57: Immad Akhund - The Art of Irrational Effort

21:10Immad Akhund:Yeah. I think there's like, you know, there's this funny thing, like if you don't know what the product is, then you're the product or something. But there's like, I think it's worth understanding, like what is the product that the bank really makes money on? And it's mostly lending, right? So banks exist and make money on lending, like that's like 80, 90 % of like the revenue most banks make. And, you know, it's kind of like a mid-market enterprise kind of sale. Like if you put it in like a software startup kind of context, it's like, you know, hey, like I give you$10 million to buy this like commercial real estate, right?

21:46Immad Akhund:Like that's, you know, if you're making like five-ish percent and then on that, whatever, you know, it's millions of dollars. Like that's like a 500K ACV, but it's like kind of guaranteed over 10 years. So, I mean, that's like a serious, you know, serious like mid-market slash enterprise like sales deal. And, you know, like any organization, you become, as a bank, you become catered towards the thing where you make money. So these are really like mid-market enterprise sales companies selling loans as a main product. So if you put it in that context, then like I think the rest of why banks are going to make a lot more sense.

22:22Immad Akhund:Because the deposit product is like, I mean, they need deposits in order to serve those loans, but it's never been a place where they're trying to differentiate or be competitive. It's like the minimum possible. It's an alignment issue in some way. Yeah, it's an alignment issue. And it's like, who do they care about and what do they care about? So what they're good at is like, yeah, if you want to, and we don't do it at all really, like if you want to get a$10 million commercial deal, you go to a few banks, like they'll give you a really nice service and they'll take you to some golf game or whatever it is.

22:51Immad Akhund:But that's like they have, I think, probably some great salespeople that like really focus on like doing those big deals. and there's a risk averseness that's kind of built into the system that's tended towards let's do the safer, bigger deals where we can underwrite them easier. But I think they're good at that. Hopefully we'll get good at it too since we applied for a bank charter and we'll probably be doing bigger loans over time. But definitely something they're good at and fintechs have actually not really made any headway in that space. Like there's a little bit of fintech lending that happens at the bottom end of things.

23:30Immad Akhund:But yeah, if you think about it, like, you know, what's 80 % of revenue in all financial services and fintechs haven't really made any headway into it? It's like an interesting kind of - It's like a DNA thing. Yeah. Maybe on the flip side, what did you guys compromise on? You maybe gave the inverse of this question, which is like, we really wanted domestic wires as an example. Yeah. You built the product for a year and a half, as I understand, maybe even longer. before launching, but what, what did you sort of like willingly say, we're not going to have this, we're not going to have that so that we can do this set of things really right.

24:06Because I imagine in some sense, like this business has been in large part, like a sequencing problem of like, what is the core thing? And then gradually, and obviously now we're adding books and accounting, and now we're going to become a real bank and blah, blah, blah. But like, especially early on, I'm curious what, if anything you remember that you were like, we're just going to, we're not

24:23Immad Akhund:going to have it it's going to be fine yeah um that's a good question i think when we first launched we didn't have checks i really thought that we wouldn't need checks checks super recently right well so we just added checkbooks recently like even check deposits and like check sending uh and i yeah i was like you know some like some purist part of me was like checks are stupid we should get rid of them kind of thing but like a lot of america still runs on checks yeah very San Francisco mentality. It's literally like, yeah, one of those. So we launched checkbooks on business, but not on personal yet.

24:56Immad Akhund:And it's like one of the biggest like requested features on personal now. So there's little things like that. There's definitely like a infinite scope of like attachments, right? Like if you, like the thing about banking, and this is actually kind of like was the final thing that got me going like, oh, I need to build Mercury, is that banking is like this like initial thing that like everything springs from. It's like, you need your bank account, every single business has a bank account. Actually, there's not that many products that every single business has, right? It has all your money. It has like your finance team, right?

25:28Immad Akhund:Like there's so many pieces. So it's like, it lends itself to go like, you know, here's all the other financial operations and like, here's all your vendors. Like it lends itself to a lot of like interconnectivity and a lot of like features. But we were really focused, especially at launch going like, what is the minimum we need? I mean, the minimum was big because like we needed cards, we needed wires, we needed like multi-user. But it was really the minimum. And we tried to make that minimum like really polished and nice. But we didn't launch when we launched with like saying like, we do this thing that no other bank does.

26:01Immad Akhund:It was much more like we did the thing that you might expect your bank to do, but we did it like much nicer, which is like actually unusual kind of approach for startups. Like, you know, most startups are very focused on like, what's the new fancy thing? Totally, it's a really interesting point. I mean, it was some extent it was new and fancy and there was like online and online focused banking, which like still was like relatively new then, but it wasn't trying to do some new and wacky thing. And I really thought, you know, I've launched a lot of products over time, really thought we'd launch this thing and no one would care.

26:35Immad Akhund:Yeah, that's like, yeah, there's like a weird thing. So why did you take so long? Because I thought that's when the work starts. Like you launch, I mean, we literally launched the first possible moment we could have launched. It just took a year and a half to get to that. Got it. The minimum spec, like, you know, that's what I was saying, like, the wires barely work. Like, we literally were like, this was the last thing we needed to work. And we tested it. And we're like, I think it's working. Like, let's launch.

27:03Immad Akhund:So, you know, our perspective was really like, you launch, and that's when the work starts. Like, that's when you have to, like, collect user feedback. Like, you can't even really collect user feedback until you launch, right? Like, to collect user feedback, that's when you set up the distribution engine and all this stuff. So when we launched, we thought no one would care. But it was literally we launched, and then we just grew from there. Was it a show, don't tell thing? Maybe to go back to that point of it not being a quote-unquote novel hook feature. Was it just like, and maybe, did you guys have the demo.mercury at launch?

27:37No. Okay. So it was more just like a few people tried it, and the word of mouth was like, oh, it was just that delightful.

27:42Immad Akhund:Yeah, I think there's a, so actually I had this like slightly disheartening process just before, like, you know, six months before launch, I was like, okay, let me go talk to 100 companies. And like, literally 100, I have like the list somewhere probably. And I was like, okay, you know, let me see what, like, what do they want from this? Like, would they be excited to try it out? And I was trying to like set up customers for like our eventual launch. So I talked to 100 company and I remember like two of them were really like, yeah, like let's go kind of thing. And I was like, oh my God, like we're working on this thing for like a year and a half.

28:13Immad Akhund:And like, that's partly why maybe I was like, no one will care. But I think the interesting thing I learned there is like actually if 2 % of people are like, fuck yeah, that's actually a lot of people if the market's big enough, right? So I think that's what really happened, right? Like when you first start, like you just don't need that many people to go like, oh my God, it's a snowball, right? But like it has to be the 2 % that really want it, like have to really, really want it. And then like you kind of work your way up to the people that are like a little bit less interested. but that only works if the market's big enough.

28:42Immad Akhund:So I think what we really experienced is in that first, whatever, six months or something, it was the 2 % of people that were like so sick of their banking and they were like, okay, you know, I'm just going to try this. Like it's got to be better than like what exists. And I think that another part that's like hard for everyone to achieve is like the product was like audacious enough. Like there weren't that many new banks back then. So like going out there and saying like, hey, we are building a business in your bank was like an interesting enough message that like spread a lot. So, you know, you always have to have, I think there's like a, you know, when someone does like something audacious, like they're like, I don't know, building like humanoid robots or something, whatever it is that today is like, you know, the audacious messages tend to be more interesting than like the non-audacious ones.

29:28Immad Akhund:So like the fact that it was like a big and audacious message, like help it spread to find that 2%. Speaking of audacious in some dimension, you are now becoming a real bank, as they say, I suppose. I don't even know. Candidly, I'm not totally even sure what that means. I'd love to talk a little bit about it. Maybe to start, what's going on with this whole sponsor bank structure? What does that actually mean? And what are the implications of that? Why, and maybe as a follow-up, why even become a bank at all? Like a quote-unquote official bank. So in America, this is actually not true everywhere, but in America, in order to issue a card on Visa or MasterCard, you have to have a bank issue the card.

30:08Immad Akhund:That's one thing. And then number two, if you're going to hold deposits, they need to be an FDIC-insured bank. And I guess number three, like wires and ACH, like again, are also done by a bank. Okay, so you need a sponsor. If you want to do any of those three activities, you need a sponsor bank or you need to be a bank. When you're a tiny fintech, like we launch with like eight people or whatever, it's just not realistic in America to be a full bank. The expectation that the bank regulators have is very high. So when you're small, I think the sponsor bank ecosystem has emerged to help support this.

30:45And is that a relatively new phenomenon?

30:47Immad Akhund:I think it's like, again, it goes back to these shop cards, like the store cards. So I think some level of this phenomenon existed since 1980 or something. I don't know, whenever the first store card came out, maybe even earlier. But a long time. there was definitely a period in between 2017 and 2021-ish where there was this massive surge of like everyone not everyone like it went from like when I first started Mercury I was like let me list out every single sponsor bank that's worked with anyone right like I had a whole spreadsheet because like that was one of the hard things about Mercury it was like maybe 20 or 30 on that spreadsheet it wasn't that many I think it probably like a lot more came online and did a lot more partnerships and it probably peaked 120 and that's actually kind of somewhat declined since then.

31:34Immad Akhund:But that's the sponsor bank ecosystem. And other countries like the UK and Brazil and even Nigeria, and I think you have like lightweight charters where, you know, maybe you can't do lending, but you can get access to depository or whatever restrictions they have where you can be a smaller entity and get access to the charter, but the US doesn't have like that method. So, yeah, you know, when I first started Mercury, I was like, okay, you know, maybe let's go get a charter. Or you can also buy a bank, I guess that's like a third route. And it just seemed too hard. It was like, you know, it's like, you probably need a 30 million minimum to start off with.

32:14Immad Akhund:Of deposits? Sorry, of money. You probably need to buy the bank, and then you need some capital. So yeah, it wasn't like accessible to me to go buy 30 million. It wasn't even obvious that, But to go back to the previous thing, you need to build a great product that people love. And it's not obvious that you have to do all this fixed-cost work of getting a bank charter before you can even figure out whether the product is anything people want. Totally. So we went the bank charter route. I mean, we went the bank sponsor route. And it's only more recently, I guess, year and a half ago, where we really were like, let's go kick off this bank charter person.

32:50Why so long? I mean, to go back to your earlier point, I don't know if you were instantly successful, but you were kind of, you certainly had a lot of traction. You were, I don't know, when the first billion dollar valuation was, not super recently.

33:01Immad Akhund:2021, yeah. Why was this the right time? Why not five years ago or five years in the future? Honestly, the sponsor back stuff worked better than expected. Like the bank sponsors, there was more of them. They improved over time. And I know when we initially launched, I was like, we won't be able to do X or Y. and like there's still some restrictions on things we can't do. Like we don't have Zelle, for example. But A, we grew big enough that we could get our sponsor banks to do things. I mean, checkbooks, like checkbooks, like maybe some other sponsor, fintechs have them, but it's very few. And it's like a relatively new feature for like getting people to like go build that for us.

33:46Immad Akhund:But I mean, it's leverage and also like the sponsor banks have like better technology. But like, you know, in 2017, when I was looking at it, It was like barely ACH and debit card. So the fact that we managed to get to the level where we can support like a broader set of features. So that's been useful. And, you know, we grew really fast. So it was always like a, hey, you know, are we going to jump this to our top of priority kind of thing? And it was always like, you know, if the features are good enough and like we're still growing, like let's just focus on like, you know, growing and adding features and supporting customers.

34:20What changes now? Like what does this actually unlock?

34:23Immad Akhund:So I think there's like three things. Number one, like we're just at the scale where the sponsor bank ecosystem is like, you know, not really made for the scale that Mercury operates at just like amount of deposits we have and customers. And it's kind of tricky. Like I think it would be much better for us to work directly with regulators. And I would say regulators have been really open to working with us. But it's, you know, when you're really small, you're kind of relying on the sponsor banks to have a compliance team and a risk team that like, you know, really guides you. At this stage, our compliance and risk teams are bigger than our sponsor banks' compliance and risk teams.

34:56Immad Akhund:And the customers come to us first, so we really have to be the first line that really holds the bar or whatever, holds the regulatory compliance bar. So that's one really big thing for us. Secondly, we would like to do more stuff for our customers. We talked about Zelle, we talked about lending, and these things are just very hard to do as a fintech. So I think we'll deliver a much better product to customers. And then thirdly, it will end up making us more money. There's a middle one. Primarily because of lending? Or just a broad suite of... No, just like for every single thing we do right now, we pay our sponsor banks.

35:37Immad Akhund:And if we did that in-house, we would have more money. I mean, there's more costs associated to it as well, but especially as you scale, the cost kind of gets cheaper over time. That's not the primary motivator. That's like third on the list, but it's still effective. Yes. And it sounds like really more than anything, it's just a product of an extreme amount of scale. During the book's launch, there was a line I really liked from Sonia Huang at Sequoia. She said, as the cost of software asymptotes to zero, we should expect to see more bundling and consolidation of previously independent categories of software around the things that are actually scarce post-AGI, like a bank charter.

36:14I'm curious how you've kind of thought about, and again, as I mentioned earlier, I want to get more into the weeds on the product side, but how you thought about sort of, in some ways you do things in a very like Silicon Valley startup-y way, which is like moving really fast and being super nimble. And obviously you guys have done a ton with AI tools and CLIs and things. And then there's another thing that seems true to me about Mercury beyond just the bank charter, which is just this kind of like slow, deep compounding. It seems very clear, like you have a long-term vision and you are like focused and steady.

36:50If you wanted to, I'm sure you could be launching new products every two days. Like the frenetic nature, when you land in San Francisco, the mania of everything that feels possible in software now is just so different to 2017, let alone when you started your career. And so I'm curious how you're thinking about sort of like the parts of Mercury that are the sort of durable core and then the parts that are like, we want to be really experimental. we want to give agents credit cards, which you guys have done. Like you're clearly not throttled, but you are sensible. Sure.

37:20Immad Akhund:One thing I really care about, like, so actually this is something else I thought about when I looked at, you know, my previous bank accounts and like you click around on the interface and everything looks completely different. I don't know if you've noticed that about your bank. You're like, you click on international wires. It seems like you're on a different website. And it's always been like, you know, then things don't work between these systems and it's always been like this kind of frustration for me. But I think it speaks to like, it's very easy maybe to build a lot of things, right? Like, you know, like Greenfield kind of stuff is easy.

37:53Immad Akhund:But like things that work really well together and are really thoughtful, like unfortunately AI is not that thoughtful, right? So like if you really want to build something great that works really well within like an ecosystem and like, you know, most of what we do at Mercury, we do the next thing because it works really well with the existing things, if that makes sense. It's like you want to have a user permission system that works across all of your different products and you want the UI to work seamlessly and you want the data to flow between them all and all these kind of pieces. So I think it's much easier if I was just like, hey, actually a lot of things that Amazon does, right?

38:29Immad Akhund:They launch a new domain and it's a true two-pizza team and they don't have to talk to anyone else, et cetera. That's not that hard and maybe we could do more of that. But the real value, every time we think about something new, I'm like, why would this product work better at Mercury than it would work anywhere else? It has to be a combination of we have the money, we have the data, we have the users kind of try factor. And we want to make it so if you use this product within Mercury, it's just like a no-brainer because it works so well with everything else. And it gets better the more products we have kind of thing.

39:07Immad Akhund:So there's just like a more thoughtful, it just takes more time to build all of that stuff and make it like really cohesive and high value. Another point that I wanted to make is like, you know, software, you know, if you think about like when I started in 2006, like, you know, software became easier and easier to build over time anyway, right? Because these tools got better, it got easier to deploy, like we got Rails and then Node or whatever, right? Like it became easier to build software And to some extent, AI is a continuation of that, where the cost of actually deploying something small gets smaller.

39:44Immad Akhund:But the hard bits are still hard. It's still hard to build trust and brand and network effects and moats and the bank charter stuff is hard. And actually, that's where more and more of the value gets. Maybe when Mercury started, it was like 50 % software. I don't know what the percentage was, but maybe 50-50. And now if, like, the first 50, like, the building of the software gets to, like, you know, 10x easier, then it becomes, like, you know, the other part becomes 95 % hard. And actually, that's where, like, maybe most of the value goes, right? Like, it's, like, the software part is easier, but, like, you know, caring about, like, great product design is even more valuable because everyone's building a lot of software.

40:24Immad Akhund:And I see a lot of companies where they just throw a lot of stuff out there. And, like, you know, over time, like, you know, maybe the first product, everyone was like, wow, this is good product design. but like, you know, when you throw five things out there and they don't, they're all like kind of hodgepodge and like you're half supporting some of this stuff. And like, you know, over time, that's how like, I think about this a lot, actually, like, you know, why do companies get bad over time? Right? Like, it's like, seems like inevitable march. Yes. Like, yes. You know, very few companies have stopped that march of like degradation.

40:55Immad Akhund:And I think this is one of those things that you throw a lot of products out there and you don't really maintain them over time. they don't work well together and like decay. And there's a bunch of other reasons, obviously that culture degrades over time and like people, you know, move away from like customer value to like customer extraction or whatever. But it's really important for me to think about like how do I build a company that like gets better over time, ideally, not worse over time. And I think Apple's really good at this. Like the, you know, it's like whatever you launch, you should never, you should have a high bar for it.

41:26Immad Akhund:You shouldn't, I mean, I guess this is low bar to say you shouldn't be ashamed of it, but you should feel like you're giving delight with everything you launch. And we try to hold that like really high bar to it. Yes, yes. I was thinking as you were speaking about Stuart Brand has this, he's on part one of two into this book about maintenance. And it's a similar thread around like, it takes a great deal of intention and effort to resist decay. Decay is actually the default. Yeah, that's the default, yeah. It's like entropy is sucking it out of you all the time when you got a fighter. Yes. And it could be so, I mean, it's funny too, just in like this, this tension, because you've also talked about how like banking has infinite TAM and there's infinite ideas.

42:07It's like, it's very clear. You're not someone who is short on possible things to do, but you have found the right sort of balance to say like, actually cohesion is what matters above the cohesion, the cohesion of this product working really elegantly is way more important than any like exciting new feature.

42:25Immad Akhund:Yeah. I mean, you know, there's also like only so much new stuff you can invest in. We go through phases where I'm like, oh, we should do these five things and then like, you know, then the next year I'm like, okay, we've got these five things undergoing. Like, everyone will get mad at me if I can get a sixth thing in there. So, I mean, like, you know, we launched the books thing though. We worked on that for about two years. So, you know, at any one point, like we have like two or three things that are like cooking and then I have like kind of investment model in my head where I'm like, okay, you know, this is a, like books, like before it launches, like a pre-park market fits startup.

43:00Immad Akhund:Like how much do we invest in that based on the idea and whatever. But then like, as these things like do well, we invest more in them. But there's only so many new things you can have going at a time. Like there's obviously like smaller features and like whatever, some team will go build something small, like, you know, the agent card is like, you know, our normal cards team kind of built that as a smallish feature. But for like the big product stuff, that's like much more meaty. Yeah, you kind of, there's only so many of those you can kind of attempt at a time. You have this line on this idea of sort of AI making things easy and certain things being scarce around the sort of the work that requires pain.

43:40Can you give a few more examples of like, obviously, like a lot of the initial work for the company. Obviously, a lot of, I would imagine this bank charter process is like a good amount of pain there. I don't know if friction and pain or what the right word is. But other examples of things that are like maybe unexpectedly bumpy or frictionful.

44:00Immad Akhund:Maybe hard is the right word rather than pain. Yeah, what a hard. I think like talent is always like hard, right? Like how do you, it's like a lot less like obvious to point, but like, you know, how do you have a strong culture and like you hire people against that culture and you hold a high talent bar and you make sure people have like the right level of autonomy. and then you do good performance management, right? Like what's the full life cycle of that? You know, honestly, if you ask any entrepreneur and you were really like, what's so hard about your job? It's like, it often comes down to like, you know, they're trying to hire someone or they're having some issue with it.

44:35Immad Akhund:And like, that's actually like quite a hard, hard part of the job, but it like compounds, right? Like if you can get some great person, like that's, yeah, like everything feeds downhill from the people and like great people that are really thoughtful, like end up making great products and great customer experiences. So I think that's like a hard one. Yeah, I have some, like, I don't know if we're amazing at it, but, you know, we've tried to get better at it. I think you mentioned books was like a two-year process. Why does that take two years and not two months or long? I don't really have a great...

45:06Immad Akhund:So, I mean, I think, you know, we talk often, like, especially as media people, like entrepreneurs and like people on social media, we talk as if like this stuff has existed forever. But like, you know, AI for product development and really only got amazing in like December last year. Right. So I think there's a chance like books would have launched a year ago or something like that if we were already there, you know, when we first started or whatever. It comes back to actually like similar to what we're talking about with Mercury that like we, and it's almost worse now, like the bar of something we need to launch is it has to be like pretty good for like a large number of people.

45:43Immad Akhund:And there's a ton, like some things are just complicated, right? Like it's not like something you can do quickly. It's like banking. Banking is also like a hard product. Even if you were launching it from scratch now, it would be hard. And it's hard primarily because of edge cases, because of regulatory, because of like, you can't screw things up, all of the above. So there's just a, there's a lot of different types of businesses and they do a lot of different types of things with money. And they all need to kind of be accounted for in a way that's like tax ready and available. So like the two or three things that are like generally hard is like, integrations are kind of hard.

46:17Immad Akhund:So you have to pull in data from all sorts of ways. It helps a little bit that we have a lot of first-party data in Mercury with your banking and cards and all that stuff. But it's still hard to pull all of that and also pull from third parties and put in a data model that really works for people. So integration is historically trickier. You kind of have these two users. You have these accountants and bookkeepers that it needs to work well for and it needs to work well for founders. So you've got that kind of second thing where you're designing for two people. accountants and bookkeepers literally spend all their day in these accounting systems.

46:49Immad Akhund:So it's a very high bar of productivity tools. And there's tons of little details like, how do we make it so they don't have to go to their mouse and the key bindings all work amazingly well. And then it has probably like... But also, by the way, it has to be really good for the founder who's going to look at it, I don't know, for an hour a day and less detail. And then, yeah, just a ton of edge cases. And each edge case has like a way that it already exists. And it's always a little harder when you're developing something that's like mature software out there that people have high expectations for.

47:22Immad Akhund:Because like we are asking them to stop using their existing mature software that has like a bunch of checkboxes and say like, let's, you should now use this new thing. So you don't necessarily need to have like 100 % coverage on all the checkboxes that they've developed over like 30 years or something. But you need to be like pretty high coverage for them to like consider you. And even now, like, yeah, I wouldn't say we're like fully there across every type of business. Like, you know, if you're a simpler business, and if you have complex like accruals or inventory management and stuff like that, we haven't built all of that out.

47:52Immad Akhund:So there's still like a ton to build. You're also it's interesting to go back to an earlier point around like, they're not necessarily being always in shiny, new, super exciting novelty thing. It's like, you're really building to solve pain points and make the experience less frictionful, painful. But depending on the customer, like that is like the thermometer on their pain has to get hot enough that they're like, I need to stop using this crappy piece of software and switch to Mercury versus like, I'm coming to Mercury for this feature I desperately want, which is a different, yeah, it's a different disposition in some way, I think.

48:28Immad Akhund:So one thing that has helped with that for Mercury is people do need new bank accounts for new businesses. Got it. So, yeah, about 25 % of people do switch from whatever bank they're using, but actually the rest of the people are coming as the first company, first bank account kind of thing. And something similar will work in books as well. Like I'm sure it'll be quite hard to get you to switch from QuickBooks or whatever you're using, but yeah, you just, you need an accounting system. You're not using anything right now. And this thing is integrated with your bank account. Like you're good. This is really like a bet on entrepreneur.

49:01I mean, maybe it got to where we started the conversation. This company in some level, given that thread is like a bet on new entrepreneurship.

49:08Immad Akhund:Yeah. And I mean, yeah, if you think about Silicon Valley, I mean, there's been downturns, every year there's been more entrepreneurs and more funding. And I think it would be reasonable to say, yeah, the next 10 years of entrepreneurship will be greater than the last 10 years, even though the last 10 years were like pretty crazy, if you think about it. So yeah, I mean, and like, you know, we're at the stage where like more than 40 % of like pre-seed companies use Mercury. Normally we tell people like one in three startups use us, but like the earlier you are, the more likely you are to use us just because like, you know, more mature companies, we didn't have the same market share.

49:43Immad Akhund:But so if you play that out, right, like the, you know, for the next 10 years of companies, like hopefully half of them are using Mercury. And that would be like a really powerful position to be in. And yeah, the future is defined by those companies, not the existing companies. There's a stat I found. As you said, one in three startups banks with Mercury. Yet in 2025, 73 % of new customers came from outside the tech startup category, showing a broad appeal of what Mercury has built. So those are primarily new companies that aren't tech startups. If I were to, huh, fascinating. What's the sort of like, can you share anything about the sort of like rough distribution of?

50:21Immad Akhund:So it tends to be, I mean, I'd say like mostly digital entrepreneurs, right? Like you see, you're still spending most of your time in front of a computer. That's most probably new companies broadly, I would guess. So e-commerce is our second biggest single category. And then professional services and consultants, there's a lot of those, and a lot of them use Mercury. So those two are our second and third. And then real estate is another big one, like 5-ish percent of our customers. And then there's VC and finance type. That's almost in the startup ecosystem. Was there a deliberate effort to become, at one point, maybe even still today, you're like the startup bank.

51:00Obviously, for a little while, it was you guys and Silicon Valley Bank. We saw how that went. Was there a deliberate intention to be like, we have to move beyond startups? Or did that just kind of happen naturally?

51:13Immad Akhund:So we've always been a horizontal product. It's never been the case that we specifically said, don't use us. But we started off with the tagline of banking for startups. That was our tagline. And for a long time, I would say until 2024, we really focused on that. We were open to other businesses, but everything we did was startup-centric. And I really wanted to be focused. I was like, it's a big opportunity for us to win. And I would say we didn't really, really win it. When the whole SVB thing went down, we were pretty head-to-head in terms of market share in the early stage space. I would say we were like 20-ish percent.

51:52Immad Akhund:They were like 25 percent. and then it was, maybe there was like 30%. But yeah, when it came to about 2024, like the flipping had happened where we were like the dominant kind of, the biggest kind of bank for early stage startups. I should say all of this is like, we're a new bank. We're not currently a chartered bank. So, and at that point we were like, okay, we have grown in these other categories. And even then, like we were quite big in e-commerce and a few other things. but we never like focused on it. But at that point we were like, yeah, it's hard to go from, it's hard to go 10X when you're like already in 30 % market share or whatever it was.

52:33Immad Akhund:So we really need, we'd still want to like do a good job in the startup side and keep dominating that. But like to get the next 10X, like we needed to go outside that space and that's when we really were like, okay, how do we, and there's a lot of, even though we're a horizontal product, there's a lot to do to think that through. So like our acceptance rates, like our approval rates outside the startup space were not that great. Just because like, you know, startups have like LinkedIn's with people who worked at Google and like they have websites. They're just like, you know, the input data we used was like very startup centric.

53:08Immad Akhund:And we made a bunch of changes with our cards products. Like our cards product was very much like geared towards like you've raised a million dollars and now you get like a corporate card. I see. Whereas, you know, most small businesses don't have a million dollars straight away. So there was a lot of like big slash small changes we made. And then that really like, you know, really took like a year and a bit to like really start growing very fast outside the startup category. So 2025, we grew really fast outside the startup category. We've already talked a bit about product, but people really love your product.

53:39And like, obviously, anytime that's true, I think you should be all proud. But in your category, I think that's especially special. there was a great tweet from also around the books launch um ashwin he said mercury's unfair advantage is that they just do the obvious things that every bank should have done 15 years ago which is cheeky in some ways i i love your reaction to that because i like on some level i'm sure that is like all that's that's true and there are probably things that aren't obvious i don't know i'm curious does that feel like a compliment or does it feel like it's underrating aspects of the product?

54:16Immad Akhund:No, I mean, sometimes we do things and I'm like, why don't other bank interfaces do that? And there's a lot of... When I first started Mercury, I was like, I really thought maybe there's a law that makes it you can only see transactions that are within the last 90 days. Have you noticed that in your bank? You click back, back, back, and after 90 days, you can't... Why? And you have to go to bank statements. There's no rule there. Yeah, so it's just like they all use the same back-end software, and that's been a limitation from 20 years ago or something. is, but yeah, there's no law about it for sure.

54:46Immad Akhund:So I think that there are two factors. Number one, we are very thoughtful and we spend a lot of time thinking about it and like try to like not be stuck in like whatever seems like the limitations, but also the bar was not that high. Yeah. Right. Like it wasn't. Do you think the bar is higher now?

55:05Immad Akhund:I mean, there is like a, the bar hasn't got higher with the incumbent banks. Like I don't think they've changed. There's definitely a slew of other neobanks that compete with us.

55:18Immad Akhund:We think whatever we're doing, we try to talk to customers and do it from that perspective, rather than what are other people doing. So at least for us, the bar is always high. But yeah, there's definitely a massive premium to just being thoughtful and listening to customers and going like, okay, what are you frustrated about? We try to be very close to customers, Like I'm very active on X and LinkedIn and I try to make myself available. And obviously I get busy sometimes so I don't answer everyone's DMs. Sorry, everyone. But I try to look at them and like I think there's always like these things that you can learn from like customer kind of frustrations.

55:58Immad Akhund:But yeah, we have like our designers, our engineers, our PMs are often talking to customers. We try to like really be available and then obviously our customer support can talk to our engineers. So, yeah, there's just so much you can do. Actually, 80 % of the fight is doing the little things. And if you just keep doing the little things, that combines over a long time as well. Can you talk a little bit about the demo product and how that came to be? I guess for people that don't know, you could go to demo.mercury.com and it's the full experience. So firstly, when we first started, we made this design choice where we wanted to be able to develop the front end and the back end separately.

56:37Immad Akhund:so we had like mocked data to like make it so you know when you're developing the front end you don't have to like go connect to the back end and wait for like a response and get them to finish the work you could just like go do that so it just so happened so we built up this like set of mock data and like a front end that work completely independent of the back end so at some point I can't remember how this happened it was probably like a hack week or something like that we you know we were like okay you know why don't we make that clean up that mock data and put it on like a separate website.

57:09Immad Akhund:Like it just happened to be we made this infrastructure choice which made it easy-ish to do. So we did the first version relatively quickly. But it's like not, I mean, just to be super clear for people who haven't seen it, like it's the full product just with fake money, basically. Fake data. And it's like, I guess it's super obvious in hindsight, but I don't know if it would be an obvious, like other products like this don't have this type of thing, so I understand. There's like this, I really hate talking to people if I don't need to. I'm so sorry. Like, no, no, not that way. Like, I hate calling service providers, right?

57:43Immad Akhund:So that's like one of these things in the back of my head is like, you know, how do we make Mercury in a way that like no one ever has to talk to us? Which is like, I remember I had some interaction with SVB and they like, maybe I was interviewing some RM or something. But like one of their metrics was like, do they get to have a conversation with their customers and how often? And like, they were literally optimizing to talking with their customers. so in the back of my mind I've always thought of Mercury as like the thing you come to if you don't want to talk to people and we were just like because it's like so easy to use right so this is part of it like it's like Gen Z proof product you don't want to talk on the phone or like at least engineer proof but like that's part of the reason like demoed or Mercury was exciting too I was like you know why are we talking to people telling them about the product they should just try it out so So that was, I guess, part of it.

58:35Immad Akhund:I love that. But it's cool, right? You can try the whole product. Some people try to hide their product and it's like, or make it, we're like, I mean, if you want to copy it, you could like, whatever. I could probably pull up some stat. But it really makes a difference. When people go to that demo before they sign up, I think there's like a 30 or 40 % higher chance of them becoming active. Wow. It's really a big difference between someone not going to the demo and clicking on the demo. And it makes sense. like you want to like you know banking is like a big decision uh it's nice if you can like try it out and see and it's actually one of the other things that i've always struggled with mercury it's like you know we'll just go around saying it's better but like it's very hard to go like yes and like i could talk about individual features that are better but like it's not this is show don't tell yes exactly but it's also like a lot of other products have like this one shiny feature that's better they're like we're better because this x is like so much better Whereas like it is like a hundred different things about it.

59:32Immad Akhund:Like our search is better and like our virtual cards are better and like our sign up. But like it's hard to like really sell the better without like experiencing it. There is a, we talked a bit about this, like there is a cohesiveness to the product that is felt. And it kind of has to be felt while doing multiple different things in the product. I was telling you when I walked in to the office, like there was just a sense of calmness and cohesion in this physical space, which isn't too surprising because the product itself, like in some sense, the product is a place. It's a place that I have to go do these things.

1:00:03And by the way, these things that I do are, usually when I have to do them in other products, they cause my eyes to bleed. And so it's cool. In some sense, the demo feels like such, the demo site, I should say, feels like such an elegant display case for Mercury, which is like, it's actually all the things at once that have been considered to fit together.

1:00:25Immad Akhund:Yeah, 100%. I think it's like one of the reasons I think the product is great is because we dog food it internally. So Mercury's always run on Mercury. And I guess maybe not the biggest. We're either the biggest or one of the biggest kind of customers on Mercury. And that's always been really important to me, to dog food the hell out of it. And now that we have personal banking, we give that to all of our employees for free. And I think the demo and the mock is like part of that. It's like, I just want like people in Mercury to be clicking around and getting annoyed about things all the time. Because like, it's one thing customers complaining about something, but, you know, if an engineer has to go do something and they're like, ah, this didn't work.

1:01:08Immad Akhund:And then, you know, they could just go fix it, right? Like, I think you want to like try to collapse down the like steps it takes for like a problem to be fixed to the smaller steps. And like the demo definitely helps in that as well, because, you know, it's one thing if you're like, oh, the backend, something, something. but as you're designing the product, you're also checking the demo as you're doing it. There's all these weird things like what happens when it's empty? And you experience that as you're building it, so that also ends up being a better product. When it comes to, you have this, I think, amazing engine, which is new companies want to use Mercury, basically.

1:01:45Whether it be on the personal side or I suppose what you could call like kind of hunting for larger customers, how do you think about kind of like tactically growing the business? It seems very likely that you are going to continue to be the default, certainly for startups and maybe for broadly for new entrepreneurial companies starting in the US. That's an amazing position to be in. did you do personal out of a like wow there's this huge massive market that's under exposed is it actually we're just getting so much so many requests from our current customers when it comes to how do we go get more i don't know large cap companies working like using mercury like are either of those deliberate strategies that you want to pursue or do you are you kind of comfortable sitting like riding this new company formation wave um

1:02:34Immad Akhund:we definitely want to continue to be great at the new company formation wave. And I don't take that for granted. I think that itself requires work. And then we think about exploring like, you know, new verticals, right? So obviously personal banking is one of them. And that is actually like, you can sign up for personal banking without having a business bank. Books is another one. Right now you need the business bank, but we will make it a standalone product as well. When you have like one engine that works really well, and it's like scales to be like 400 ,000 businesses or whatever, like that, you know, that engine is like the powerhouse, but you do need to invest in like the future engines, right?

1:03:10Immad Akhund:So like both books and personal and like other stuff we do. Maybe a different way to ask this question, sorry to interrupt, is like personal doesn't feel as obvious as books to me as like a offshoot. Maybe it is, maybe I have the wrong read there, but. Like your point is why would we get into personal? Yeah, like you, without knowing, I'm sure there's so much nuance here, but like you could make the case personal is just a distraction. In the same way that like going after giant billion dollar companies who already use QuickBooks or already use a different bank account might be a distraction. So personal was initially started as like a five person team.

1:03:48Immad Akhund:And it really is like the business product just like strip some stuff down and like see if it works kind of thing. And then it did well. And then we were like, okay, let's invest more in it. But like the backbone is like, again, like to come back to the horizontal, thing, right? Like it's like most of the features and most of the elements of personal are like the same product. And actually when we make improvements in business, like we launched Mercury Command, which is like a kind of inbuilt AI agent that also works on personal, right? And it wasn't like, here's a separate team to do this. So actually the product is fairly similar.

1:04:19Immad Akhund:And then like 60 % of our customers are LLCs. And actually like with an LLC, you need to move your money back and forth between personal and business. Like it's, you know, this kind of distinction of like, you know, this is a startup and it's a separate money source. It doesn't quite exist for like a small business. So basically, I would say like, you know, similar kind of product without like a ton of extra EPD and like really strong use cases of why you'd want business and personal together. And we try to construct these things that is like a separate team and it's not going to distract everyone else.

1:04:50Immad Akhund:Like it's not like, you know, the whatever the business invoicing team is like thinking about personal all the time and and they shouldn't have to think about each other. Yeah, so think about them as autonomous kind of units that can go after a separate vision to what the rest of what we're doing is. And in terms of why invest in books or personal, or invoicing or whatever, there's a combination of, I really like things where they're big time by themselves and our customers really want them, and we have some right to win. Those are the three dimensions we'd probably look at. and I think both of those fit that really well.

1:05:28Immad Akhund:I want to come back to this other thing which you were hinting at, which is worth talking about, which is like, how do we get bigger companies to switch to Mercury? So we actually have a ton of big companies using Mercury, but most of them started when they were small and they've just grown to be bigger companies. So we have several companies with more than$500 million on Mercury accounts. And this historically was actually quite a hard thing to do to get bigger companies to switch to Mercury because banking is kind of entrenched and you don't want to think about switching. Even if we're like, oh, look at this demo.

1:05:59Immad Akhund:It's so great. It's still like, well, it's just people like, oh, this is too much hassle. What's changed more recently is we've got this much broader product suite. So we'll go to a company and say, hey, we're not just selling you banking. We're like, you're also going to use corporate card and spend management and invoicing and bill pay. Often when people switch to us, like instead of them switching the bank to us, they're like switching like three or four different separate products they're using into one. So it's like a consolidation and this is a much better system and, you know, it tends to make, save them money, save them hassle, like all those kind of elements.

1:06:36Immad Akhund:So now actually like that switching function is working a lot better. You know, in terms of volume, it's not as big, but those companies are bigger when they switch to us. But if we're new to it, like, you know, I would say it's only in the last year where like we've had a compelling reason to like switch to us beyond like just banking. Right to win framing is interesting, both on that last thread. And I guess for something like books, like what is, how do you think about right to win?

1:07:02Immad Akhund:So A, like, you know, can we make that product better being Mercury than like a standalone company trying to like build a accounting solution? So to me, it's like, we've got that data. Like if you're literally using Mercury banking and cards and invoicing and bill pay, Like, you can, you can, and there's not that much more to do with your books, right? Like, that's a lot of your core data that's, like, already in the system. It's already reconciled and categorized and set up really well. So, it's just, like, a much better product together than separate. So, that's one thing. There's, like, you know, is there, like, a distribution advantage kind of thing?

1:07:38Immad Akhund:And for us, it's, like, hey, most people set up banking before they set up an accounting solution. So, we can really, like, go, like, hey, actually, like, when you need this, we're there. And we can even help, right? Like you don't need the full solution. Like, you know, we'll start categorizing your transactions like from day zero, like every transaction is already categorized, right? So you can end up like getting a shape of a P &L and like those kinds of things without going like, this is your full accounting solutions. It's not always data. Sometimes it's like payment flows or something like that, but some sort of like unique thing that's already at Mercury, some sort of distribution advantage.

1:08:14Immad Akhund:And like the third one, which is like a little bit harder to, like a little bit more abstract is like kind of brand and trust, right? Like do we have the right to win because like we both, you know, in the case of Mercury, it's actually kind of, it's always been a painful thing to like build up enough brand and trust to like win your banking. Because like, you know, most other products don't have step one, send me all your money. It's like, now you're using this. Give us all your money so you can actually use it. Most of the products are like, yeah, it's like a SaaS thing. Give me your email. Exactly.

1:08:49Immad Akhund:So the bar is quite high for banking. But because of that, we win that relatively early on in our relationship. And things like books are like a high trust situation. But we already have that trust. And I mean, obviously, I don't take it for granted. We have to keep delivering on that to have people trust us. But it does mean that like, you know, a user's already in like a trusted relationship. They're like more likely to be responsive to like products that also require trust. On the brand side, which obviously is fundamentally kind of intertwined with trust with a product like this. What are the other things that make a brand?

1:09:26Like it's clear to me that you guys, maybe the brand could just be, hey, this product's amazing, blah, blah, blah. but you guys, even from an aesthetic standpoint, lots of things around little details and animations and the corporate card that's a partnership with an artist and is so elegantly done. Like, yeah, I'm curious how you think about brand, particularly coming out of that lens of like, we need to be a brand that people trust at a very, very kind of foundational level.

1:09:54Immad Akhund:I think brand and culture are like kind of similar and actually like it's hard to have a brand that doesn't align with your internal culture as well, right? So there's a few elements we have to our culture that I think seep through. One is we try to be honestly really helpful and low ego. And I think that shows up in the brand. I think there's a lot of brands that don't talk in very authentic human ways. They talk in these kind of weird ways, right? They're trying to be someone. We try to be authentic and human and like treat people like they're, you know, that they are sophisticated people, you know, even though this is like obviously not a space that they're experts in, but like, you know, we try to not talk to people and there's a lot of ways that kind of shows up.

1:10:46Immad Akhund:And then, you know, care is like a big part of it, right? Like it's like, how much do you, like this little attention to detail things make a big difference. I posted this like cool like particle animation we did as part of like the book's onboarding process. But I think there's like these little things where you like spend a disproportionate amount of energy that seems irrational. And like, that's kind of what art is in some ways. It's like, why did you even do this? That's a great definition. Especially today and more than ever before. Yes. But yeah, it shows that we really care and we're willing to put in an effort beyond like what seems like completely rational at times.

1:11:24Immad Akhund:You can't do that everywhere, but like in core parts, like in onboarding experiences and things that we deliver to users. There's places where you can do that and people really appreciate it. I think there's also the brand and product also tie in together. One thing that I think really hurts the brand of banks is they'll charge you all these fees and it's always confusing why you're getting charged something. I remember when, I won't say who, but every month we'd get some weird charge in my previous company from our bank and we'd be like, what the hell is this? And then we'd literally go like, what is this?

1:11:58Immad Akhund:And they'll be like, oh, sorry, like, we shouldn't have charged you. That'll go away. But it happened, like, consistently. I'm like, this is not a high trust situation. But it's like those types of things are like, you know, there's lots of ways you can make money out of customers. And, like, you know, we don't, we want to build a long-term sustainable business that makes money, right? Like, it's not, we can't be giving away everything for free. But I think you can do that without, like, kind of feeling like you're confusing people and taking advantage of them. more money in the long run too if they trust you.

1:12:30Immad Akhund:Yeah, exactly. It really is like a combination of things, which makes it actually tricky. And as an engineer, it's always kind of tricky. I'm like, what's the formula for this thing? But it isn't necessarily a formula. You have to kind of live it. You made a comment somewhere that it was really important for you to be kind of visible as the CEO and the founder as part of that brand and trust exercise. I don't know if you were that earlier in earlier companies. Maybe it was less relevant. And I don't know, you have a podcast. It seems like over time you're good at it. You've leaned into that. But I'm curious where that came from.

1:13:08Immad Akhund:Yeah, I think around 2017 when I was like, okay, I'm going to do this. I was like, okay, yeah. There's two elements. A, I think with social media especially, the brand is also the person. like it's much easier for someone to go viral than a company to go viral, if that makes sense. But there's also like, you know, if you want to trust Mercury, like, and it's like a company, it's harder to know who to trust. Whereas like if you trust Mercury and it's like, hey, my other CEO, that's like a much more direct relationship, if that makes sense. So yeah, I started and, you know, I have a hard time just saying things on social media.

1:13:50Immad Akhund:I don't know how other people do it. So I really focused on like, okay, you know, what are entrepreneurial lessons I can give people? And I've always been an active investor as well. So I'd often like have a conversation with entrepreneurs. They're like, oh, that's like a generalized lesson that like everyone should have. So a lot of my content historically has been like trying to be helpful to entrepreneurs, which I think aligns with Mercury's brand anyway. But yeah, I think that's over time, that's become more and more true since we started. I think like the human behind the thing matters a lot more than just like the brand does.

1:14:21Immad Akhund:And actually, like if you think about like, you know, to go back to JP Morgan or whatever, right? Like historically that's been true in banking, right? Like the person is like the thing that you're trusting and like that relationship is like very important to people. I think it even, you used the word care earlier, like you can express care through a brand and through product, obviously, but it's also like, I know that person really cares. Yeah. And actually it ties also to like, you know, if someone asks me or finds my email or whatever, like I get WhatsApp messages all the time. Like, you know, I will, like we, and like often fintech and banks are like the, like faceless organizations where like, you know, you get screwed and some decisions made and you can never read someone.

1:15:04Immad Akhund:Yeah, you can never get to someone. You can't get support for anything. Whereas I'm fairly accessible. People can get to me. And I want them to have good experiences, so I try to be responsive to that. You mentioned culture. A great quote from you. I think it's an ill-defined word, and I'm an engineer, so I hate ill-defined words. Oh, did I say that? I just thought that was it. Yeah, I mean, you've talked a lot about culture elsewhere, but it seems that you have been really deliberate about it. I think you were really deliberate about it early on. Was that a reaction to past entrepreneurial endeavors?

1:15:46Was it something that sort of you've been honing? Like, in some sense, maybe a strange way to ask this question might be like, how does Mercury's culture compare even to like your last company? and like how has that evolution happened?

1:15:58Immad Akhund:You know, my last company, again, I didn't know what culture meant really. I think for a long time, I was like, you know, do people stay around and have drinks together and like that kind of stuff. So we were very not deliberate about it. And, you know, over time it tended to us like whoever was the loudest kind of voice in the room. And it was like, you know, it was definitely like a disconnect between like, there was no culture. So it was like kind of all over the place. and it annoyed me. So at Mercury, I was like, okay, you know, what does, again, I don't, I think culture is badly defined.

1:16:34Immad Akhund:Actually, like Ben Horowitz has a great book on it, like Who You Are Is What You Do, I think is what it's called. That's probably like the best culture book I have read. But, you know, it really came down to that for me. It's like, what are the personalities that I want at Mercury and what are those personality types and things that we encourage for people to do. And that's like a much simpler question to me than this like nebulous, like what is culture. And that's where we kind of, you know, focus on like, we wanted humble, curious people that are like low ego, that like really care about customers, really care about product.

1:17:10Immad Akhund:And, you know, we wrote like six of these things down, which has like changed over time, but the nucleus has been like fairly similar. And then, you know, you've got to write them down, You've got to hire against them. You have to encourage them. You have to like, you know, if someone's very anti those cultures, you have to kind of performance manage them. But like step one is writing them down. And we did that really early on, just when we were four people. And it doesn't have to be like some huge exercise. I think every company should do it. Just like spend a few hours and go like, what do you really care about?

1:17:38Immad Akhund:And it doesn't have to be what we care about. Like, you know, Mercury is not like a overly like crush your competitors kind of culture, right? There's like my sense of Uber is like, At the start, it was like, do whatever it takes to win, crush your compare, and obviously worked for them. And it's probably a different set of people that were attracted to that. But I think you have to pick your culture. Ideally, and this bit's the tricky one, it has to bleed through into your product and brand as well. It's like your culture should be aligned with what your customers care about as well, which I think on the whole, they care about us being helpful and curious and making products like that.

1:18:18You mentioned the word helpful a few times. What does that word mean to you?

1:18:25Immad Akhund:I think at the end of the day, actually my sister said this once to me because I was kind of a bratty teenager or something. And she was like - Older or younger. My older sister. And she was just like, if you're not going to be helpful, what's your purpose? And I just kind of stuck with, I don't know the exact phrasing of it, but like I was just not being very helpful as a, you know, around the house or something like that. But I was like, yeah, you know, right. Like I think like a lot of value that I think about I want to do for people is be helpful to them because like, you know, otherwise like what's the impact I'm having on the world?

1:19:00Immad Akhund:I don't want to sound cliched here, but like I really genuinely want to be helpful to people. As like a base thing of like a purpose for like life, I think like trying to be helpful to people is like kind of a good way to think about things. But if you approach things like that, it's not just altruistic. Obviously, you want to build a long-term company that also sustains and makes money and all of that. But I wouldn't want Mercury to succeed in a position where we weren't being helpful to our customers. I want to succeed because we're helpful, not despite being unhelpful kind of thing. But yeah, it flows through a bunch of things, right?

1:19:37Immad Akhund:It's like, how much do we care about customer support? or like how much do we care about? Like small customers that maybe don't make us that much money and like how much thought we put into the product. Like helpfulness is like this like core thing, but it's also internal, right? Like it's like if I'm working with someone and I know they're like gonna be helpful, it's like a very different relationship than like, you know, I really don't want any part of Mercury to be like in competition with each other or like fighting each other or like, you know, like a lot of politics stems from like people not being helpful to each other.

1:20:07Immad Akhund:They're like thinking about their interests over other people's interests. So I think it's like a good motto for life, I guess. Like I haven't thought about it as that until like this conversation, but yeah. Why not be helpful? It's a nice word. It's a, you know, it's a, maybe the reason it stood out to me is it's a common word, but not a word I thought about very much. I think the actual cultural motto we have is like be extremely helpful. Like just being slightly helpful is not good enough.

1:20:36You said somewhere you have a product interview that you do for almost everyone, including non-product roles? Yeah. What does that mean?

1:20:45Immad Akhund:So I can't remember the current construct of the interview, but it's like, you know, if you were developing this feature, and I think the normal one is like something to do with like, like some Uber feature, actually. So like, just have someone walk through, like if they were developing this feature, how should they develop it? And like, see how they explore that space. I learned a lot of lessons in my last company when I was trying to hire salespeople. and how to hire salespeople and what kind of salespeople to care about. Because I ended up managing the whole sales team. I mean, I was the CEO, but I was managing the whole sales team.

1:21:18Immad Akhund:And it was just like so much harder to think about than engineers. Because engineers, you're just like, can you code? Yes. And like, you know, there's various salespeople. I'm like, I don't know how you figure out whether they're good or not. So from that, like, I was like, okay, you know, one thing I learned with salespeople is like actually like if they're product-minded salespeople and they think about, but actually goes back to helpfulness and curiosity to some extent. What is the type of personality that ends up building good products? And it's someone who can be curious about things, who sees problems in things, and it's like, oh, we should do it like this, who wants to build helpful solutions.

1:21:53Immad Akhund:So it's system thinking plus curiosity plus helpfulness leads to good product thinking. But you kind of want that everywhere at a company. You don't want, yeah, when we think about the product, It's not like how do they think about building an actual mobile app or web app or whatever. It's more like how do they think about the systems that they're developing within Mercury and explaining. There's almost no position in Mercury where good product thinking won't be helpful. And it helps that everyone's on that same page and they can talk to each other better. There's an empathy inside of it that I also think it's worth noting.

1:22:30the defining kind of distinction between Mercury and a traditional bank is that you are first and foremost a product company, I would argue, and most banks are not. And so it's, maybe this is telling that like the atomic unit of the person who would be here is somebody who's empathetic to and attuned to what makes the product really helpful. We briefly talked about it, I think, but obviously over the last year and really in the last few months, once you guys have started to aggressively launch AI features from the MCP and API stuff, CLI, to probably most importantly, command. Yeah. Which is a, for people who don't use Mercury, is basically a chat to BT style interface for using the product that has some great guardrails and so on that we can talk about.

1:23:16But the experience of using it, you start to squint, and you see like, oh, wow, this is the product going from a place, an interface that I do things in, to something that looks more like an agent or a service. I think everyone in Silicon Valley in making software is kind of reckoning with this. Like, is all of software just going to collapse into a text box?

1:23:37Immad Akhund:Yeah. You know, we took a while before we launched like any kind of user-facing app products. Like, again, we're in a pretty high trust environment where like, you know, you don't want to hallucinate. I think we wanted like the models to be good enough to really believe we could build a compelling product, which, again, happened sometime at the end of last year. I kind of think of it as ties back to our overall vision of how do we help entrepreneurs? How do we make their life easier? How do we make finances not stressful to them? I think there's a world where it's not even a text box. I think the text box is like a stepping stone.

1:24:21Immad Akhund:What the end solution should be, it's like, what's the problem someone's trying to solve? Like, let's say they're dealing with a customer and they're like, hey, you know, like they'll just CC Mercury or command and Mercury will deal with that customer for you. Like, well, we'll get that SaaS agreement signed and maybe we'll negotiate it for you and we'll like make sure that the customer pays on time and we'll like help you track how much they're supposed to pay you. And like, you know, all these things that like, I kind of think like, yeah, at Mercury, we have a 20 % finance team or something.

1:24:52Immad Akhund:maybe not that big, 15%. And they do a bunch of stuff for me. Like I don't have to think about like being paid or like paying a vendor or like negotiating contracts or dealing with job offers. Like there's all these kind of like just things that like entrepreneurs just like have to deal with daily. It's such a like stressful thing. And like, you know, it's hard to outsource really because like you're like, you know, you can't afford like people that are like spending all their time doing this stuff. But Mercury has like a lot of these kind of context that we can help you make that payment. We can store those details for you.

1:25:27Immad Akhund:So I'm not saying like we're there yet, but like I kind of think about that as like the way we want to get to where people don't come to Mercury, maybe at all, but instead of coming to us to like go, like I need to do this specific action, like I need to send a wire to my landlord. I need to like invoice my customer. It can be much more like people turn to Mercury. it's wherever they are. It could be in Slack or text or email or maybe chat, GPD, or whatever interface they're in, and Mercury kind of solves the problem for them. But that's, I think, where we want to get to. It definitely wasn't possible two years ago, and even a year ago it wasn't.

1:26:07Immad Akhund:I don't think 100 % of what I just outlined is possible even today, but it's just like there's obvious line of sight that AI is getting good enough that you could have these kind of agents that take care of things that are, you know, finance teams or HR ops or like all of these like people would be doing for you. But we can really automate a ton of it for you. Do you worry at all about sort of like durability or moats in this world where sort of the big product is collapsed into like a single agent, especially an agent maybe that I'm interacting with via another service? My take on it is the future is the future.

1:26:45Immad Akhund:And the worst thing you can do is fight the future. And yeah, I want to, I want to accelerate the future. The future is like, these things are easy and someone's taking care of you. You want to help entrepreneurs. And you want to help entrepreneurs. So like, I think Mercury is like uniquely situated to help with the future, right? I think other people will be thinking about how do I protect my systems or whatever. I think actually one thing I've thought about is a lot of things that were like problems have been helpful to Mercury. COVID was obviously a major problem.

1:27:25Immad Akhund:I'm not downplaying it as it was a major pandemic. But it accelerated Mercury because everyone was online and you literally couldn't go to a bank branch to get stuff done. So, you know, that was, I think Mercury was already the future. It was just pulling the future forward faster. Right. So I just think of AI as like another accelerant, right? Like the bar of like, how much better our product is to like an incumbent bank is already pretty big, but we will embrace AI and do it with the right controls in the right way. But in a way that like probably, you know, banks, they can't even build mobile apps.

1:28:00Immad Akhund:So it'll take a long time for them to build an agent. I think it's like at the end of the day, like what's aligned with customers, what's like going to happen in the future anyway? And like, how do we help facilitate that? And I think if we do that the most aggressive way we can do, and like, you know, the future is not like well-defined either, right? Like, yeah, is it going to be everyone's in, you know, flawed co-work or chat GPT work or whatever? And that's the main interface that like most people run their business. Oh, is it still Slack or text or whatever it is? Like, I don't know, but like, we'll try to explore all of them and on that last note um i we briefly spoke about agent cards my sense is we're like probably on the precipice of things getting pretty wild um maybe it will start in crypto or whatever but like agents are going to be i already have an agent that has my credit card in a vault like these things are going to start ramping um i think you guys have been really thoughtful and like relatively cautious maybe is the right word when it comes to this there was a frame somewhere.

1:28:59It's like, um, our overall philosophy towards AI was to assume that LMs will hallucinate rather than wonder if that could happen. We focused our efforts on ensuring that it'd be virtually impossible in those instances for the AI to do anything unintended or harmful to users account. But I think people are going to demand more and more for lack of a better word, like chaotic possibilities. We've keep coming back to the scene, which is like, you are balancing, like we are a bank, we need to be reliable, we need to like reduce harm and we are like actually pushing on what is possible. But this feels like a really, really hard domain to think through.

1:29:35Immad Akhund:Maybe. I don't think like, you know, actually this is like generally true. You know, the thing that like, I think bank regulators or like sensible people want is not that misaligned with what customers want, right? Like I think customers would not want an agent to go rogue and spend a million dollars or something like that. And we don't want that either. So the way we build command is like, it can't do any action for you. Like it can present an action and you still have to click and it actually goes to a separate non-AI kind of server to like actually go send the money or whatever. So I kind of think about that across like all of this space, right?

1:30:15Immad Akhund:Like if, you know, maybe you're fine with your agent having, you know,$50 a day or$500 or whatever, or like maybe on a specific thing, you'll give it$10 ,000 to go like spend. But you'd want to have like those controls. You can treat it similar to like, what would you give to like an outsourced like person that was like buying on your behalf? And like, there's only certain levels of controls that you would trust that person and you'd be pretty careful about it. And yeah, maybe over time you'll like, and like this may maybe happen with AI, like over time you'll trust AI with your money more than you'll trust yourself or something, which is like, you know, kind of, But for now, we're still in a world where people will want to have controls, but you want to reduce the friction.

1:30:59Immad Akhund:So that's kind of how we think about it. It's like, oh, yeah, the agent can spend money, but you have to approve it. At what interval? Like approve every transaction, approve up to a certain? So I think it depends on each person. You want to give the person the maximum flexibility. Yes, exactly. So I think people will want different levels of flexibility and control. So at least on like bigger payments going out, I think we will require people to click on the approve, but like it can be all set up for you. And that's like kind of the annoying part. When it comes to like card spends, I think there'll be much more like, you know, we have an agent card, you can set a lot of controls on it.

1:31:32Immad Akhund:But yeah, maybe the controls are like a little more free because like, you know, this is booking a hotel and like the card is issued to be only able to book a hotel. And like, yeah, maybe it's a little bigger than because like you've got this control on there. So you need like a sensible set of controls that like deliver the best experience to customers. And I mean, I think everyone's trying to figure this out. Like even like this kind of idea of like, you know, the agent sets up the transaction, but you have to click to approve it. Like, I don't know, we did that. I know other people exploring that kind of, you know, where's the like purely text thing and where's the interface and where's the boundaries between that.

1:32:11Immad Akhund:And I think text is not always great, right? Like our command agent does like charts and things like that. Right, right, right. But you can like meld these things together, right? Like I think that's the future. It's not like the text box and the command, the chat GPT type interfaces, like just purely text. I think over time it gets like more complicated and like delivers like dense information in the right way. This is a ridiculous question for regulatory reasons, if not other reasons. But do you think there will be a future? can you imagine a future where agents can open Mercury accounts by themselves?

1:32:51Immad Akhund:I guess they're like at least right now they're still making an account on behalf of someone else, right? I think we're there yet where either there's a human or a company behind that agent like someone's got to pay for the compute and all that kind of stuff maybe be an eventual I might tell my agent to set up an LLC though Yeah, but then you're still behind that LLC Like who owns LLC? And I think at least in the US banking system, we would want to KYC and KYB. Like the LLC is a real LLC and like someone owns it. Somebody needs to be liable too on some mobile. Yeah. Yeah. And like, yeah, there's sanctions, there's all sorts of things.

1:33:28Immad Akhund:So there's definitely a world where agents are like, you know, basically AGI or ASI or whatever we want to call it, where, yeah, an agent is like, you know, owns their own compute. Like maybe you've seeded it with$1 ,000, but they're making their own money. They own their own computer. They own their own company. I don't think that's like some crazy distant world, by the way. It feels pretty close. It's not today. But yeah, in that world, either like the agents, like these AGI entities will have to have like alternative systems, like they'll have stable coin wallets or whatever, or like the US banking system needs to have like agent identities.

1:34:06Immad Akhund:And like that, yeah. Yeah, maybe there's words we're issuing driver's licenses to, or like IDEs to agents. We're about all entrepreneurs, agents or otherwise. It's going to be a strange one. I just have a few more things before we wrap up. I mentioned earlier unlimited TAM, unlimited ideas. When you think really ambitiously about Mercury, at least that you're willing to talk about, what types of things come to mind? I mean, there's still so much to do, right? Like we actually have this, like, we call it the cosmic cube. The x-axis is like the types of customers we can do stuff for. The y-axis is the types of features we can build for them or products we can launch.

1:34:54Immad Akhund:And the z-axis is like kind of compliance and kind of quality and trust and support and all of that kind of stuff. So we've had this concept for like, I don't know, five years or something like that. But like, if you approach the world like that, like it's everything. It's like, what are the types of customers we do today, which is relatively small sets of types of businesses, but we'll keep expanding that. We don't do anything internationally. We have a little bit in that personal space, but it's still very new. We only launched that in January. So there's this kind of user ICP expansion that has a lot of dimensions where you can do stuff.

1:35:30Immad Akhund:Then there's the types of products. So there you can kind of split it between financial products where we don't have any lending products and there's a lot to build there. And then there's the software products where you can think about, we just launched books, but you can think about what are the other types of products that deal with money and that people care about from a consumer business angle. And then I guess the third dimension of products is this kind of agents. What are the agents that will help people and what are the use cases that work against? and you can, whether you have sub-agents or like, yeah, you can imagine an AR agent, an HR agent, an AP agent, a bookkeeping agent.

1:36:11Immad Akhund:Like there's just so many ways to like help people with their finances and like make their lives easier there. So that has like, a lot of those categories are like huge kind of time categories. And yeah, I don't know if the Z axis by itself has like time associated with it. But yeah, there's so much to do. I mean, I think there's a, if you think about US banking, it's like$2 trillion market. Like, it's actually kind of funny. It's as big as all of like the software SaaS industry or something like that. But that's just the US, right? So yeah, it's a huge market. And I really think we're just like right at the start of it.

1:36:48Immad Akhund:It takes a long time to kind of compound in this system. I understand that one of your cultural values is humility. but I'm curious if you have any specific ambitions around that very, very large market you just mentioned.

1:37:06Immad Akhund:Like as and how big do we want to be? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think at some point I want to be a public company. I think that's like my last, as an entrepreneur, the last thing I haven't like crossed the Rubicon on or whatever. And is that a product of just product of scale in a public company? Obviously a$5 billion company at some point in time would have been public. It isn't today. It makes more sense. Yeah, I think because we've kind of set our path in this bank charter process, there's a lot of steps to get that and get that stable. And I think one of the, yeah, there's like the two things that public companies should be is scaled and stable.

1:37:41Immad Akhund:It's like kind of, yeah, ideally, actually, the world wasn't like that. And we could have subscale and still not unstable, but like, you know, volatile companies earlier on that would go public. But yeah, so that kind of, I would say, delayed our thinking when it came to going public. So there's no imminent timeline, but yeah, at some point we'd like to do it. And then outside that, like, you know, to me, the main thing is like having more and more people that love Mercury and like giving them more and more value. Yeah, that will end up meaning that like we make more money and we have a higher valuation.

1:38:17Immad Akhund:I don't like, I don't personally see a cap to that. I think the markets are huge. And we'll grow into that if we do a good job for our customers. How has investing, I mean, you've been an incredibly prolific angel investor and now have a fund. You've talked a lot about investing, but I'm curious how that specifically influenced this seat as the CEO of Mercury, if at all. Yeah, a lot of our early investors were, I mean, a lot of our early customers were things I'd invested in. and like there was just the right size and obviously they had like some trust in me, I guess. So that was like kind of like, it wasn't deliberate necessarily, but like it was literally like, oh, I think our 30 beta customers were like almost all like companies I'd invested in.

1:39:05Immad Akhund:So there was like some help there. I know a lot about like all sorts of things. Like I know a lot about like AI and harnesses and like, you know, even like some lab stuff and like, you know, LLM technology and things like that. and yeah, I've done a bunch of space tech, so I know all sorts of things about space tech. Actually, like investing is this like funny thing where like if you want to invest in a space, you end up talking to like, you know, five or six people before you invest in one company. So like maybe you've had three hours of conversations on like the space. And like actually entrepreneurs tend to, part of like what is being a good entrepreneur and being good at pitching is like simplifying like complex concepts into like a understandable narrative.

1:39:48Immad Akhund:So it's like such a gift as an investor because you have like really smart people at the frontier of what they're doing that are spending like 30 minutes to an hour, like breaking it down for you. Like they're just answering all your questions, right? And like, I think like I really enjoy this. I mean, that's like why I still invest really. Like I don't, you know, I want to be helpful to people, which is the second reason I invest. But like I don't really do it for the money. I think like it's just like a fun conversation. But you do end up learning all sorts of things. And I think it does keep you abreast on whatever.

1:40:22Immad Akhund:I think I know a lot more about AI. And I think it's definitely informed our strategy there. There's also an element of you go look at this two-person company and they do all this stuff. And you're like, oh, man, why does Mercury have 1 ,300 people and we aren't doing more kind of thing? So it does like – Over the decay. Yeah. Yeah, it stokes this kind of feeling that like small teams can like actually get a lot done. And like, you know, how do we like construct Mercury in that way that like we can get a lot done? How do you think you've improved? Maybe this, you talked about the cultural side, but how do you think you are different as a leader today in 2026 than you were, let's say, in 2021?

1:41:02And then in 2016 at the last company?

1:41:06Immad Akhund:I mean, I definitely made my most egregious mistakes in my previous companies. I think this is a benefit of being a full-time entrepreneur. The worst of my mistakes, I was better at. And there's still a ton of learning that you do over time. And also, the company changes, so you need to change the way you behave. you know one thing that like i've learned to do i guess like more somewhat recently but maybe people would still say i'm not that great eyes like you have to kind of be a little more careful about like what what you say when you're at a bigger company and like people don't know you right like because like sometimes you can just be like i hate this kind of thing and like you know when you're like three people together you can say i hate it and people like understand it but like you know when it's a bigger company and like they don't know you and you come into like something and you say you hate it, like people can feel like really disheartened about it.

1:41:59Immad Akhund:So you have to like, you have to like spend a little bit more time giving more context and like, yeah, probably being like a little bit less emotional about like how you react to things. So it's like - Amazing to imagine that you don't know everyone who works here. Like it would be impossible for you to know. It's crazy. And it's, yeah, we have a, actually next week we have our all hands. And like, yeah, it's like nowadays when I go to those, I'm like, I don't know, am I supposed to know you? but yeah that part is I mean until about 180 people I interviewed every single person which like eventually it just became too much to do that but at least you had that one connection point at that point but yeah now I definitely don't know everyone You mentioned you were kind of in this acting CTO role this year what has that been like has that taught you anything more broadly in your real day job?

1:42:53Immad Akhund:I mean, it's been fun because I'm an engineer. So as a CEO, actually when Mercury started, I was coding until basically we launched for the first year and a bit. And it's nice. I kind of missed it. So it's nice to kind of go back to an engineering mindset and think about problems. I'm not coding that much, but still, I'm fairly deep in some technical problems that I haven't been for a while. So that's been fun to see. Yeah, at the end of it, a lot of it's obviously still humans and organizations and products. So it's not too different from the CEO job. In fact, I try to actually, you know, being the acting CTO is just the more recent thing I've done.

1:43:43Immad Akhund:Before that, I was like the acting risk operations person. Before that, I was like the acting something else. And so, like, I tend to, different CEOs approach things differently. I tend to be like, whatever's the biggest problem, I'll dive in there. I'll try to figure out, make some progress. And then, like, potentially hire someone or, like, sometimes just, like, I don't have to do that. But so, like, that's every year as an entrepreneur, I end up doing different things. So, the CTO is just, like, the newest thing. But at least the good thing about this is I know kind of what I'm doing. Whereas, like, I was a risk officer.

1:44:14Immad Akhund:I was like, I guess, like, I'll figure it out. but I can be a little deeper here. But it's also fun because AI is changing what an engineering team does and how it operates. And even I started as acting CTO, I guess January-ish. But the whole environment's changed since January. The number of PRs we do a week is doubled. So everything is changing. So it's kind of like, as an entrepreneur, I love that. I think most people don't like continuous change. I'm like, yeah, that's what I live for. Surf the wave. I may have mentioned it earlier, but there's this clear attunement to aesthetics that is partly designed and brand and care and all these things, but is there any place you think that comes from?

1:45:05Is there an art thing? I don't know. Where do you think that comes from?

1:45:10Immad Akhund:It's actually my co-founder, Jason, who manages product and design. He is like a very artsy person. I think, so, you know, I will give him a lot of credit for like a lot of the aesthetics. For me, I really care about like the customer experience. So there's like, you know, product design to me and aesthetics, there's definitely like the art kind of side of it, but there's also like, there's kind of also an art to like simplifying things and like making them understandable and easier. and like, you know, you have to kind of, to be like a great product designer, you have to be like a really good problem solver.

1:45:52Immad Akhund:And that bit like really resonates with me. Like I really, whenever I look at any product, I try to like remove my biases of like, yes, I understand like how Mercury works and like how banking works and all this and go like, if I'd never seen any of this before, like, would this button make any sense? Or like, would this flow make any sense? How do we really be extremely empathetic? So that's one aspect. And then I also try to get really annoyed about things. I think just being annoyed about the world is quite a useful attribute as a CEO. You're just like, okay, why does it have to be like this?

1:46:26Immad Akhund:So I try to harness that annoyance into feedback on product ideas or whatever it is. You've got to contain it, I think, but it's probably very useful. Yeah, but like, there's like probably like a negative kind of annoyance where you're just like frustrated and like can't articulate it. But like a positive annoyance, which is like, you know, why does this step exist? And like, it could be better. And like, this is how it would be better. And like, why don't we do it like this? Like that kind of thing. I think that can be like pretty positive. Yeah. You have three daughters, as I understand. Yeah.

1:46:56Is there anything that you particularly want to instill in them?

1:47:03Immad Akhund:Hmm. So my two favorite personal attributes, which I think are like real gifts that I would love to give them as being optimistic and being curious. And like maybe the third one is like being kind of resilient. Yeah. But it is hard to teach these things. Like it's not like an obvious, actually like teaching anything as a parent is quite hard. I think the main thing you have to kind of do is be like an exemplar to those things. Like if you live it and breathe it, you can teach it. But like, yeah, it's just like I've always thought that like I'm fairly optimistic and I'm very curious. And I've always thought both of those things are like such just free gifts because like, you know, I just feel like if you're just optimistic, you're just like, you know, most of the time things are actually pretty good.

1:47:52Immad Akhund:And if they're not, you don't like worry about it all the time until like the bad thing happens. So optimism is great. And then curiosity is just like, you know, the world is like such an interesting place. I think if you're like learning and curious, like that's like such a, like I enjoy, like a lot of my enjoyment comes from like learning things and being curious about them. So, but I also think like optimistic and curious and resilient people are like the most kind of successful at whatever they do. But like that's kind of the, those three things are like the core of like being able to do anything successfully.

1:48:24Yeah, they're also, I think, an engine to keep going. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

1:48:28Immad Akhund:As an entrepreneur, it's actually like, you know, so much shit goes wrong. Like essentially like early on that, like you have to go like, oh yeah, that's fine. Like the last three products I launched didn't work at all, but this fourth one is going to change the world.

1:48:44You were born in Pakistan. You had a tour in the UK. I don't know that that was necessarily the highlight. And then you ended up in the US and you've been here for a long time. I'm curious, maybe particularly for Pakistan and the US, what gives you pride about each of those places?

1:49:05Immad Akhund:I mean, I have, it took a while to get it, but like, you know, moving to America is like a tricky place. Like it's this, I went through like four different visas. Like they don't make it easy, but I remember like getting a citizenship, which I think was like 2018 or something. And like, you feel a lot of pride. Like that's the first time where like, you really feel like you're welcomed and there's like a nice ceremony. and actually the step from like green card to citizenship is like relatively easy. So I remember feeling a lot of like pride then. Like now I, you know, because America is actually the place I've lived the most.

1:49:40Immad Akhund:So I feel like there's something nice about America where like, I guess I help Simon, San Francisco, where there's a lot of immigrants, but I feel like you can become American in a way you can't become British. So I've always liked that about America. and obviously it's like a very entrepreneurial place. Like I'm very aligned with it. Pakistan to me was like very much like I was there until the age of nine. That's still like, you know, where my family comes from and my roots. I have like a somewhat funny story, which like is probably like a big source of pride for me. So on my mom's side, 12th grandfather, so you have to go 12th generation, was the ruler of the Durrani Empire, which was like, which is actually, so actually her family, the Barakzays, were like basically in control until the Taliban.

1:50:33Immad Akhund:Wow. But the Durrani Empire like stretched from Afghanistan to a lot of Pakistan to like a bit of India. But like, you know, we were quite poor growing up, especially moving to London. So it was this like weird thing that I grew up with where it was like, you know, I might be poor and I might not have anything, but I always felt like I could achieve anything because of this weird familial... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do think these stories that people tell themselves, it's like, what are your self-limiting beliefs? But I didn't have a limiting belief because I was just like, well, I can do anything because this guy did this crazy thing.

1:51:12Immad Akhund:Great, great grandson of him. So I've always actually, I think as an entrepreneur, that's always been, and that's something I really like about San Francisco. you can be like, yeah, you can go to an event and see like some person who built like a billion dollar company. And like, you know, I did Y Combinator and like, yeah, it's like you get like suddenly exposed to a bunch of people who come to do these dinners and you sit next to them and you're going like, you know, they're smart, but they're not like some like superhuman person. They're like, like they become like, they, I think it's hard to believe you can achieve something when you think it's like someone else in like some other situation.

1:51:46Immad Akhund:Whereas like, if you feel like they're just another human, and they have their own struggles.

1:51:53Immad Akhund:That's always been a really empowering thing to me. I don't think I'm amazing or anything, but I also don't think everyone else is that amazing either. We're all trying to figure stuff out. So I guess I talked about Pakistan and America. I don't know if I have a great one for the UK. I mean, it was definitely a formative set of years for me. And I was there from 9 to 23.

1:52:16Immad Akhund:and what gives me pride from that? For what it's worth, I was actually asking primarily about Pakistan in the US. I know that it seems like the UK thing was important for your resilience, maybe. Yeah, sure. It was important for resilience. And also, I think people probably shit about on the social welfare system or whatever, but I'm definitely a product of it. I went to university for basically free and I went to like an amazing education system. I definitely wouldn't have got that in Pakistan. So in that sense, I have a lot to be thankful for in the UK. We talked about it at the very top around your answer for banking.

1:53:00I think money is something that in some sense is like this fuel and it can also be an area of obsession and it can also be an area of frustration and pain. But I'm curious if you have any advice or thoughts for people on how to make it an empowering idea and substrate rather than this thing of, again, either on one of the spectrum, like obsession point, like point thing or this like thing that rules over you and is a point of pain point.

1:53:31Immad Akhund:So there's this like funny concept, which like, I think if like, maybe this is too libertarian a concept, but like money is like freedom in a way that like, like you have to imagine a world without money to see how important money is right like a world without money like what does that mean like it's like you know i would have to like like i won't be able to like sell my services in any way like i'd have to like you know do my own thing i'd have to like go farm or something or like you know maybe i can like figure out how to build something and i have to barter for it like uh or like maybe like you have like a communist type system where like someone else is defining like, you know, maybe still industrial, but there's no money.

1:54:12Immad Akhund:And like someone's defining like who can buy what and who can work in which job and like all these things. So like both of those things are like pretty messed up. So money is this like massive unlock of freedom, which is like hard to like really get because like it's not, like we're just so used to it that like we don't realize like we can swap this like abstract thing for anything and we can sell our services and we can build things. so I think like I think that's one we own it which I think is like interesting to kind of think about like there's no alternative to this thing like this is actually freedom and like it's such an abstract freedom that like we think we take it for granted not that I'm saying this isn't problems with society but like I think problems with society actually like mostly government based in my opinion but that's a whole separate kind of conversation I think the second thing that's like really interesting about money is for certain activities, like the upside of what you can get out of them is like unbounded and the downside is bounded, which is like what got me really comfortable with being an entrepreneur.

1:55:18Immad Akhund:It's like, I was like, hey, I am forsaking a job, right? But like the maximum I'm going to get out of this job is like whatever, I think I was like making$50 ,000 or something when I first quit. So like I'm losing$50 ,000, but I could make a billion dollar company, right? Like that's like, I'm not saying like it's easy, but, and that equation is obviously different for different people, but like doing things that have like unbounded upside and cap downside is like great. And actually like, I try to teach this to my kids to like do things that have like unbounded upside and cap downside and not the reverse.

1:55:55Immad Akhund:So there's a few things like drugs and gambling and like - We're under calibrated on risk or miscalibrated on risk, I should say. Yeah, where the downside is unbounded, where you can really ruin your life. So that's actually a nice framing, I think, for money as well, to try to think what are things that have this kind of unbounded potential to them. Yeah, I feel like it's changed a little bit. If you're an AI researcher, you can get unbounded potential without being an entrepreneur as well. But maybe you can still have that framing. There are benefits to entrepreneurial life that aren't just money too, i.e.

1:56:32freedom.

1:56:32Immad Akhund:Your phrasing was money. A quote from you. I think something people don't understand about time. Time is about energy, not about time. Can you say more about that? So I think it's like, you know, if you're doing something that like gives you energy, like, I don't know, you're like having this conversation or talking to entrepreneurs or like, I don't know, playing sport, like tennis or whatever, You can do that for a really long time. Whereas if you're doing something that's kind of like, I don't know, you're fundraising or something. Sometimes when I'm fundraising, I do four hours of pitches or whatever.

1:57:14Immad Akhund:And at the end of it, I'm like, I'm so done. I can't do anything else today kind of thing. And it's like, you can do one thing for 12 hours and the other thing for four hours. I think that most people actually have a lot of time in the day. There's the many hours in the day and people, I think the limiting factor for most people, at least for me and maybe other people, like slightly different to me, but the limiting factor is like, am I doing things that like give me energy and I can just keep going at them because like I have, you know, I'm like gaining from this over time versus things that like just like pulling me down and like I'm just like feeling it hard to get through this thing and getting hard to get through the day.

1:57:52Immad Akhund:So this really struck me when I was in my first job, I was like, I'd show up and I wasn't like a hard worker. I'd like, you know, I'd show up at 10 and I tried to leave as like a four or something. I was just like so tired at the end of it because it's like such a draining thing. And then when I quit and I was doing my own startup, I'd like wake up at nine, go till midnight and I'd still be like energized. And like, it was just like, I was like, okay, like, you know, time-wise, like I was clearly doing way more time, but somehow like I'm still feeling energized about it. And I also think about this in the context of having kids.

1:58:24Immad Akhund:Like I think like a lot of people like forsake like life for like being an entrepreneur. Whereas I, like, you know, when I, I've always had this feeling that I want to be an entrepreneur forever. So I was like, I'm not going to like give up on my life because like I just have to find a way to do this alongside my life. So in that context, you can definitely be like, okay, you know, how do I construct your life in a way that you, you know, when you're at work, you're like maximally productive because you're like filling your things that like give you energy. But I mean, there's, yeah, there's, you can't hide from the fact that as an entrepreneur, You have to do things that like a grind that are like, you know, take away from that.

1:59:01Immad Akhund:You just have to kind of balance it. And then like, you know, I think of like family life is something that gives me energy. That's all I got. Thank you, sir. This was a joy and an honor. This was a great conversation. Thank you again for listening. If you'd like to support the show, please share this episode with a friend. You can also learn more at dialectic.fm slash immad dash akhund. And thank you again to Notion for supporting the show. Notion was an early believer in dialectic, and they have been so supportive in me turning this project into a business and in terms of something that I hope to do for a very long time.

1:59:43Notion is a tool that many of us have used for years, many with unbelievable love and some with frustration. People have criticized Notion's speed in the past or the complexity of setting everything up. And I think they have been so thoughtful recently in listening to those critiques. The team just recently rebuilt the mobile app from scratch to make it significantly faster. And of course, with AI and Notions MCP, you can have your AI tools design any part of your workspace and make it incredibly easy to use Notion as a hub, whether you're spending a ton of time directly in Notion or you're just having your agents use it as the shared substrate.

2:00:23Notion Skills API lets you store all of the skills you use across different tools all in a single place. So that again, if you decide to change the tool you're using, use a different model, use a different agent, you don't have to start from square one. The other great thing about the Notion Skills API is that anybody on your team can access and use the skills that you have created. Notion's MCP works with whatever AI tool you're using too. so you can connect your agents and make sure they update everything about the context of what you or your teammates are doing right inside Notion so that everyone has consistency, reliability across tools, and context across all of the work that is being done.

2:01:01Regardless of the AI tools and agents that you and your team might use, you should use Notion as the shared place where all of the context is for people to read and work with and for agents to read and work with, regardless of what those agents are or what tools a person might use now or in the future. My thanks to Notion for supporting Dialectic. You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. And thank you for listening. I will see you next time.