the future and things like that. And I do think the idea makes a huge difference to success. That product-market fit, sure, we did a bunch of things right, but there was also an inherent, the idea was really good and it really worked and it was the right time for the that idea. So that's one thing if I was to go back and tell myself in whenever, 2008 when I started HazeUp, I'd say just spend another freaking 6 months thinking about the idea and make sure this is something you want to work on for 10 years.

I love that. Yeah, the idea does really matter as much as people say it doesn't. Last one, what does it mean for you to be a conscious creator?

I think it's— I'll come back to something I said earlier. You really have to enjoy the journey of creating. It can't just be like you seeking an end result. You have to love that journey and really remind yourself that you love that journey because sometimes it'll be hard and it'll seem like a grind. That's just what it takes. Yeah.

I didn't actually realize till I just looked it up, which is you've been doing Human Mercury for 5+ years.

Yeah, 2017.

Yeah. Even though I feel like there was a moment I was talking to Maybe I was listening to another interview where someone was talking about how the signal they looked at was every company that was coming through YC started using Mercury. And it was like, okay, this product really works. But yeah, you really spent time over 5 years building it. And it was really clear how thoughtful you were as we talked about product building throughout this conversation.

Yeah, thanks, man. I really enjoyed the talk.

Yeah, thank you for coming on.

I appreciate you having me and talk soon. Cool.

And then obviously the website is mercury.com. We'll have your Twitter and everything else linked up. Anywhere else you want to direct people or anything else you want to leave people with before we end?

No. I mean, if someone wants to talk to me, feel free to DM me on Twitter. I'm not always great at responding, but I try to at least look at everything.

Sounds great. Awesome. Thanks for doing this, Iman.

Thanks for having me.