I Built A $1B Company... Here's 7 Business Ideas I Would Start This Year

you hear about these companies that are going from like 0 to $100 million in like 2 years or 3 years or whatever. Like the equation is very simple from a company perspective.

What's up? We got my buddy Imad here. He's the founder of Mercury, an awesome company that I use and love. And is— you've created a billion-dollar company, dude. You did it. You did the thing that all of us, when we were living in San Francisco and in our 20s trying to build these companies, you finally did it. How does that feel?

Uh, it's funny you say that. So, you know, we raised our Series B in 2021, uh, which is actually like 4 months, uh, after we did our last podcast together at My First Million in January 2021. Uh, and then we're just announcing our Series C, uh, which is a $3.5 billion valuation with Sequoia leading. But in 2021, when I raised my round, that was at a $1.6 billion valuation. And it was so weirdly anticlimactic because it's like I started as an entrepreneur in 2006. So 2021, what is that, like 15 years? So I'd been working towards this objective of like building a unicorn company, right? Like that's, as you say, like I moved here when I was like 22 and like that's all it was about for me for a long time. It was like getting this like really successful company. And then you hit this objective of like becoming a unicorn. And like nothing changes. So I have this like, I have this helmet behind me because that's like, this is from Joe Montana. He was, he's an investor and he's a footballer. So he sent me the helmet and that's literally the only thing I got when I became a unicorn. I mean, obviously I had a successful company, but I keep it there to show like, you know, like these objectives don't really matter. It's like you have to enjoy the journey because you hit the objective and then you're like, okay, now what? Dude, Joe Montana should make that his thing.

He's just, he should send a helmet to every founder who becomes a unicorn. Unicorn.

I mean, at least he sends it to the ones he funds because it says like Billion Dollar Club on it. It's kind of cool.

All right. I told you, I said, love to brainstorm with you ideas. I thought you would come with a bunch of fintech ideas because you're the bank guy, but you came with a bunch of— you sent me a list of bullet points, none of which sound like fintech. So I'm excited. Give me some of these ideas, things that you think founders today could be going and doing, or if you weren't doing Mercury, that you would interested in doing?

Yeah. So I had 3 trends that I think are interesting. Trend number 1 is space and space tech. There's a few reasons I like the trend. Number 1, I'm just a sci-fi nerd. Like, I love space. So I think it's really exciting as a space. And it's finally hit this point where there's all of these kind of enablement factors. So number 1, just a few years ago, getting anything to space was like a $100 million endeavor, right? Like, we're talking about literally $100 million to get something in space that works because there was no SpaceX and all of the space satellite stuff was like these hardened, like, you know, radiation-proof, like, satellites. Now, the other week, like, SpaceX did like 8 flights or something in one week. Like, it's insane. So, you know, there's this repeatable kind of channel to get things in space. It's much, much cheaper and it's getting cheaper every month, basically. And nowadays people have these kind of microsat platforms where it's basically a computer in space. Like it's not going to cost you a million dollars to get, like just to build the satellite, like you can do it for like $100,000 or something. So this is like huge enablement thing. And I've invested in a bunch of companies. I did this company called Albedo that's doing, that's doing kind of very low Earth orbit pictures of things. So you can get like 10 centimeter kind of resolution pictures from space. Yeah. Everyone's kind of excited by AI, which I'm also excited about, but that's a heavily, you know, everyone's doing it.

Super competitive, yeah.

Whereas I think that actually space is still like super open. There's not that many people kind of attempting things in space. So the crazy idea I sent to you, which I don't love this idea in terms of like, we need to come up with like why we should do this, but I think a nuclear power plant in space would be really cool. Like potentially we put this thing on the moon and then we mine mine water from the moon. And one of the cool things about water is if you can split water, you get hydrogen and oxygen, and oxygen and hydrogen together make rocket fuel, but it's also like you get breathable oxygen, which is useful. So having power in space is pretty useful, and there's lots of interesting things on the moon. And if you have a nuclear power plant there, you could probably like, there's this other cool company that does this thing. I don't know if you've seen it. I can't remember the name, but like, it spins things super fast and then like basically fires them out. I think it's very hard to get something from Earth's surface into space by like spinning around, around and flicking it. But I think on the moon, it's much easier. The gravity is lower and there's no air resistance. So yeah, if you had a nuclear power plant, you could power that. So I thought that was cool. Let's see what else. I'll talk about my second theme because it ties into space as well. So the second theme is defense tech in general. Obviously, we've seen Anduril, but there's kind of two trends, well, actually three trends in defense tech that I think are interesting. Number one, yeah, there's a lot of geopolitical disturbance. Everyone is basically, yeah, we're living in like, or moving into a multipolar world, which means like, you know, there's India, there's China, there's America, and America is no longer kind of the policeman, right? Like the only way America since the 1990s has been able to be a policeman is there hasn't been any other power to really challenge that. So it's not just the US needs to rearm, it's all of Europe, India, whatever. Like everyone is like arming. So you have like all of these people that are in the market now that weren't. And then number 2, autonomous vehicles have changed the game, right? These drones, AI in general can be applied to all of this stuff. And then number 3, yeah, you're going to get a ton of drones. Like it's not just like big billion-dollar fighter planes, right? It's going to be actually like a thousand or million tiny drones that are easy to manufacture. So all of these things kind of make it so startups can now compete again in a way that wasn't possible before. So I think there's like two types of ideas that I think are interesting. Number one, like, how do you make more things autonomous? So people are doing autonomous drones, but you could do autonomous subs, autonomous boats, autonomous tanks, right? Like, I think a lot of these things are not being head-on. And when you make them autonomous, you can change the form factor as well. Like you can make them smaller, you can make thousands of them. So that's one aspect. And then second aspect is like a lot of these autonomous things kind of favor defense. So I was reading about this and the Ukraine-Russia war is like actually like trench warfare, which is kind of crazy. Like we haven't had it since World War I, but they're literally digging trenches. And like, that's why the lines are like hardly changing because it's like Neither of them has air superiority. The drones actually make it hard to get air superiority because you can have like a tiny drone knock out a million-dollar plane. So in that world, like, yeah, so you've got one side is autonomous side. Second side is like the kind of how do we build more defensive autonomous things as well. So like, you know, maybe we automatically have these machines that are building trenches. You could have autonomous mines that are like smart and they don't, I mean, I guess that sounds like bad to people, but you can have it so like, if it's a civilian, it doesn't blow up. If it's a tank, it does blow up, right? Like you can make these like safer mines that move around. And then to tie back to the space thing, you know, I think in the next kind of war, space warfare will be a big part of it, right? Like if you can knock out satellites, you can like, you know, cut down on Starlink and all of this kind of communication. You can remove the, the visual side of things, right? Like these kind of satellites that are viewing things. You can knock out GPS. So some of that actually happened during the Ukraine war. There was like some, you know, there's some rumors about like some satellites being knocked out. But I think that's going to be a big thing. So the counter to that is how do you create defense around satellites, right? How do you, maybe you'll have like stealth equivalent of stealth satellites, right? Like you kind of only move them when like the sun is kind of obscuring the viewpoint and you move them to a place and then upscale the, upscale them completely so they're not reflective. Uh, yeah, I don't know. There's a ton of ideas around like defensive kind of stuff in space as well.

All right.

So a lot of people watch and listen to this show because they want to hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business. And really a lot of people who are listening, they have a full-time job and they want to start something on the side, a side hustle. Now a lot of people message Sean and I and they say, all right, I want to start something on the side. Is this a good idea? Is that a good idea? And again, what they're really just saying is just give me the ideas. Well, my friends, you're in luck. So my old company, The Hustle, they put together 100 different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's a list of 100 pretty good ideas, frankly. I went through 'em. They're awesome. And it gives you how to start 'em, how to grow 'em, things like that. Gives you a little bit of inspiration. So check it out. It's called the Side Hustle Idea Database. It's in the description below. You'll see the link, click it, check it out. Let me know in the comments what you think.

So what I like about what you just said is that there's probably 3 core things I think about when it comes to great ideas, and I will differentiate a great idea from a good idea. So on this podcast, a lot of times we'll talk about good ideas. A good idea means a business where there's, there is demand. There might even be competition. It might even be established, but that gives you a bit of a playbook and there's, there's, it's not gonna be winner take all. There's room for everybody to eat. And a good idea, what it profiles out to is that you make millions of dollars, maybe tens of million dollars, maybe a hundred, a couple hundred million dollars with a higher likelihood of success. But you'll pretty much never get to the, the billion dollar or, or sort of groundbreaking new category creation type of companies doing that. And what you're talking about is a, a different criteria for great ideas. And a great idea, I would say there's 3 tests. The first is the Peter Thiel test. Famously, Thiel went to YC and, you know, he was asked to give a talk and he went and he drew two circles on the whiteboard like a Venn diagram. And he basically said, he colored in the middle and he labeled one circle, sounds like a bad idea. And the other circle was, is actually a good idea. And he's like, you're looking for the overlap because the best ideas sound initially like a bad idea, but actually are a good idea. And so, uh, now that's hard to do because you don't know what's actually a good idea. You have to sort of think for yourself there. But what it is good at is it sort of reminds you not to run away if your initial idea sounds a little crazy, sounds a little out there, or, or, you know, 8 outta 10 people who first hear it say, nah, no way. Right? And so you, uh, so that's the first thing is like a great idea typically comes disguised as a bad idea. The second thing is some inflection point. So you talked about how for space, suddenly if SpaceX is doing 8 trips in a week, right? It's like going to space went from, Somewhat impossible to possible, now a regular thing. It's like, oh, I could just hitch a ride on one of these trips and the trips are getting cheaper and cheaper every year. Or somebody's already taking a payload up and I can just add something to it. Or I can build on top of their satellite platform that's already, already going to be up there. So I think that's a huge inflection, like you're talking about. The other one you talked about with defense is autonomy. So just the ability to make things self-driving, self-flying, self, Um, you know, self-swimming, you know, just basically, uh, give a thing eyes and now it has a brain because of AI. And suddenly you can take humans out of the equation for, for that job. And when it comes to like warfare or defense, great. Cause that's, you know, lives saved when it, when you do that. Um, so, you know, you have these inflections. So that's thing number 2. And thing 3, I would say is, um, scares everybody off. So like, you know, you were saying AI in general, like, you know, Uh, if I said I'm building an AI agent startup, that's probably like the biggest bloodbath competition right now. But you're kind of right that smart, capable teams that are doing interesting things in space, there's still like way more opportunity and way less versus the number of teams pursuing them. Um, and same thing in defense that, you know, still the average smart, capable team is not, um, not going after that right now. And so there's just like a lot of room and, you know, these are huge TAMs, right? So. Uh, obviously like, you know, space and satellites, that's a, that's a huge market. And then defense is obviously huge, especially as you said, the whole world is rearming. So it kind of hits all three, even though my first reaction when you say nuclear power plant in space, I'm like, all right, I don't even, that breaks my brain a little bit. I don't even know what that means. Is that even possible? Um, I kind of like the underlying thought process you have going in, even though I don't fully get the, like, you know, the end product idea, because I just don't know anything about the space.

Yeah, I mean, I have like some simple ideas that are maybe good, but not great, but like, you know, more achievable. Here's a fun one I thought about last night. I thought it'd be fun to have a billboard in space. So, yeah, the first ad in space. So I had this like a few years ago, I was like going camping and I didn't have internet. And like, yeah, there was this like Starlink satellite launch. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but like I think they fixed it so it doesn't do this, but they basically launched the satellite. So they were like, they were kind of positioning them. So they were all visible. And there was like 20 in a string in space. And you could see them naked eye.

With a telescope or just naked eye?

No, just naked eye. You just look up and there's like a string. And initially I was like, are those stars? Are they UFOs? Because they're like, yeah, they're like very bright. Like they're brighter than a star. But they're like, they're like completely in a line and they're moving quite fast because they're in like LEO, right? But I was like, oh, that's kind of sick. Like, you know, you can literally, as a human, like launch this thing that changes like everyone's view from Earth. Right. I thought that was like kind of insane. But yeah, I think, I don't think it'll be that hard to put a billboard in space and make it so you could view it from a telescope. I don't think you could do it like, I mean, you could probably do the natural eye thing, but like obviously people will complain. But making it so you can view it with a telescope, I think would be actually kind of cool. And then people would like buy that. So this one's more a good idea. I mean, I don't think that's a billion-dollar idea, but well, another one I remember, there was a whole service around buying and naming stars.

Do you remember this? This was kind of like a big idea in the '90s, maybe early 2000s.

Remember Three Body Problem? That's like one of the ideas.

I haven't actually read it. No, it's like on my kind of to-do, to-read list. But we, back in the day, we had this business called Birthday Alarm, and Birthday Alarm was like a reminds you of when it's your friends and family's birthday, and then you can send an e-card, just like a greeting, you know, animated e-card. But there was this company that had approached us that was like, hey, if you add the, um, gift of naming a star after someone, you get a certificate, blah blah blah. And it was like, whatever, $30 to, to buy a star in someone's name. And that company was doing like $20 million a year, I remember. And it was just like a couple of guys and they approached us to that. We said no. But when we had gotten to know them, I was stunned that they were doing, you know, that much revenue, at least at that time. I do think it was a bit of a fad, but still, that was very impressive to me.

I thought the other one that would be kind of cool is like, you know, when I die, if I— it would be cool to send like— I actually don't want to be cremated, but if I was cremated, it would be cool to send some ash to space. Having like some sort of memorabilia being sent to space, I think is kind of interesting as well. And that would be easier. Uh, and the more practical ideas, I do think intelligence as a service is kind of like an interesting idea. So you mentioned AI agents. So there's tons of these companies going after these big categories, right? Like this AI SDRs, AI customer support agents. Uh, I haven't seen too many companies kind of go after more niche ideas where people are willing to pay. So, uh, AI SAT tutor, right? Like imagine, like actually like AI is great as at education because A, like the content is like extremely easy for AI to do.

Super structured.

Yeah. B, it can be completely personalized. C, it's just extremely patient, right? Like, I mean, when I try to teach my 13-year-old, I'm like pulling my hair out after like a few minutes. So there's a whole class of like, you know, you take any test and you could probably make an AI agent that's like great at that and great at teaching that. So like you could do the bar exam, you could do I mean, that's such a no-brainer.

Is there somebody doing that? Somebody has to be doing that, right?

Because I haven't heard of anyone doing a great job of it.

Yeah, nobody's won yet, which is amazing. But like, you know, you look at Kaplan and you look at, you look at the, the big test prep companies, they were built like decades, like many decades ago, right? And they were built in the— I mean, I used to buy like those giant books with, uh, you know, the practice tests in them from Princeton, I think Princeton Review or whoever, when I was studying for the SATs. And then sure, it moved to like video and online after that. But now you're right, like if you just did AI, a personal one-on-one tutor, I think that's, you know, obviously, that's obviously the best. I don't know if you've seen the studies of like, or if you read about the, like the, the two-sigma thing when it comes to tutoring, it's basically like nothing has shown as measurable of an effect as one-on-one tutoring in education yet. And it's basically the problem for a long time was I think I think you basically would get something like 2 standard deviations above the mean. And by the way, this is kind of debated and people say, no, that was, it was measured wrong and it's not true.

I think intuitively it's like, feels exactly like when I'm learning something, if I talk to someone, like if I had a gun to my head and it was get the best grade possible on this test, right?

If my life depended on it, would I choose, uh, just showing up cold? No. Would I choose just a book where I self-pace and self-study? No. Would I choose a library of videos?

No.

If it was like a, a tutor comes to my house and sits with me for 6 hours a day and that's how I study for this, I'd be like, that's my best shot. And if it was the smartest, most patient tutor with infinite knowledge and knew exactly where my level was and was ready to work with me the moment I was ready to do it, all times of the day, right? That's an AI tutor. Um, so I think that's kind of, uh, kind of great because it's so scoped to, you know, one chat, one specific, um, test, which people are not doing because they voluntarily want to, you know, educate themselves. But like, I need to pay X dollars to get Y grade to get into Z college. Yeah, you're willing to pay.

Yeah, I think like the, the good ideas right now in these kind of AI agent, whatever things are like these, like kind of more niche ideas that you can expand from later, right? Rather trying to do like all tutoring, right? I think that's actually like quite a hard problem and AI is not quite there yet. Like if you pick just one thing and you just like completely nail it, then you can always expand from there as well.

Right, right, right. I like that. What are some of the most interesting companies you've invested in recently? So is there any company that's like taking off or doing well that you feel like more people should know about, but they don't— they don't know about it yet?

You know, this is like what I put it— put as like intelligence as a service company. So I'm an investor in 11x, which does kind of AI SDRs, and I'm also an investor in Decagon that does kind of AI customer support agents, you know, they just have like these insane numbers. I don't think they're public, but you know, you hear about these companies that are going from like 0 to 100 million in like, you know, 2 years or 3 years or whatever. Like all of these ones that hit where they're like, you know, like the equation is very simple from a company perspective. It's like, hey, I'm paying a ton of money for customer support or SDR. Like if you can do the same task with some sort of like fallback to humans, at half the price, sure, let's do it, right? So there's definitely across a bunch of these spaces, and the big ones are like, you know, sales, customer support, legal, accounting, a bunch of these. And I'm an investor in like many of these companies. There's definitely like a moment where like they're really winning. And obviously it's still early, but it seems obvious to me that like a bunch of these things will be delivered by AI. So On the other side, every company that has sales or SCS or whatever, the CEO, the board is saying like, hey, how do you make yourself more efficient through AI, right? So the buyers are like really looking for solutions and anyone, there's not that many actual, in each of these spaces, there are a lot of companies, but like normally it's really hard to do enterprise sales, right? Like this is like a 9-month, 12-month cycle. But when you have like buyers that are just like, hey, I need to deploy something to show something that I'm like, I'm doing stuff in AI, it creates this like moment where you can actually like have this explosive enterprise sales growth, which is actually very rare. It only happens like in these kind of rare trends.

Would you, let's say you weren't doing Merki right now, you had all your free time and you know everything you know today and you wanted to find an AI idea, a winning AI idea. What would be your process? Like, explain to me how Iman finds, like, kind of comes up with the ideas and vets them and sort of figures out what idea to do versus what idea not to do.

I approach things like both top-down and bottom-up. So top-down, uh, and I actually did this as part of like your, your podcast prep stuff. I, you know, I went to ChatGPT and said like, hey, tell me every, every human worker in the US that like does knowledge work. Give me a list of all of them and tell me how much labor costs for across each of them. Right. So that's very top down. And you're like, okay, you know, there's education, there's medical, there's lawyer, there's accounting, there's, right. Yeah, whatever. Like all these like knowledge worker type things like design, coding, et cetera. So that's like a top down approach. And you can say, okay, you know, here's the most interesting. And you could do like a matrix kind of thing. It's like, okay, here's all the interesting ones. Here's the TAM. Here's all the companies that are in those spaces. Here's all the bits that are not done. Here's, maybe you want to avoid regulated spaces, or maybe you want to go all in on regulated spaces. Maybe you're like, hey, no one's touching doctors because everyone's scared of doctors. Like, why don't we just make an amazing doctor for like, I don't know, Africa or something? Because like, you know, there's less regulation there and you can prove it out, et cetera. So that's one kind of top-down approach. And then I'd also go bottoms-up and I'll go, okay, you know, what gets me excited, right? I love serving entrepreneurs. So like, I'd go, because I'm an entrepreneur, all my friends are entrepreneurs. I love the idea of like people making things. So maybe I'd say, okay, you know, what are things that entrepreneurs struggle with? And, you know, one thing that I still don't have a great solution for is like, you know, as a CEO, there's so much knowledge across the company. I'd love something that, yeah, there's a few companies doing this, but I would love to have like an AI twin of Imad that like is like continuously absorbing all the knowledge across like the company and maybe across the internet and telling me stuff. It's like, I think Imad should really pay attention to this. And I think, or like, even like, I actually thought it would be kind of fun to make it so like on the Slack, like there could be an Imad twin and someone could ask you questions, say like, oh, what would Imad think of this idea? Right.

Yeah.

Actually, like a funny thing that just came up the other day. And I was like, I'm pretty sure my AI twin could answer this. It's like someone was like, oh, you know, our boardroom is like kind of small. And we just added 2 people to the board. Like, hey, should we do the board meeting at our law firm. And I was like, no fuck no, I'm never going to do a board meeting at a law firm. Like, that sounds awful. I'd rather stuff like 16 people in a tiny room than do that. So I feel like my AI twin could have answered that question. So that would be like my bottoms-up approach. And yeah, I do think like you should really work on things that get you really excited. Like, you know, an AI SDR, like I'm happy for those guys. I personally would not get excited about that. Like, I hate receiving sales emails and calls. So I think doing things that you would wake up in the morning and say, I'm excited to solve this problem, because these things take such a long time, right? I've been doing Mercury now for like 8 years. And if I was doing something boring, I would probably wake up in the morning, why do I have to do this again? So I think that's like the bottoms-up approach where you try to think of like, what do I care about? What do I want to see in the future? And try to come up with that. And then you kind of merge those two kind of concepts together. And often you do something and you find out actually it's a bad idea as well. So Mercury actually had like a very smooth ramp where it was like, I was like, okay, I like this idea. And then I executed on the idea and we never had to pivot. But often you do, like as you learn something, you're like, oh, actually this doesn't make sense, but this makes sense. So that's part of like ideation is to like actually go build things.

Do you, so let's take an idea. We'll role play it real quick. So pick one of the ideas like plausibly you'd be like, oh yeah, that's kind of checks the boxes. It kind of top-down makes sense, bottoms-up, it resonates with me. Like what would be an example of that? Is it the digital twin thing or is it—

let's do the, yeah, let's do the digital twin. I think that's like kind of the most fun.

So you have a, you know, your digital twin CEO who's basically reading all the Slacks, the documents in Google Drive, the con— he knows everything about the contracts that are all there. He looked at this, he has access to the CRM so he can see anything in the, in the dashboards, et cetera. Um, all right, so now first few weeks, what are you doing? Is it like, I trust these 5 people, I'm going to bounce the idea off them? Do you make a deck? Because that clarifies your thinking. Do you just go build a prototype? Do you go look at competition?

Great question.

Where do you go next?

You know, with Mercury, I had this moment where, so we, you know, we'd raised the money, we were doing the thing, and I was like, okay, you know, let me go talk to a bunch of like potential, um, companies that could use this, like, you know, create like a big pipeline. And also just learn what it's about. And I talked to basically 100. And I remember like getting kind of depressed after I talked to them because I talked to 100. Most of them were like, oh yeah, that sounds kind of cool. But like there was no, it's very lukewarm. And it was only 2 of the 100 companies that were like, oh yeah, like I would fucking use this, like give it to me right now kind of thing. And at that point, like, you know, it was like, it took us a year and a half to build this. So this was like one year in. So you're like, you're kind of running out of momentum anyway, because it's taking so long to build something. And then you go talk to 100 people and everyone's kind of lukewarm. I was like, what am I doing? But, you know, I was like, I would really want this. So I just like powered through it. And it turned out, you know, A, if 2% of people want something and the market's big enough, that's like probably big enough for like an early adopter base. But if you think about it, like, you know, talking to 100 people and having only 2 people get excited about something is like actually like kind of like tricky. And, you know, maybe I wouldn't have talked to those 2 people because like, you know, if I talked to 50 people, I might have missed out on it completely. So I think it's actually surprisingly hard to vet an idea against humans. People just don't know, and it's hard to imagine an idea as well. So what I think I would do is, I would do that talk and I would go talk to some VCs as well. I'd talk to a bunch of users, I'd talk to some VCs, just get an idea of what is the reception like. But then I would try to spend a lot of time. And first thing for me, one of the things that gets me excited about Mercury is that After, like last year we launched a bunch of new things, like we launched invoicing and bill pay and reimbursements and personal banking. And some ideas are like, hit a dead end over time, right? Like you kind of do the idea and then you end up like 5 years later, you're just like making like small features and just selling it more, et cetera. And then some ideas like turn out to like fork like a thousand ways. And Mercury is one of those things because A, there's just so few people in banking that like a lot of these spaces are unexplored. And B, banking is like this kind of platform where it has all your money, it has all your finance team, so you can build a lot of things on top of it. So I'd want to think about like, okay, you know, if I did the digital twin idea, like what are the forks? Like why does this become even more interesting the more users that you get on it? And maybe the interesting thing is like, okay, it's not just a CEO twin, everyone at the company has a twin. And maybe some of the people don't even exist at the company. Maybe these are like the, you know, maybe you have like a comms person at the company that's just literally just AI. I'm just like riffing off this. Maybe your AI twin shows up at the Zoom calls. Maybe it becomes your coach and it's like helping you through difficult times, right? I think that is an idea that could probably fork a lot of ways because it has all the knowledge, it learns a lot about you, it's in your communication channels. It's got these core ideas that like, yeah, it sounds like a pretty good idea now that we're riffing on it.

That is getting excited. Yeah, well, you also with Mercury, you, uh, it seems like this maybe is too simple, but like, it seems like you had been a founder for 10+ years and you were like, I don't personally like have a banking product I love, but every startup needs a banking product. So I want to build for startups. There's nothing that anybody loves. Maybe they don't hate their thing or they don't spend too much time thinking about it, but they don't have one that they love. And you basically built the one you would want. And then you're— the bet was that there's going to be a lot of other founders that think like me. That like what I like. Is that fair or is that oversimplifying it?

No, no, that's 100% fair. I think generally speaking, I'm a little unusual. I get like, if I have to call someone to do something, I get so annoyed about it. Like, I want to press a button. Yeah, I will delay for weeks for sure. But like, if I have to do it, and like, that's the way banks are in after, you know, except for Mercury, like you have to call to like get a wire done. You know, I don't want to like, I guess they're kind of gone, so I can probably bitch about them a little bit. But like First Republic, like if you wanted to send a wire, like, yeah, firstly you tried to do it and you'd hit a limit. So you call them, raise the limit, and then you do it. And yeah, then it would go to the next phase and then they would call you and you'd have to authorize it. Then someone else would have to call them. It was like, it was like a multi-week process just to figure out how to send wires.

So I was like, this is what, so you guys started sponsoring me and I was like, all right, cool. I have an idea for the ad read because I got 6 Mercury accounts myself. So I was like, trust me, I already know. You don't need to give me the talking points. I know why I use it. And I was, I was like, I know you have all these fancy features, but like, for me as a founder, I move at a certain pace. And as a founder, it's one of the only advantages you have, right? You don't have, you don't have the biggest team, you don't have the most money, you don't have a lot of things, you don't have the most experience, you don't have a brand in the, in the, in the market that everybody knows. But like, your pace is the one thing that you have that all the big companies don't have. The problem is If you just start hitting walls because you can't move fast, that becomes very problematic. So like, I like to have an idea. I like to buy a domain on GoDaddy in 2 seconds, right? I like to file my, uh, if I have a trademark, I like to just be able to file it online. I don't want to talk to a lawyer and schedule a call if I want to start a bank. And those little things, they sound like one-offs, but they add up and they create momentum and momentum begets momentum. And so I just will always default to using any tool that can, that can operate at founder speed. So with Mercury, it was like, oh cool, I can just type, don't have to talk to any human being, don't have to call anybody, don't have to drive and park somewhere, and I can get my bank account open, I can get money in, and I can wire money. Because I used to wire for my e-com business, uh, out of Wells Fargo, and I would have to every single month, just to pay our suppliers, I'd have to drive to a Wells Fargo bank, make an appointment, which I would always forget to do, go inside, they gave me this freaking thing, freaking hour to do it, they gave me this thing like it's the nuclear codes, and I had to have that, and then it's like, and then I just sit there an hour and then she would ask me questions and I'd have to make sure that the number's right. And I'm like, dude, I wish I could just copy paste, push a button and be done with this. And then I had to get my limits raised. Then they had to call another lady to raise the limits because they would only let me do $50K or $100K at a time. It was super annoying. And so it's amazing that literally just feeling like, okay, these people get me and they'll build a product that moves at my speed, how important that was. And I also then took that to hiring. I was like, Oh, my, my best hiring heuristic is basically, did this person speed up the pace, keep pace, or slow down pace? And anybody who slows down pace for me, even if they have other strengths, I've found that it rarely works out to work with somebody who operates at a slower speed. Like, if we have a discussion or an idea and you're like, cool, I'll get to you next week. It's like, wait, wait, wait, we said this was important.

Yeah, let's just get it done.

There's still 8 hours left in the day. What are you talking about? Like, how long could that possibly take you? And if you're, it's not that they won't do it, it's just if their default expectation, if their default clock speed is slow, it's just not going to work. I want my software fast and my employees fast.

Yeah. So actually, you know, like once you describe that process, like it sounds awful. So I think like there's like people just get used to being abused by the current products, right? Like I think it's in some ways like because I came from the UK, I didn't, I didn't, I had a slightly better expectation of banking. Like, you know, in the UK, you can move money instantly and like the software was better for various reasons. So I think there's like some element of the fact that like I had this outsider perspective as an immigrant. And I do think that's like part of it that like people in America were like, okay, with once a month having to like drive to Wells Fargo to do something basic and like having this like painful process.

And like beg them to let me do something with my own money.

Yeah, exactly.

Like convince them and sometimes they say no. Yeah, dude, that, uh, the term abuse is so good. It's like, that's gonna be a new filter for me on ideas is can I describe the current abuse that the product is doing? Like, I was in this, um, conversation the other day and it was like super, it was that, I went to that Dialog conference. I don't know if you've ever been, but like, oh yeah.

And look at this. The room was, this is the Dialog couple.

Oh, perfect. Perfect. So I went there last, uh, like 2 days ago, whatever. And in the room was like the CEO of Renaissance Technology, right? Like the Renaissance, like the best investors in the world, the CEO of Bridgewater, or like it was basically like the who's who. And in the money conversation, it's like a group of 10 people. In the money conversation, the topic of crypto came up and somebody who was a dean of a very famous university was basically like arguing that, you know, crypto, I don't know, I'm not convinced. And I just sort of, it was the abuse thing. So I was like, so you, you think, he's like, you want to park your money in something like the dollar, right? Cool. Got it. I understand a bunch of reasons why, but the abuse that was normalized was so the dollar, which has a whole arm, the Fed, whose job is to have a 2 to 3% target inflation. Oh, oops. Sometimes we go way above that, but we'll try to get back to 2 to 3%. And I was like, so your, your default expectation is that in 30 years your purchasing power is cut in half. That's like the accepted financial abuse of saving all your money in US dollars is that Every 30 years, your purchasing power gets cut in half.

It's a lot worse than that because of like asset appreciation, right? Like people don't think about it, but like, you know, like houses and a lot of other things are like way above inflation.

Inflation even measured where it doesn't include your house or your rent, like, you know, like the kind of screwed up version of inflation, even that, even that like gain the adjusted, the adjusted EBITDA of inflation, right? Where it's like this, this specific basket, even that's supposed to be 3%. So it's like, that's a system where that abuse of like what if of savers getting penalized, right? Anybody who saves gets penalized in the dollar system, but it's a blind spot. People really don't, they've accepted that abuse. They're so used to that abuse that it's just taken as fine. You know, it's not even a problem. It's not even like a known problem for them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think part of the reason it's not a problem for like richer people is because they get the asset appreciation, right? So like, you know, people aren't sitting on cash. It's, unfortunately, a lot of the abuse actually happens to like poorer businesses and like poorer people where they have to sit in cash because, you know, they don't have, they're living paycheck to paycheck and like most of their money is not in assets. Right. So I think that part is like particularly sad. I don't necessarily think crypto is the only answer there, right? Like you could buy gold, you could buy stocks, like Bitcoin is obviously done particularly well in the last 10 years. But, but yeah, it's, it's definitely like something where like there's something a bit weird about the system for sure.

Yeah, exactly. You can debate the solutions, but the problem seems like not debatable, but it's not, but it's just accepted. It's an accepted abuse. Tell me, uh, you guys had this crazy situation where Silicon Valley Bank goes through this crisis. Tell me where you were when that happened and then what the next, I don't know, 24, 48 hours, what did that look like and what happened to Mercury during that time? Because it seems like you were the big you were a big beneficiary of, of that situation in terms of customers coming to you guys or adoption.

Yeah, I mean, to set the scene, right, like SVB has been around one year longer than I was alive. So it was like started in 1983. So I always remember that. Uh, and when, you know, when I was working on Mercury, right, like SVB is part of the seed deck, right? It's like, hey, this is the 800-pound gorilla. Like, this is what everyone in Silicon Valley uses. At that point, they were like worth $16 billion. And I think in peak COVID, they were worth $40 billion. So this is a big company. So, you know, when this started happening, you know, I wasn't— we had obviously been competing against each other, but yeah, it was like kind of a weirdly indirect competition in the sense that like SVB just offers something very different, right? Like this is like the stolid Silicon Valley bank that's been around forever. And then Mercury is kind of this upstart fintech, right? Like, so And like, you know, we used SVB in my previous company. I like those guys. Like, they were like, they were friendly. They like cared about startups. I mean, their software wasn't great, but none of the banks had great software. So like, to be clear, I didn't feel anything bad about them. And I felt really bad about for the people there. And, you know, I thought they'd be fine, right? Like when Thursday rolled along, I was like, hey, everyone's freaking out. Like people like panicking about things on the internet.

Did you find out about it at the same time as all the rest of us? Or did you have some inkling or some foresight that that might happen?

In December, like, so most of the bank run happened to SVB in March 2023. In December 2022, there was like this article about like the fact that the MSPs, the mortgage-backed securities, MBS, the mortgage-backed securities were like massively underwater. There's even been some VCs that had freaked out and like pulled their portfolio companies out. So I had seen some of those rumors in that December 2022, but Again, like, yeah, people was calling some crisis and freaking out. Like, if you want to, like, right now there's someone freaking out about something. So like, the default is to ignore that stuff. But yeah, I mean, on Wednesday, it kind of kicked off and like, you know, we started seeing like, just people were freaking out and they were like, hey, how quickly can I get a Mercury Bank account, right? And it went from like, yeah, normally like banking, like people don't want to switch banking services, right? Like this is a, a lot of the customers that Mercury wins are like a day zero. Like you just start a new business, you don't have a bank account, you need something and we're there for you. It's much harder for us to switch people. So yeah, we obviously like hitting up every startup in Silicon Valley with like our sales team and other marketing stuff.

Did you have like a, like kind of emergency meeting? Like, hey, here's the game plan. Or how did you, how did you organize that to like sprint?

My initial thing was like, hey, you know, I was like, we do not say a word of this publicly. Like we don't want to like jump on their misfortune, but anyone that comes to Mercury, let's like support them. And we did a bunch of things. So we changed the product. So, uh, you know, we were like, hey, if you're a non-SVB, uh, customer, we can always onboard you next week. Right.

Right.

But if you're coming from SVB, let's make it in, let's do it in half an hour. So, so we meet, you know, we had this Plaid connection thing and we put that right at the top and we said above it, SVB customer, connect your SVB and we'll like prioritize you. And like SVB customers were really easy to prioritize because they're like, you know, they tended to have more money. They're already vetted by a bank. They're not new customers. So yeah, we basically like tried to think of all the ways we could speed up the process for them. And we really focused on just providing that process.

Was it like 2x, 5x, 10x normal? Like what did you see as the spike?

So right now Mercury has like 200,000 customers and we had like maybe $100,000 back then. But yeah, SVB had a lot of money, but not at like an insane number of customers. So I want to say they had like 30,000 or 40,000 kind of total customers. So the volume was big in terms of dollars, but not necessarily in terms of like numbers. It was significant. I think what we published is like around 8,000 customers moved over to us like in a 2-week time period. Yeah, which is like big, but not like crazy compared to like the normal kind of monthly growth we get.

Right.

So the other thing we did is, you know, everyone was saying to us like, hey, SVB failed. Like, why won't Mercury fail? And, you know, I would say to people like verbally, it's like, hey, you know, we, we're not a bank ourselves. We work with partner banks. And your money is like, has extra FDIC insurance. At that time we had $1 million in FDIC insurance. And then I would say, okay, you know, after, if you have more than a million, put the rest of it in US government. T-bill mutual funds, which we have as part of the platform. So I would say this over and over again to people, but obviously, like, you know, if Emad says like, hey, your money's safe, like, that's not very fulfilling, right? Like, the SBB CEO was also saying your money's safe. So what we did over that—

Sam Bankman-Fried.

Yeah, exactly. So I was like, that's the one thing I don't want to say online. So what we did over that weekend is we built this product. It was called Mercury Vault. And it would basically visualize where your money is. We'd say, okay, you know, this much of it is in FDIC-insured account up to this much. So if you had, yeah, and we also actually worked with our partner banks to extend the FDIC insurance. So we went from $1 million to $5 million over that week. So it's, if you had $6 million in your Mercury checking account, we'd say, okay, $1 million of that is not FDIC-insured, $5 million is. And then, you know, we'd help you set up your treasury system. So you'd put in US government T-bills. So we built this product and that really worked. Like, it's so powerful.

So you used product to build trust instead of words.

Exactly. Yes. And it also spoke to the moment. It's like, okay, you know, instead of us like hiding away from it, we weren't saying like, you know, let's not talk about whether your money is safe or not. We were like, okay, let's show you, right? Like, you know, you don't have to like trust like Imad's word or like some marketing. Like, we were like, here's a product that shows you. And it wasn't you know, it wasn't like something completely new. Like we, this basically like my general view on things is like, if you're saying something over and over, if customer support is doing something over and over, like how do you make that in the product? So like people don't have to ask you and it's just so much more powerful. Like it feels tangible to people. It also just felt to people like, okay, you know, instead of us going to another bank that could also get a run, we're going to something where like you get this extra FDIC insurance and Mercury is a fintech. It's not, Yeah, at that point, like, you know, we're like, we are not holding your money. The money never touches Mercury's bank account and it never does. Like, it goes to our partner banks and they have an FDIC sweep network. So that was really important to people that like we were speaking with product and like, it's also, you know, I think entrepreneurs appreciate that, right? Like the one, there were like the fact that like we spend the weekend building a product for them that like actually answered their biggest question, uh, like made people go like, oh shit, like Mercury gets it, right? Like, I think that was like a really powerful moment for us.

Yeah, that's dope. You have this—

also actually felt good as an entrepreneur because like, I think sometimes, yeah, when there's a crisis moment, you can feel a little bit like, like, it's like, oh man, what am I supposed to do here? Like, obviously you can talk to customers and things like that. But building product is like what we are about. So as an entrepreneur, I was like, okay, you know, let's spend the weekend, everyone, like, let's go do this. Like, yeah, it gave you like something really tangible to do. So actually the whole team like thinks like even I guess 2 years later, like we, yeah, the whole team is like, hey, we worked that whole weekend, we built this product together. And like everyone's like still like excited about that moment because like it, it like it did the thing that we were good at doing to solve that problem.

Yeah. Yeah. You got the adrenaline rush, but you stayed in character. You didn't go out of character and try to do something that you don't normally do. You have these philosophies that you sent over. One of them Maybe it's related to what we just talked about. It's go all in on asymmetric upside bets.

Yeah.

Can you unpack that?

I feel like a lot of people kind of try entrepreneurship or do things, but they don't go all in on them. And, you know, when I did my first startup for 7 months in the UK, and I was like, you know, it was really a moment for me where like, I was like, okay, this is what life is about for me. I was very you know, I did college, I did computer science, but I was never like that excited about it. I just did it because I was good at it. And it was kind of fun. And then I worked at a job and I hated it. I worked at Bloomberg for a year and I was like, wow, like, you know, I was worried that that's what life is, right? Like having this like grind and like, and then, and then, you know, one of my friends was like, hey, let's do this like startup thing. And I was like, okay, you know, let's try it out. And that was like the first time I did something where I was like, oh shit, like this is so much fun. And that startup did nothing, right? Like it went nowhere, had no users. But just the idea of like working 9 AM to like midnight, building something myself and launching it. Like I just, I don't know, there's just something about it that like so speaks to like my core. So I was like, okay, if I want to do this, you know, what is, where can I do this the greatest? And that at the time was San Francisco. I would still say San Francisco, but at that time it was like 100%, like I had to be here to do it. So I was just like, yeah, had basically no money. I packed up my stuff. I did get into Y Combinator with my second startup and moved to San Francisco. And I just spent, you know, even in that 7 months when I was in London, I was all in. Like I would like code and build this thing all day. And then I would go to every single event that was possible to go to. And like, honestly, half of them, or maybe all of them were a waste of time. But just, you know, you just, if you work really, really hard and you do all the things, you'll eventually like build up a network, right? That's how actually like the way I came to San Francisco is I met someone through this like just extreme networking I did. And they'd already got into Y Combinator and they needed a technical co-founder. And I was like, okay, you know, I want to get to San Francisco, so I'll join you guys. So I think like, I just feel like a lot of people that do things just kind of half do them. They're like, oh, you know, it's my side gig and I'm doing this thing. And I'm like, yeah, whatever. I'd had no money when I quit my job to like do my first startup. But like that kind of like forceful like grind, like, are you just like all in on things? That just pays dividends in a way that like half doing things just, I don't think really does. And I feel like, yeah, over time, like going all in on things, like, you know, another part of my things is like going all in on family. Like basically like I, you know, I married, like I met my wife 3 weeks before I moved to the US and I had a long distance relationship and then I married her and then we had a kid like 2 years later, which like I was still in like the startup grind. But I was just like, okay, you know, I'm all in on like having this family. I don't know. So I just feel like going all in on things has just like this like big upside that like half doing things just doesn't. And I think the asymmetric side of it is like, you know, the worst thing that could happen to me is if my startup didn't work, I'd have to go and get another job. So like, basically, like, I was always like, okay, you know, at that point I was getting paid like £40,000 a year or something. So I was like, okay, you know, I'm losing £40,000 a year in salary, maybe £50,000 if I get a raise or something. But the asymmetric bet is like, you know, I could make a million or whatever. But, you know, it's also asymmetric life bet. It's like I could either, like my downside was like, you know, I'm going to have a shitty time and not enjoy my life. And my upside was like, I'll have a great life that I'm extremely motivated and excited about. So that to me is like extremely asymmetric, like doing things where you're like extremely excited and like having fun. Like that's a rare gift, right? Like I think a lot of people don't do things that they enjoy every day. And like, you know, I have some friends that are like that and like, it's just kind of depressing talking to them. Like having like the ability to do things that you really enjoy in life is such a, such an important thing that like, I think if you find something that is like that, you should go all in on that.

I love what you just said because I wrote go, I wrote going all in, right? As a reminder, I have these note cards, which are usually just reminders. Like the best information is not brand new information. It's just true information that I needed to hear again, needed to bring to the front of mind, or I needed to remember in my current context. And I think that the way you described it actually made it click for me in a, in a new way, which is going all in is a skill. And I did the same thing as you. I had a startup straight out of school and I, I had this idea and I was having all this fun with my friends and I was either going to go to med school as I had planned, took the MCATs, all that, or I was going to do this startup. I decided I'm going to do the startup thing, right? Then I start with that. And then I got this gravitational pull. I got this job offer. Someone's going to pay me $120,000. I had to move to Indonesia where the opportunity was. But it was like this guaranteed salary, blah, blah. And I remember my co-founders, my two buddies, I was like, yeah, we told ourselves this stupid story, which is, you know, we're always telling ourselves stories. And I was like, I'm going to go, dude, the lessons I'm going to learn there are going to be so useful for us. Like, I didn't have the courage to just say I'm going there because I really want this. This guaranteed kind of safe salary thing. And instead we told ourselves this story that I needed to learn business over there before I could go do business here. And within 2 months when I was there, I was like, this was a mistake. I need to be all in. And I, I quit my job. I told the owner, I was like, hey, I'm out of here. He's like, what? Like, it's only been 2 months. And I just told him, I was like, I need to, I need to see this through. Like, I'm, I'll always wonder, right? Like, I kind of know what this is. Same thing. Like, I'm not like lit up every day. I had more fun over there. Yeah, there's no guarantees over there, but like, I think the guarantee of feeling lit up every day is going to be like good for me in the long run. So I flew back and I was like, all right, I'm all in. And we moved. That was the first thing. Cause I was like, is this the best place to build this company? And if not, why are we building it here? Just cause we're already here. Like that seemed like a terrible reason to just do it. So we immediately moved to like the hub of where that type of company was built. It was a restaurant chain and all the top restaurant chains have been launched or most of them have been launched in Colorado, like Chipotle and Smashburger. Burger and Quiznos. This is, there's like Noodles and Company. There's like 8 of the big fast casual chains have started in that area. It's all, it's the Silicon Valley of like, you know, shitty fast food. And so, um, so we go all in there and it was the same thing, which nothing really came of that startup, you know, like I lost money. I lost arguably a year of time working on something that didn't work, but I absolutely didn't lose because not only did I set myself on a different trajectory, but I more importantly learned the muscle of going all in, which once you fast forward 5 years and you look back at your same smart friends, friends from school who have just been in, you know, a bit of a corporate life that whole time, you see that that muscle has atrophied. They don't have that muscle. And that muscle is really important because whatever you're going to do, the winning idea, you're going to need to be able to go all in in order to make that idea work.

Yeah, 100%.

All right. The last, last philosophy I want to hear from you, because I, I dig these, is, uh, there are no rules. Just construct your work and your life the way you want.

Want.

What do you mean by that? What makes you say that?

You know, I feel like when you're in Silicon Valley, everyone's got these like, you know, there's so many people who are trying to like be influencers, like VCs, like, you know, everyone's got these ideas that like, hey, you know, like I remember when, you know, in 2011 when I had my first kid, like it was very unfashionable to have a kid and have a startup. Like people were like literally like, what are you doing? Like you're going to fail your startup or whatever. But actually, one of the things that's like a complete contradiction is like the only way you succeed is by doing things that are unusual, right? Because if you're doing the normal things, how can you succeed? Because like everyone's doing those things. So weirdly, like, you know, if you look at every single success, it's a contradiction because it had to be. A really common thing in Silicon Valley is don't do consumer startups. But actually the biggest startups like Amazon, Facebook, Google, they're consumer startups, right? Like, so why are we telling everyone not to do consumer startups? Those are the $3 trillion companies. So I find like, in general, like most knowledge is like, you have to understand where it comes from and why it comes from and like why you're the exception. But like the only way you succeed is being an exception. So like you kind of have to like just ignore the rules and like just do the thing and be the exception because that's the only way you succeed. But I do think there's like knowledge out there and like there's a reason people talk about these things and you should understand why it is that you are different. And like, yeah, what are the problems with consumer startups? And there's lots of them. But I've just generally found in life that like actually the best things I've ever done have been like ignoring the rules and just doing things that like, yeah, I just think like most of the time, if you do the, not the opposite, but like if you pick the set of rules that you're ignoring because you have like a strong reason to ignore them, you're going to be much more likely to be successful.

That's a, that's a great point. You know, there's that, I forgot what the phrase is, but it's like experts know all the rules and masters know when to break them. Um, so, so, you know, that's the, that's sort of the best signal of mastery is when you know the rules and you intentionally choose which ones you're going to break. So like if you, I'm learning the piano right now and my teacher will be like, oh yeah, this is Bach or this is what Beethoven did. And he'll be like, he'll specifically call out, he did this thing that, you know, normally you wouldn't do. Right? This doesn't make sense. These are two different keys, or that doesn't— it's not part of the scale, but it works because of this. And it's like they make up a reason why it works. Yeah, they make up the reason, but it's post, post-fact, right?

Exactly.

Um, it's, you know, now it becomes a new rule later. It's like, no, oh yeah, but if it resolves tension, then it works. It's like, okay, cool. Um, but at the time, this sort of breaks, breaks that rule. And that's what all the, all the best ones do. What I like about what you just said is it made me think it's worth writing down. I'm going to try this after this podcast. It's worth writing down, like, not just how I want to win, how I want to live my life, but specifically, like, what rules, what kind of common best practices or generally accepted good practices that I am intentionally choosing to break. You know, I'll give you an example. The other day I was having a conversation with a guy who's really smart and wise, and he said, he said this great line, and everybody nodded and took notes. He was like, You know, when you get money, people come to you, they want to get— do business with you. They want you to invest in their thing. They want a loan, they want whatever. And he goes, I have this rule, you know, either our friendship is sacred or the money is sacred, but you can't have both. And I said, so does that mean you just never do business with friends? He goes, never. And everyone's like, yeah, that makes sense. It could be really messy.

Yeah.

And I go, I don't know. I think that everything you said is true. And yet I choose that mess because I think there's a great upside in like finding the people you love and doing life with them. Life is a lot more fun when I do projects with friends or invest in people's companies. And I, I, you know, I give people— I bet on people. And yeah, sometimes it doesn't work out and sometimes it gets a little hairy, but like, I choose this mess. It's like I choose that rule to break and I'm comfortable living with that, you know? And I can always go back and change my approach, but for now, that's a rule I'd want to break.

But that's a good example where you want to understand how to break the rule as well, right? Like, it's not just like, I'm going to break the rules, therefore I don't care about it. You want to go like, okay, You know, if I'm putting money in a startup, I'm going to make sure there's a contract and everyone understands, like, here's how we work together. And like, yeah, I do think when you break the rule, you have to kind of go out of the way to mitigate the potential downsides of like breaking that rule. Like, and the breaking the rule is doing the harder thing normally, right? So you have to understand why and how and how do you mitigate the risk.

The rule you broke was as a startup founder in SF with all the options to choose, you chose the like highly regulated, highly compliant based, hard, have to build for a year and a half before you launch. You know, that's not the quick and dirty prototype vibe code. Like you can't do that playbook there. So you're like, all right, I'm going to choose to break that norm and go this way because that's what I want.

Yeah. Yeah. But I spent a lot of time understanding what I was like in for. Right. I spent like 3 months just talking to people and like researching compliance and rules and laws and like all this stuff. And like I wasn't, I wasn't doing it blindly. Yeah.

All right. So, Ahmad, where should people find you and who should reach out to you? Who do you, who do you want to reach out to you from things like this? Because when you're out there, you know, you attract certain people. But I like to say, you know, you want to have your API. You want to tell people who should connect with you and on what basis. So give me a sense of that. Where should people find you and what should they reach out?

The easiest way is on X or Twitter, as it used to be. I'm just Ahmad. Yeah, who should reach out? You know, I'm always willing to try to be helpful to entrepreneurs. So, you know, if you have an idea, you want to pitch me something or whatever, reach out. And yeah, I try to be like quick and say yes or no if I'm interested or not. And obviously, if you're interested in Mercury, you know, go to mercury.com and sign up.

All right. Love it. Thanks for coming on, dude.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Sean.