How Mercury Hit $500M ARR—then raised $300M from Sequoia at $3.5B. | Immad Akhund, CEO & Founder of Mercury

Pablo Srugo (00:00:00):
When did you get to like a million in ARR for example?

Immad Akhund (00:00:02):
Very quickly. Maybe four and a half months we were at a million ARR. And then it took about three weeks to go from like starting the raise to getting a term sheet for the Series A. 

Pablo Srugo (00:00:13):
How much did you raise?

Immad Akhund (00:00:14):
$20 million at a hundred million valuation from CRV. Just when you have users and you have to worry about things breaking and fixing bugs, et cetera. It becomes hard to do new things. It's better in some ways to just. If you know what you have to build, it's better to just not have any users. If the database goes down, who cares? You can just go build the thing with no users, and it's actually much easier. As soon as you have users, it's just slower to iterate.

Previous Guests (00:00:44):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question.
Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:00:56):
Do you think the Product Market Fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders, and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. All right, Immad. Welcome to the show, man.

Immad Akhund (00:01:12):
Thanks for having me.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:12):
Dude, so you guys, I mean. You've built a massive, massive startup. Just raised $300 million, right? From Sequoia earlier this year. And maybe more, at least for me, even more importantly, half a billion in revenue. Profitable, which is not normal in starter land, so congratulations.

Immad Akhund (00:01:29):
Thank you. Still feel like there's a lot to do, but it's a good start.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:32):
That's the way you want to feel, man, day one stuff. So yeah, man, I mean. I'm really curious to hear how you started Mercury in the first place. Where the idea came from and how you executed against it? But maybe we can start, you had to start it before this, right? What was that company?

Immad Akhund (00:01:49):
So I've actually had three before this. 

Pablo Srugo (00:01:50):
Okay.

Immad Akhund (00:01:51):
But the last one was for eight years. So it was the bulk of my pre-Mercury entrepreneur time. It was called Heyzap. Actually had like four full pivots, always in the kind of game developer ecosystem space. The eventual thing we did that did work and we ended up selling it for $45 million was a developer tool around ad, advertising. So if you're an app developer and you wanted to show five, six different ad networks. It was super annoying to plug them in one by one and optimize them. So we would package them all up. You just make one call, show video, add, and we would take care of the rest of it for you. And give you nice dashboards around it.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:32):
And this was in gaming or these ads were like everywhere? Any mobile?

Immad Akhund (00:02:36):
So any app developer could use it, but it was most popular among like indie games. You know, basically on iOS and Android. We were used by kind of top three or four. Three or four of the top 10 games. In the last kind of couple of years before and after the acquisition. We were like the main. Main software that those developers used for an ad super space is called ad mediation. And that was actually the first time I really experienced product market fit. You know, I've been doing startups since 2006. And we didn't launch that fourth pivot. Until I guess this was, like, 2014 that we launched it. So it goes to show you like you can raise money and do a lot and think you're making progress but like not achieve product market fit. And it's a very different feeling when you do achieve product market fit. (Context: Ad mediation is a technology platform that helps app developers maximize ad revenue by automatically managing and optimizing multiple ad networks to serve the highest-paying ads.)

Pablo Srugo (00:03:25):
What were the other two startups?

Immad Akhund (00:03:26):
So I did one in London, it was kind of like a Yelp for London. Very small scale. That was like seven months, and then I did another one as my first Y Combinator company in 2007. It was a developer tool for kind of logging into websites, like made it easy to put in Google and Facebook Connect and things like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:43):
And what happened to that one?

Immad Akhund (00:03:45):
The first one didn't go anywhere, we kind of just shut it down. The second one, we had lots of users, but no real way to monetize. And we ended up doing a talent acquisition. But I didn't go work at the acquirer. I just started this third company.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:01):
How much time did you spend across those first two companies?

Immad Akhund (00:04:04):
Those were quick. It was seven months for the first one.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:07):
Okay.

Immad Akhund (00:04:08):
Almost two years for the second one. Eight years for the third one, and then I guess I'd be doing Mercury for another eight years.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:13):
Did you ever think, especially after those first two. Which weren't really successes, to just go get a job? Or were you always just like, I'm just going to keep building until I get a hit?

Immad Akhund (00:04:22):
So I did have a job before all of that for one year.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:25):
Okay.

Immad Akhund (00:04:26):
And, you know, I hated it. I just didn't, I can't, I just found it. You know, maybe there's like a better company I could have worked for, but I really felt like a cog in the wheel. I didn't feel like I had agency. I didn't feel like I could talk to customers. I was an engineer, and then doing my first company. Which went nowhere, was a complete disaster in any. Any external metric you could think of. But it was so fun just building something and feeling like I could wake up in the morning, have an idea, talk to customers, go try to build it. I just find that so exhilarating. The fact that I can just be, alive doing that is good enough for me. If I could raise enough money to survive and do it and obviously. We've subsequently been successful. But there was no point in that journey where I was like, oh, I wish I just had a job because I was just like. I really enjoy the journey for the sake of it. Which I think is the only way you can do it for as long as I have.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:26):
And then walking through, like it's one of the things about coming up with company after company. The part that I find like really hard, honestly, just coming up with solid ideas. Things that are actually worth spending time on. How did that change? Like, your first one. At least for me, my first company was just. I don't know, you just kind of, like, I want to start something. And then you kind of find something around you. You're like, that's the thing I'm going to do, and you do it. Maybe that was your Yelp in London. I'm not sure. But how did that evolve over time?

Immad Akhund (00:05:52):
I feel like it gets easier to do ideas and think of ideas and be in that mind frame. When I started doing a company, I was, like, "Oh my God, the world is full of ideas." I remember before I started my first company, it was not obvious how you came up with ideas. What ideas existed. I feel like when you're doing a business, you just see problems everywhere. Obviously, a lot of ideas, especially in Silicon Valley, are B2B ideas. If you're running a business, there's so many problems in running a business that you just see ideas everywhere. If you're an engineer, you see developer tool ideas everywhere. If you're trying to. Back then, especially, this is 2006 when I started my company. Everything was broken. A lot of the things we take for granted today in terms of running a business didn't exist in 2006. And that's partly how I had the idea for Mercury, but there was no payroll, right? You had to use some really weird old school thing and there was no Stripe. I used like this super messed up thing called Authorize.net that was like impossible. There was no Slack. We used to do everything over Skype and it was like just coordinating groups on Skype. It's just ridiculous. So anyway, everything sucked. So like I felt the whole world was like full of ideas. I'm sure it's different now that like I have a lot of, now that Mercury is like more mature. I have a lot of ideas for Mercury. I don't actually have that many ideas outside Mercury for like, I mean, I talk. I invest a lot. So I see a lot of ideas and that kind of spurs new ideas but I don't have like that many like, oh I'll go do this other business idea. I feel like my idea scope is smaller now that I'm doing Mercury and it's scaled. And there's so many ideas around that. But I'm sure if I was like an AI founder right now or thinking of ideas in AI there's probably, like, a similar feeling of there being infinite ideas. But yeah it was like that in 2006, '07, '08 and '09 especially I feel like there's so many ideas around web, and social, and mobile that were so new and like. Yeah, it felt like there was a lot available.

Pablo Srugo (00:07:52):
What was the original idea for that last startup? Because you mentioned you ultimately pivoted like four times until you ended up, I think with product market fit.

Immad Akhund (00:07:58):
Our first idea. This was like end of 2008, was a Flash. I knew everyone played these casual games on Flash. It was like a web-based platform for casual games. So it was a Flash games distribution network. That was the idea. And it was actually somewhat successful at getting a lot of distribution. We had, like, I don't know what it was. A peak, probably like 60,000 websites that had this like widget in them that was like allowed you to play flash games all over the internet. Lots of random websites had kind of this embedded flash gaming thing that we'd built.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:32):
What was the problem with it? Just monetization?

Immad Akhund (00:08:34):
Just mobile killed it. I mean, no one wanted to play casual games on the web. Yeah, like 2008 and '09, it kind of worked.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:41):
Yes.

Immad Akhund (00:08:42):
But 2010, the shift to mobile was very extreme and very quick. So like it was basically done by then.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:49):
And so when you sold the business, you said $45 million in 2016, is that right?

Immad Akhund (00:08:57):
Yeah, start of 2016.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:59):
And then did you go work at the Acquirer or were you kind of like hands off right after?

Immad Akhund (00:09:04):
No, I was there for a year, and then I moved on. Had a, you know, five. I was going to take a one year sabbatical. But I basically started working on Mercury as soon as I moved on. I mean, you know, for the first five months it was more research phase. So it wasn't like full time. But yeah, I have a hard time just sitting still.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:23):
So let's go deep on that. When does the initial idea for what became Mercury, come to you? How does it come to you?

Immad Akhund (00:09:31):
There was this idea that I used to call. And I don't know what the official name was, but I used to call it consumerization of enterprise. Where a lot of the tools used as entrepreneur, there was this feeling in 2009-ish that entrepreneur tools are always gonna feel and look crappy. They'll be hard to use, the products won't be good, et cetera. But consumer tools were, you know, much higher quality and people enjoyed them and they were easy to use, et cetera. But there was, yeah. Then there was a lot of ideas came out. Which were just like taking consumer grade product and design. And applying it to.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:07):
Just like the Slack, like the Slack-like kind of thing.

Immad Akhund (00:10:10):
The Slack, Stripe, Gusto, et cetera. So, you know, everyone. I mean not everyone but people like me who thought about ideas a lot had lists of saying like oh yeah here's all the business tools that I use and like they're gonna be a better version of them. So, I distinctly remember I had payroll as one of those things. And then I knew the Gusto founders before they started Gusto. And that was one of the ideas. I was like, payroll sucks. Someone should make something better. And they came along and did that. 

Pablo Srugo (00:10:43):
And they're doing quite well. So, that was a good idea.

Immad Akhund (00:10:46):
But to be clear. You know, I was busy doing that company. So it wasn't like I had a list of these ideas that I was going to go implement. It was much more like, oh, it's obvious these things will be don, and it's like a pool of things that you think about. It's like, oh, here's some ideas that people will do. So, yeah, at that point. I'd not done any fintech, not done any banking. It wasn't something I considered as like something that I might do. It was just on my list.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:11):
The banking was specifically or payroll?

Immad Akhund (00:11:13):
Yeah, banking was one of the things on the list. And eventually, around 2013, I met this other kind of fintech company that was NYC that was issuing debit cards to seniors. And then at that point, I was like, oh, wow, like you can do this. Before then, the idea of actually going and building something. There had been this one company called Simple, which is a consumer neobank. But apart from that, there wasn't a thing that you could do to actually issue cards. 

Pablo Srugo (00:11:45):
Because the whole banking as a service. When did that kind of take off and start and make it easy?

Immad Akhund (00:11:50):
I mean, around when we launched. So we launched in 2019. Yeah, I would say 2018 was like the first year. The idea of banking as a service has been around for a while. But probably, 2017-18 was the first year where there was a few of these services that you could actually get like with. And you didn't have to go. Because, before then what used to happen is you'd have to go find a bank and you'd say, hey, will you work with us? And the bank. A, most of them are like, what the hell are you talking about? 

Pablo Srugo (00:13:05):
No.

Immad Akhund (00:13:12):
And the small numbers that do work with Fintechs. They don't know how to build technology. So it's all. It's pretty, especially when you're a seed stage startup with like four engineers. It's super hard to think about how do I go integrate with a bank backend. And then they also don't, you need to have a compliance and other framework that like a bank expects. Which, yeah, at this stage Mercury has all of that, but when you're a small seed funded company. You just don't have like enough stuff to like support it. So Banking as a Service made it possible to kind of get live as a seed stage company. So that was a big enabler.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:05):
But in 2013, when you see this company that's issuing debit cards. That's why it's so much of a wow kind of moment, because it's just not something you see every day.

Immad Akhund (00:13:12):
And they actually did the hard work. There was no banking as a service. I think they went and integrated directly with their sponsor bank. Yeah, so I was really impressed and at that point I was like, okay, you know, if they can do it. Maybe I could do it someday. And again, it was like. You know, it's weird, like Mercury has been an idea that like really stewed in my mind for years and years. So it was like, every other business I did, it was, brainstorm ideas. Go do this one that's at the top of the list. Whereas this one was very much like, I felt the pain point as an entrepreneur. And it kind of stewed in my head as like, you know. and I always assumed someone else would do it. Because I was busy with my company.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:47):
Well, that's the weird thing, right? I'm just thinking out loud here. You think in the world of fast moving tech. If you have an idea for something that you identify as broken and you just sit on it. Somebody else should do it. You know what I mean? Somebody else must be thinking that too, and doing it. And yet, you know, four years, five years later, whatever it is. You still, you launched Mercury.

Immad Akhund (00:14:04):
Yeah. I mean, banking is scary for people, right? Like if the, you know, even in 2017. When I was kind of raising money for this, lots of people were like, "Hey, why don't you just do a software company?" And like the path to do. It is harder to do a fintech company in general. Especially one that has any sort of payments, like money movement. It's probably three times harder than a software company. Like a software company, you can probably launch it three months. A payment slash banking company will take you at least nine months to launch something. Probably more than that. And there's the software piece, and even the software piece is a superset. You have to build all the kind of user facing software, but then you need controls and, you know. Compliance and risk software on top of it. And then there's the backend, like integration with these like legacy, kind of payment rails. Which is actually like very complicated. And then there's all the compliance and legal and, you know, partnership work that you have to do. It's much more complicated. So I do kind of understand why? Even if other, and actually, I found quite a few people would had this idea. But just not follow through with it as well. It wasn't like, this wasn't like, super secretive idea. It was, yes, we should. It was, it was much more like who? Who had the will to follow through with it. I'd also say, you know, as I said,  we would just came into the world where banking as a service was a thing. So that was, I would say, enabling technology. I think two years earlier, if I'd started in 2015 instead of 2017. I think I would have done it, but it would have been a lot harder. Whereas 2017 was a time where it became a little easier. And then, you know, by 2020, 2021. Everyone was trying to do a neobank and it would have been. Yeah, if we hadn't started in, if we hadn't launched in 2019 and built up a little bit of, a lead. It would have been probably an overly competitive space by 2020, 2021.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:58):
So you have this little idea, little seed, you see some things in 2013. It kind of just sits there. Anything else happened through kind of that period?

Immad Akhund (00:16:08):
No, I mean, I was really focused on my other startup. You know, when you're running a business, you're not like.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:11):
You don't have much time for anything else.

Immad Akhund (00:16:13):
Yeah, the only thing that happened that was like somewhat related to this idea is I just started collecting people. I was like, oh yeah, like every time I met a fintech entrepreneur or fintech investor or someone in banking. I'd like, you know, I'd make a mental note or a physical note where I'd be like, okay, you know, if I ever did this idea. This person would be like really smart and useful to help me with that. So I had this collection of mostly entrepreneurs that I'd built up. That when I finally did go do this idea. I was like, hey, remember you met me in XYZ event and now I'm doing this thing. And everyone's, especially in Silicon Valley, very generous with their time when you've got a connection. Especially if you're doing something new. But that was, I would say, the only other progress that I made towards it.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:56):
How big of a deal was that, by the way. Being in Silicon Valley instead of. You were in London, is that what you said earlier?

Pablo Srugo (00:17:01):
It's hard to like, you know, do a comparative. I mean, A, the U.S. market for banking is freaking huge, right? It's like probably 20, 25 times bigger than the U.K. It's like 2 trillion in revenue per year. Yeah, the ideas are just bigger in the US in general, but especially when it comes to fintech and banking. And everyone's just so ambitious there that you are forced to think of big ideas. But yeah, there's definitely an element of building the network. And I'm sure there's people, especially in fintech, actually. There is some pretty good companies that are fintech companies in London. But yeah, just being around it and having a network of people and being able to tap into that was definitely useful.

Pablo Srugo (00:17:41):
Okay, so that happens. You sell your business. You're in the Acquirer. Are you right away thinking about this is the next thing you're going to do? Or what happens during that year while you're working there? But as you say, you started to do some research.

Immad Akhund (00:17:53):
I didn't do too much in the year that I was actually working there. I actually was trying to explore whether I wanted to be a VC. So I did. I did something like 25 investments in my year and mostly decided I didn't want to be a VC. But yeah, it's hard too.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:08):
Why not? Why not? You're just not close enough to the thing, or what turned you off of  it?

Immad Akhund (00:18:12):
You know, I found it like a little depressing being a VC. I feel like the best, you know, when I first started investing. I was like, wow, I'll be so helpful to entrepreneurs. And like, you know, I have all this experience and I can help them, et cetera. And then I soon found out that like the best entrepreneurs just didn't need me, right? I had a, I made this investment in this company called Rappi. Which is a door dash for LATAM and it's done really well. 

Pablo Srugo (00:18:34):
Nice, nice, nice.

Immad Akhund (00:18:35):
Honestly, I invested and they never talked to me again. And, you know, I mean, I guess I was like, OK, that's fine. And they were like, you know, not quite a unicorn, but like, yeah, they were they were like already very successful within a year. So I was like, OK, you know, my best investments never talk to me and are successful regardless of me. So I'm just like this weird, you know. I don't want to do something just because I make money doing it or like like I want to do something because like I make an impact to the world and, at least when it came to seed stage investing. And maybe it's different at later stages. But it didn't feel like my impact would be transformational. It was mostly, if you're a good company with a good founder. You're probably going to raise money from someone else, if not me. And you'll probably be successful regardless of any investor input.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:23):
I think it's true, by the way. Many VCs, talk about the value add, and I'm not saying that there's no value add. There's some, but I think VC is first and foremost. I mean, it's a capital allocator. You're really, your number one kind of value of the world is deciding who should? Where is this money best allocated for the highest potential output, risk adjusted. And then the rest is kind of the extra 5/10%. But like, if you don't do that right, nothing else matters. And if you do that right. The rest takes care of itself, kind of as you're saying.

Immad Akhund (00:19:54):
I mean, there are some things like Y Combinator that are truly transformational. They make an investment when other people are not, or they come up with a model that's different. And I'm sure there's other examples of that, of people that were either very early or very transformational in Series A. But at least the basic model that I would have done. Which was like C-stage investing. I didn't think was going to be. Me doing it would not have changed the trajectory of that many companies. So I found that pretty depressing. And as I said earlier, I love being an entrepreneur. So I was like, OK, let me just go do that.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:32):
And what do you go after at that point when you leave and your sabbatical gets interrupted?

Immad Akhund (00:20:37):
Yeah, initially I had a list. This was just the top idea I had. I had a few other ideas. So mostly I was like, OK, this idea I've had for years and years, let me just go research it. And mostly I was trying to falsify idea. I was like, okay, you know, I probably. My initial thing was like, it's probably just a bad idea to do this. Let me, let me go figure out why it's bad. But the more I researched it, the more I was like, okay, you know, it's, hard, but it's like a deterministic hard. Like, you know, the, It's like a fixed cost hard. I just have to do the thing. I have to go get a bank sponsor. I have to go hire someone that understands compliance and risk. And I have to go build this stuff. But it was understandable, hard, and I felt I could go do it and learn the skills to do it.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:27):
And the original idea, by the way, just specifically was what? A bank for startups? Or what was the first premise of the idea?

Immad Akhund (00:21:33):
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much what we launched. An operational bank account that would be your primary bank account when you're running a startup. Mostly targeting early stage founders initially. I was just saying, that's basically what we launched. So, you know, the idea has been, you know, I would say even from 2013 has been like fairly consistent. It wasn't like, you know, some people pivot around in terms of idea space, but it was very much, this is what I wanted to do. And then like, it was just to, you know, explore other things within the space. But I was like, okay, I still felt good about it. And a lot of the time, I don't know, maybe I just do this, but, you know, you have this idea that's like your gut instinct. It's like, Ah, I wish someone did this. And then you, you spend the rest of the time building like intellectual framework to support why it's a good thing to do. It's like, yes, the market size is big. And like, this is how it would distribute to the years. And, this is how, what the, you know, economics looks like. So a lot of the stuff I did afterwards was to persuade myself to actually just go do the idea that. That I like had the strong instinct for.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:29):
I think that is part of the formula. Sometimes people downplay the passion, gut feeling side of it. But I mean you do. You're going to take a punch to the face no matter what you do. If you believe highly at a deep level of the thing you're going to do. It helps you get through the values you're going to have for sure.

Immad Akhund (00:22:50):
Yeah, one thing that was different for me with this idea is I was really building it for myself. Which, you know, previous things like, you know. I've never been a game developer. I just like playing games. So I thought it would be fun. But for this idea, I was very much like, hey, if, you know, I want this tool. I want to use it, and I really want it to exist. And I think that did help fuel the. This kind of side of it, the passion and the empathy, and the product understanding.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:18):
When you did that research. Because I think this is a key part of his business, like you said, it's a semi-obvious problem, let's say. It's the sort of thing that a lot of people would have been frustrated by, and nobody was doing it. Nobody did it. Finding the right time to do it. What did you go after when you're trying to falsify it? In those few months. What were the sort of things you were doing to falsify? What were the sort of things that you wanted to really check in and understand?

Immad Akhund (00:23:43):
Yeah, I mean, you know. I didn't do any product or customer work because I was like, you know. I know how to build this product. And yeah, I felt most people would believe that I know how to build this product. And I also felt I knew how to get the customer and I felt most people would be willing to believe that. I could get a customer for this. So I really wanted to, Both to myself and to, I guess, investors eventually. I wanted to be able to prove the bit that I didn't know. When I started that process, there was no reasonable way I could sit in front of an investor and say, yeah, of course I know how to go build this product. But I wanted to go, OK. You know, what is the actual path to building this? And, you know, I explored like becoming a getting a bank charter versus working with a sponsor bank. And how did those work? And I talked to a lot of fintech lawyers and financial services lawyers. That was probably like the bulk of the research was just talking to people and understanding. What are the rules? How do people do this? And actually, lawyers are pretty useful. A, they're smart. They know the law. But B, they actually also know people. They know companies that have done this or tried to do this. And who have they partnered with. If you think about it. A lawyer is often working on contracts. So they actually understand. If a business tried to do this, who do they partner with and which are banks that are easier to work with and harder to work with. So actually I found lawyers to be extremely useful and they mostly actually work for free. If you don't take too much of their time. If you're like 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there and do that with like 10 lawyers. You can get like a lot of cumulative time and learning in like a pretty short time period. So I did that, and then when I had a framework for what I wanted to do. You know, sponsor bank model and all that stuff. I started talking to sponsor banks. And like, basically, you know, the deliverables or the items that I had before, you know, I did a fundraise was. I had some, I worked with a designer and I had like some rough initial designs of like what it might look like. And I had like three. Either sponsor banks or bass players. I think actually at that time. All three were actual direct bank deals. But I had three kind of term sheets of like, you know. I just went to these like sponsor bank people and I was like, hey, if I was to do a deal with you, what would it look like? And I got a term sheet and then I went to VCs and I was like, look, I have three term sheets from sponsor banks. But yeah, which I did. But, it wasn't like, they were ready to. I mean, I did end up doing one deal with one of them.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:15):
Was that hard, by the way? Getting those term sheets. Just working your way through these sponsored banks?

Immad Akhund (00:26:21):
I mean, getting the template term sheet was not hard. Because, I mean, you know, all these people have partnership people. And like, you know, whether you work with lawyers or other fintech entrepreneurs. You can normally get to the partnership people at these places. So getting an actual like test term sheet, not that hard. Getting the final sponsor bank deal. It took a lot of work, but you know, I don't know. I don't, it wasn't hard. I guess for me, like hard things are things that I just can't achieve. So if I achieve something, it's no longer hard.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:53):
Then it's easy by definition. I don't know, man.

Immad Akhund(00:26:54):
Like, you know, it's pretty soon after we did our seed round. I went to this conference, Money 2020. Which is like the biggest fintech conference. And I basically got the full list of attendants and I, you know, scraped some stuff and I found like the 60 people who were going that had. That were from a bank, and I emailed all 60 of them. So I had this like super intense time at Mercury in 2020. Where I just had, like, I think we ended up arranging about 30 meetings. So I had 30 meetings with banks at this conference. And I just raised $5 million, so I was like, oh, yeah. And then I just did these meetings, one after the other after the other. And I met a ton of the sponsor banks right there. Because, most people, when they go to a conference, they want to meet people, right? That's the whole point of them being there, and especially if they're partnership people from banks. And then I just raised $6 million. So I had some social proof to say, hey, we're looking for a sponsor bank. So that introduced me to the whole ecosystem pretty deeply. And then it was a case of just kind of selling them on it, getting a deal and negotiating it and all that kind of stuff.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:02):
What was the, you mentioned raised $5-6 million kind of a seed. I mean, on the one hand, you had a track record. You kind of, you know, repeat proven founder. Was it easy to raise that?

Immad Akhund (00:28:11):
Yes. The few things that made it easier is actually. When I started investing, I was working with a lot of investors. So like we were sharing deals and, you know, all that stuff. And actually, weirdly, that one year of like investing. Made my investor network grow a lot. A lot more than like being an entrepreneur had. So that made it easier just because I knew so many more investors and when you've done some deals together they know roughly how you think. And you know how they think and that definitely helped build my network there. And then another thing I did pretty early on and this was actually not even in the course of trying to raise money. But Andreessen Horowitz had a fintech investor and you know I was trying to understand the space and he actually knows banking pretty well. They'd actually invested in a bank called Cross River Bank before they invested in Mercury Seed. So I'd just been like talking to him and I really didn't expect. You know at this stage I had nothing like as I said I hadn't written any code it was very much just a crazy idea.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:19): 
And it was just you?

Immad Akhund (00:29:21):
And well. I had got. By the time I was doing the final pitch. I had like two co-founders, but I'd just been talking to him like every few months before that. Just to like learn what he knew and then, you know, get introductions to people, et cetera. So basically, like, four days into kind of starting to fundraise. I was just giving him an update and I really was not planning to raise from them because I was like, hey, you know, at that point. You know, mostly the Series A funds did Series A's. They didn't do that many seeds. So yeah, I had a meeting with them on Thursday. And then literally at the end of the meeting, it was like, hey, why don't you come in for a full partners meeting on Tuesday? And I was like, what are you talking about? It's just like, I wasn't even pitching you. I was just like giving you an update. So it was very, and at that point I felt like an idiot because I was like, you know, you don't go talk to one VC. You try to talk to like, you know, 15 VCs. This is like basic Silicon Valley knowledge. Whenever you're pitching a VC. You talk to 15 of them. But I was really not trying to pitch a VC. I was trying to just have a conversation. Then I tried to send a bunch of emails to arrange meetings with other VCs. But basically we met on the Tuesday. They gave me a term sheet on the Tuesday. So it was done.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:27):
This is the classic, you know, ask for advice, get money sort of thing.

Immad Akhund (00:30:31):
Yeah, very much. But I mean, they moved quickly and I appreciated that. They really, yeah, who knows whether I would have got any other VC. But they really did believe in the model and us doing something crazy. When really there was literally no code written. So I'm impressed that they had the faith to bet so early on something like that.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:55):
Give me a bit more context in terms of what the space looked like back then. The neobank space and just all that kind of that world. I mean, today, you said, there's so many other players, right? But what was it like then?

Immad Akhund (00:31:10):
So let's say back then. Most of the action was in Europe. So that was like Monzo, N26, Tide, Quanto. Those are the main ones. I don't think Revolut was around. Maybe Revolut had started, but they were much more in the. Yeah, Wise and Revolut were in international kind of money movements rather than banking. So most of the action was in Europe. And actually a lot of the people I talked to when I was doing the research were in Europe. And in the U.S., there was Chime and Aspiration. I want to say those were probably the only two around. But they were much smaller. I think maybe Chime was a unicorn, but only just. And it was very much like, you know, it was still a question mark on like whether this was a real category in the U.S. at that time.

Pablo Srugo  (00:31:55):
And Chime was focused on who? Is it ICP?

Immad Akhund (00:31:59):
They were and I would say they still are focused on kind of underbanked consumers. People who don't have bank accounts and they're, well, they're like, yeah. Subprime kind of consumers.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:10):
Okay, so the idea of owning kind of startups and early stage companies from a banking perspective in the U.S. Was white space, like nobody was kind of going after that.

Immad Akhund (00:32:20):
Yeah, I think there was one company that tried a little bit called Seed. That was doing kind of SMB banking, but at that point that kind of faltered. But yeah, nothing at scale for sure.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:31):
So you raise this money. You get the sponsored bank. What's next?

Immad Akhund (00:32:34):
You know, basically spend something like a year to like go build everything. It's quite a complicated product. And then, as I said earlier. You also have to do all the backend things. To do a bank account that's really going to replace all your operational usage. It can't have missing features. And I had a pretty high bar. It was like, it needs checks, it needs debit cards, it needs wires, it needs ACH, it needs international wires. And actually, any one of those payments type is normally a full startup. Just to issue debit cards and do all of that is a lot of work by itself. I was like, I have to do all five of these. So that was a high bar, both in and out, right? Like money moving in and out.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:15):
You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best interest. And how did you decide? That's an important decision on its own. How did you decide that was that gut feeling? Or how much of that was kind of speaking to potential customers?

Immad Akhund (00:33:30):
I mean, I was just, like, "What?" I didn't speak to anyone. I was just like, from a personal perspective, I'm not going to. What would we learn if we launched and didn't have one of these crucial things? All we'd learn is that everyone would say, I need.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:41):
You need that.

Immad Akhund (00:33:42):
You know, I need that. So, in my opinion, there was nothing to learn, without having everything. And then secondly, first impressions do matter. And having something that was obviously missing obvious features. That a bunch of people would show up for and then leave frustrated would be, in my opinion, a bad impression. I've also found that if you don't build a thing up front. It's often actually hard to build it after you launch. This is pretty contrarian, but just when you have users and you have to worry about things breaking and fixing bugs, etc. It becomes hard to do new things. It's better in some ways to just, if you know what you have to build, it's better to just not have any users. If the database goes down, who cares? You can just go build the thing with no users and it's actually much easier. As soon as you have users, it's just slower to iterate. I mean, obviously, you want users eventually to give you signal and learn from them. But if you know you just need a set of features, then I don't think there's any point in launching before that set of features.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:45):
I guess that makes sense, when you're building. You know, there's kind of, you're building a brand new thing that doesn't exist, like say it's Airbnb or Uber, one of these classic things, or you're building a 10X version, right? There you got to say, I don't really know how people are going to stay in people's houses and this and that, whatever. But if you're like, I'm going to build a 10X version of these are the banks. This is what happens today. I'm going to do 10X better. You do kind of know, like, clearly these are the things that after a hundred years of banking people need. Let's just do it much better.

Immad Akhund (00:35:12):
Yeah, I mean, there was definitely some things missing, but the obvious stuff wasn't missing. And yeah, that's the thing. If I need to be 10x better, I have to have all the actual things, and then I can try to build something 10x better. You can't be missing something major and say, oh, but I'm 10x better. That doesn't make any sense. So we had a high bar and then we ended up actually doing two sponsor bank deals, like one with a sponsor bank and one with a BaaS provider. So that slowed us down just because the first one made all these promises to us that they didn't deliver on. So that took us an extra six months as well. So it took us about a year and a half to go from like.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:47):
So that wasn't for redundancy, that was just one didn't work out the way you expected?

Immad Akhund (00:35:51):
Yeah, one didn't work out.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:52):
Okay.

Immad Akhund (00:35:53):
And it was a really complicated integration, but we had to shut it down completely and do one from scratch. But obviously we'd learned something from the first one, but it was still frustrating. So it took us a year and a half from fundraise to launch.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:06):
And how many people were you through that time?

Immad Akhund (00:36:08):
Mostly eight people. We quite quickly hired eight people, mostly engineers. So from the eight people, six, including me, were engineering. And then one design, one kind of product. And then at launch, we had one extra engineer, so we were nine.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:25):
You kept it pretty lean, like with five, six million. I mean, you could have gone for a bigger team if you wanted.

Immad Akhund (00:36:29):
Yeah, I talked to one FinTech entrepreneur. Where, you know, he had like a real war story around how it took him like three years to get something live. And, you know, so in back of my mind, I was like, okay, it might take three years to launch this thing. And then if it took three years and then you wanna launch it and have like some. Make some progress. So it might take three and a half years to raise money again. So that was my like, I went in with like, what's the worst case scenario? And like, I wanted to have enough money and keep the team lean enough to like be able to get to the worst case scenario. I've also found that more than probably around like the number 16, things slow down quite a bit. Like you need. But like eight people in a room, you don't really need management. It's like everyone knows what everyone's doing. Everyone's kind of aligned. If you have to change something tomorrow, everyone kind of knows all the reasons you're changing it. And by the time you change it, everyone's, yeah, let's go change it kind of thing. Yeah, as soon as you get above a certain number of people, like maybe 12, 13, 14, 16 for sure, but maybe even earlier, it just becomes harder to change things. There's always someone that has some problem and you have to get them on board when there's alignment issues and you have to do management. It's just so much simpler when there's a smaller team and everyone's like on the same page.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:50):
Overhead communication, they're all costs, they're all drags. They're just like getting things done. And yeah, like when you're a small team of people. Everybody understands everything that's going on, all the context is there. You just don't need to like disseminate information, right?

Immad Akhund (00:38:02):
Five of the initial eight people had worked with me for five years at my previous company. So we all knew how to work together and we all like knew that everyone else worked pretty good.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:14):
And so you have the product, how do you structure the launch? Is it a zero to one launch? Do you have this design partner phase, beta phase? How do you set that up?

Immad Akhund (00:38:23):
Yeah, so we had like 30 or so customers that were just kind of playing with it. But it didn't really work. Like, there was lots of these missing features. But we just needed like some. Some people actually testing it and, like issuing cards and, all that kind of stuff. Really like, you know, something like one or two weeks before we actually finally launched that, everything worked and, then we were like, okay, let's go, let's launch. I didn't think it would be a big deal. Like my, you know, my, my normal views and my previous experience of launching things is like, you launch and then the work starts, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:38:53):
It's like anticlimactic, you think?

Immad Akhund (00:38:55):
Yeah. You launch, like a few people care, but no one really cares. And then you start figuring out like how to sell it and like what's missing and all that kind of stuff. But in this case, we launched and it just like blew up and it was like, Yeah, people really resonated with the idea. And not the whole world, but you don't need the whole world at day zero. But there was at least 1 or 2% of entrepreneurs that were just like, oh my god, this was such a pain, I can't believe this is solving it. That one or 2% was like a really, really large fuel for growth. And we grew kind of 30 to 40% a month for the first 12 months.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:35):
How do you get that, like that initial cohort? I mean, at the end of the day. There's referrals and word of mouth that happened after. But like, you know, just to get any sort of excitement at launch, you need to do something.

Immad Akhund (00:39:44):
Honestly, it was mostly on Twitter. I had a bit of a Twitter following at the time. Which I'd deliberately cultivated for a few years. And then we had 60 investors in our seed round. So I, you know, I deliberately, you know, we had in recent Horowitz as a lead. And then as soon as they kind of committed. Which was relatively early, I deliberately went and like, hunted people that had, like, a large portfolio of companies that they had invested in or they had like a big kind of social media following or they were like kind of helpful fintech entrepreneurs that kind of thing. So I had 60 of them, and that was really helpful. At that point it was still called Twitter. But them tweeting about it and giving. Because so much of Mercury is about trust, right? You have to trust this startup to hold your money. When someone that everyone recognizes, like Andreessen Horowitz or whatever says like, hey, we invested in this thing, we believe that, you know, we believe in him more than what he's building, etc. Like that gives a lot of confidence to people to say, oh, let me try this out. So most of the first kind of, say two to three weeks were really like driven by kind of that investor base. Kicking it off and like providing that kind of initial ignition to the distribution.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:04):
And after that was it, mainly word of mouth or was there other like go to market use in those first few months?

Immad Akhund (00:41:09):
First five, six months was all word of mouth. The only other significant thing that happens after that is we did a partnership with Stripe Atlas. So we became one of the. So after you incorporate, you need a bank account and we became along with SVB. We were like the second partner that they recommended. I think, honestly, those two. I also, I did some work with Y Combinator. Just because I've done Y Combinator a few times. It was mostly just selling to the company. There wasn't an official partnership at the time, but that was also initially part of the distribution strategy.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:47):
By the way.

Immad Akhund (00:41:48):
But a lot of it was organic and word of mouth.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:50):
You did YC twice, right?

Immad Akhund (00:41:51):
Yes, in '07 and '09.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:53):
What was the reason to do it the second time? I'm just curious.

Immad Akhund (00:41:56):
I mean, I love YC. I kind of wanted to do it for Mercury as well. It didn't work out. But yeah, I mean, they gave me money quickly. I knew Paul Graham.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:06):
Why not, right?

Immad Akhund (00:42:06):
It wasn't a difficult decision. It wasn't , you know, after my first YC company. It's not like I knew a ton of investors and I could raise money easily anyway. Even that $30,000 that they gave us when, you know, it was at that point. It was very much just an idea was, like, a nice kickstart to kind of doing it.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:25):
So back to, back to this launch. One of the questions I have is, you know, the idea is it's a better bank. It's a 10x better bank for startups, but what specifically resonated the most? What were the biggest annoyances of traditional banks for startups at that point that you were doing so much better that people were like, I love Mercury because?

Immad Akhund (00:42:43):
Yeah, to be clear, we're not a bank. We're a fintech company that works with sponsor banks. But there's a bunch of things that are just like, in my opinion, so obvious. But so annoying that like people. People are so used to how bad banks are that they just don't realize how annoying they are until they see like something else. So, I mean, take online sign up, right? I mean, it's obvious, but yeah, that was like. And it continues to be a big differentiator. Like if you want to go sign up to Chase, go to their website. You cannot sign up. You have to go walk to a Chase branch and, you know, either prearrange an appointment or like you have to sit there for two hours. We did this actually when we started Mercury, we signed up for like eight different banks just to like see what the experience was like. It's all bad. Like there is literally no one experience that's good.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:38):
It was all in person? All the other banks?

Immad Akhund (00:43:40):
Yeah, I mean, the only alternative is SVB was not in person at the time, but it took three, three weeks of like doing online forms and waiting. And so it was, yeah, and Mercury, you can get a bank account online same day. Most of the time. So, so just that experience of, just signing up is so painful. And then, then just basic things like if you want to do a wire. Like, trying to do a wire with a, you know, a the first time you sign up, they don't enable your account for a while. You have to go back that if we account for a while. And then even when they do, it's like, yeah, you have to like, you have to call them, and then they have to call you, and then they have to call maybe someone else. It's just so ridiculous how these basic experiences are so painful.

Pablo Srugo (00:44:19):
You'd think that'd be for compliance reasons. You'd think there'd be no way for them to get around it versus just poor UX, poor design. 

Immad Akhund (00:44:26):
I mean, there's definitely some compliance things. But even the compliance stuff, right? Okay, you need to ask some questions. Why isn't it in the product? And we have lots of escalation in the product. We're like, hey, you're a crypto company, now you have to answer these other five questions. And it's all in the product. Just because it's compliance and there's more to do. It doesn't mean it involves humans calling you. You can make a product that is built around that. A lot of the reasons that wires are like that is because banks don't have true TOTP authentication. Nowadays I guess they mostly have SMS kind of verification. But that's very easy to steal someone's phone number and now you can access their bank account. But because the security level is not up to modern standards. Then they have to have some other out-of-band way of trying to verify a wire. But if you just do things at a high enough standard of security, then you don't need to. I'm sure there's been some issue, but almost no issues around someone unauthorized sending a wire on your behalf.

Pablo Srugo (00:45:33):
And were you getting mainly people who were just opening up, like starting a new startup and starting fresh? Or were you getting people shutting down like a Chase account or whatever it was and moving to Mercury, like in that first six months, first year?

Immad Akhund (00:45:45):
The first initial like few weeks, a lot of it was just people just being like, Oh my God, I'm going to switch to this kind of thing. But they were all like, I would say very early in their journey. It's definitely much harder to get someone to switch when they've got a long-term embedded banking experience. Nowadays, about 75% of our customers are within, with probably their first bank account. They're within six months of incorporating. And that is like one of, you know, in my early pitch of like why early stage startups made sense is I was like, hey, there's always new startups. So there's always this kind of new cohort of companies that we can get and then we can scale with them as they grow. And that's mostly how it's played out.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:22):
Well, also because like, it feels like most of the costs of the annoyances of a bank. I mean, like a lot of them are at the beginning, like setting it up, you know, initiating like a wire process. Once you've got it all set, it's probably still very full friction, but it, you know, the kind of, you've done a lot of the work already, right? So like the upside is. 

Immad Akhund (00:46:40):
You've done a lot of the work and there's also, you're just a lot more locked in.

Immad Akhund (00:46:45):
Yeah.

Previous Guests (00:46:45):
Like it's, there's also like annoying switching costs. It's all pretty bad. I mean, you still have to like deal with it. And then, you know, they have lots of like, annoying fees that you don't expect. So it's not a great experience afterwards, but yeah, definitely the switching costs versus the pain of the experience versus like, you know, people don't know what Mercury will really be like until they use it. So they don't necessarily know what's better.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:08):
So you mentioned last card up, like it took many years, like four pivots to finally feel what true product market fit was. With Mercury, did you feel true product market fit right away at launch?

Immad Akhund (00:47:18):
I would say I was like very skeptical because I was like, oh, it's just a launch and everyone's excited. But in hindsight, we definitely had like instant product market fit and it kind of grew very fast. I had a lot of reservations on leaning in too much in that. I don't want to go higher too much or do too much just because I thought it was going well. I wanted to be 100% sure. But yeah, I would say we had instant product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:44):
How fast did you grow that year? When did you get to a million in ARR, for example?

Immad Akhund (00:47:48):
I mean, very quickly. I don't want to like misquote. So let me try to think for a second. I want to say like maybe four and a half months we were at a million ARR. It's kind of a good question. I should really know that.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:00):
It's a classic PMF show question. But not necessarily something you think about when you're, you know, half a billion ARR.

Immad Akhund (00:48:04):
At this stage, I'm not like going like, what did we get to? But it's a good question. You know, to be fair, it's not ARR for us, right?

Pablo Srugo (00:48:12):
Well, that was going to be my question. What is the model? Where does that revenue come from initially?

Immad Akhund (00:48:17):
The way we make money is, well, the two main ways is. Number one, people use our debit card or credit card and we make money on the interchange. So every time you swipe. There's a fee and as the issuer, you get a pretty big chunk of the fee. And then number two, if you have money in your operational checking account or savings account. We get a percentage of the interest rate from our bank partners.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:43):
But originally, you didn't have credit cards, right? At launch? Or did you?

Immad Akhund (00:48:46):
We had debit cards and actually I wasn't expecting it. But it was actually a big driver to revenue, even from day zero. So yeah, lots of people do use debit cards initially, and then they eventually migrate to credit cards. And then we ended up launching a credit card in 2022.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:03):
In those first years. This is a question I have whenever a company just kind of hits. What was? Because from the outside looking in. Sometimes that feels like, wow, that was so easy. You know what I mean? So basically you had an idea, you built the thing, you launched the thing, it worked. Like that's the story. My question is like, what was the hard part of Mercury. Besides just the infrastructure? I know setting it up was like not easy as you said. But it was kind of like known things you had to solve. And you solved them. But what would you say was like the hardest part of building Mercury in that first period. Those first couple of years?

Immad Akhund (00:49:38):
I mean, there was definitely like a time pre-launch where, you know, it took us such a long time. A year and a half at least. It felt really long, no users, and there was this time. Where I went and talked to a bunch of customers, or potential customers, and it didn't seem like people were that excited about it. They were like, oh yeah, this sounds kind of cool. I remember just going like, wow, are we doing the right thing, right? We were just in a hole for like a really long time just building and there was like very little external validation to say we were doing the right thing. So that was that was probably the hardest initial time. And there's definitely like moments of like panic, right? When COVID happened. It's like March 2020, interest rates go to zero. Which, you know, from our perspective, that was like at that point, like 60% of our revenue went to zero, basically. So obviously interest rates went to zero and I was, you know. The whole economy is shutting down, is anyone going to do startups? I don't know if you remember 2020, there was definitely a moment in time where it felt like this was a pause in the whole world and startups weren't going to be any different from that. You know, it really was like a existential moment. But like two months later, we were back. You know, it was like two months later, we're like, you know, our revenue like blew up and all this stuff happened. And I was like, OK, it was fine in the end.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:09):
In that zero rate environment, your revenue goes up. I guess, mainly because of the interchange then?

Immad Akhund (00:51:13):
Yeah. Interchanged, we basically like e-commerce completely blew up and then with that. Debit card usage blew up. So I found the answer.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:24):
Nice. There you go.

Immad Akhund (00:51:26):
April 2019 is when we launched and we were at a million dollars in annualized revenue in September, 2019.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:31):
Okay. So five, six months.

Immad Akhund (00:51:34):
One, two, three, four, five. Five months, yeah.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:36):
Five months, that's awesome.

Immad Akhund (00:51:37):
That was pretty quick.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:39):
Well done. And then when did you, you raised your seed, built for a year and a half, launched. When did you raise your A and how big was it?

Immad Akhund (00:51:48):
So we actually raised the, we started raising the A three weeks after we launched. Basically like the launch like really did well on Twitter and I had like a ton of VCs like hit me up saying, oh yeah, this is great. I was like, okay, you know, After things calmed down a little bit. Which for some reason I thought was three weeks later. I was like, okay, let me just go raise a round. And then it took about three weeks to go from starting the raise to getting a term sheet for the Series A. 

Pablo Srugo (00:52:19):
How much did you raise?

Immad Akhund (00:52:20):
$20 million at $100 million valuation from CRV.

Pablo Srugo (00:52:24):
Got it. And, okay. So let's stop it there. Let me just ask the last couple of questions we end on and actually already touched on one. And the other one I kind of touched on. Which is, you know, but you had a bit of a, anyways. When did you feel like you had true product market fit? You said that when you launched in hindsight. You did have true product market fi. But it didn't feel that way. When did you going through it be like, you know what? Yeah, we have real product market fit.

Immad Akhund (00:52:48):
I didn't truly, truly believe it until after that COVID blip. Because like, you know, COVID hit us and like we lost half our revenue. And then literally two months later we were back or higher than our previous revenue level. And at that point I was like, you know, if a global pandemic can't stop us.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:05):
Haha, what can?

Immad Akhund (00:53:07):
We're probably pretty good at this point.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:09):
Yeah, that's legit.

Immad Akhund (00:53:10):
That was like the switch in my mind at least.

Pablo Srugo (00:53:13):
Awesome. And then the last question is, if you, you know, like you've been through many startups yourself, you invested in a lot. If you have like one piece of advice for early stage founders, what would that be?

Immad Akhund (00:53:28):
Yeah, I think one thing that I didn't do at my previous companies, but I did at Mercury that was like very useful is we wrote down kind of our cultural attributes and what we really cared about in terms of Mercury culture. Basically a few months in when there was only four people. And that was super useful because that initial kind of, you know, the next eight people we hired or whatever. We knew what we were looking for. We were like, these are the personality types we care about. This is the type of culture we want to build. And it's, you know, if we were at 20 people and then we tried to write the culture, then like it's hard to have a cohesive culture when you haven't tried to build a cohesive culture. So even now at almost a thousand people, like that early investment in like doing, thinking about culture actively and like trying to hire against it has like played fruit in a way that's. It's like this underlying kind of like reason that Mercury is successful is that we have like the strong culture and we hire people against it. That is like easy to miss if you don't like pay attention to it.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:33):
Awesome. Well, Immad. Thanks for sharing your story, man. It's been great.

Immad Akhund (00:54:36):
Yeah. This is good chatting.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:38):
Wow. What an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.