463: Why Small Customers Matter with ​​Immad Akhund of Mercury

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2:42Hey, Founder fam. Welcome back to another episode of The Founder Podcast. Today, we're speaking with Imad Akhand, the CEO and founder of a company called Mercury, a bank for startups that is a fintech unicorn valued at$1.6 billion. And in our conversation, we discuss how Mercury is disrupting the banking industry for startups and founders, plus we'll dig deeper into the financial strategies that startups need to overcome challenging times. please welcome to the founder podcast Imad Akhant. The first question I ask everyone that comes on is how'd you get your job aka how'd you find yourself doing the work you're doing today?

3:29So I started doing startups in 2006. I had a job at Bloomberg in the kind of R &D stuff so I was a programmer and it was like really boring. I found it very unmotivating. I just felt like I was a cog in a pretty big machine. And I had a friend and we would always read TechCrunch and see things launching and got excited about them. And at one point, he had an idea around kind of property. And I was like, okay, let's just leave this job and go do that. And it was just the two of us who raised no money. We were kind of working out of my apartment in this like tiny one bedroom. But it was just really fun.

4:18Like I was like, wow, you can just like make things and you can be like super motivated in life. And that was the start and I've never kind of looked back since. Yeah, wow. So 2006, so you founded four companies since then. Your most recent Mercury, Fintech Unicorn valued at over 1.6 billion. Can you tell us about your first company? was this it that first one yeah that was the first one it was called rev map uh we kind of pivoted halfway eventually it was kind of like a yelp for london and this was early on yelp did exist but it wasn't popular in london um and really we just made all the mistakes you could make you know no money raised it was just the two of us we had no idea how to get distribution uh we just thought you could build something launch it and then suddenly just magically become successful uh and which didn't really happen um and my uh ex-co-founder at the time was like hey i'm getting married and i need a job so he left me uh to uh you know to get a job and like honestly that startup wasn't going anywhere but uh it did just hook me on the idea and i uh i kind of went and found some other co-founders to do a new startup and move to San Francisco we did Y Combinator in my second startup so yeah that was that startup is you know we did all the things wrong but it was still like a fun journey which I think is like actually one of the most important things is to like enjoy what you're doing even when you're making mistakes and so what was the second startup and you go into Y Combinator?

5:57Yeah, that one was called ClickPass. It was basically made it easy to log into websites. Like we were on Hacker News and Washington Post and things like that. And you click a button and you say, log in with Google. And we would like manage all the kind of UI and developer experience for the website. That did pretty well. Like we had, I think a few million users. We had this kind of built-in distribution but we had no way of making money so we were just like okay you know we we'd raised some money a few hundred K and you know we built something but it was hard to get do it to the next level without like actually making money or having like a good idea of how to make money so we ended up doing a talent acquisition with that startup which led to my third startup yep and what was that uh so that was called haze app uh which is in 2008 and i did this startup so the first one was like seven months second one was one and a half years and the third one i did for 80 years uh so that was a most of my startup journey uh it also went through y combinator i did it with a really old friend of mine um who i knew known since i was 13 uh you I think having a strong founder relationship actually meant that we lasted a very long time, even though our first idea and our second idea kind of sucked.

7:26That was like four years in, we did a third idea that got us to profitability, but still kind of sucked. And then we did a fourth idea, which was finally one that had actual product market fit. And then it was, yeah, so the fourth idea was in developer tools. basically like if you are making a mobile app and you want to show a video ad normally it's kind of a pain to go integrate five different ad networks figure out like this one works well in turkey this one works well in this situation etc so we would build we built something that would like make it so you just integrate us we take care of all of the optimization for you and give you like nice dashboards and things like that and that was very successful especially among kind of mobile gaming apps and we ended up selling that for 45 million in 2016.

8:16Yeah wow I have before we get to Mercury I'm curious I have to delve deeper so how long were you working on the final iteration of it before you found product market fit? So it depends where you start, right? So we had a, it was, everything was a sequence of things. Like we never did, we did four pivots, but all of them were like sequential pivots that were like, oh, what about this thing that's related? So we had a mobile gaming social network. So Haze app was like an actual app for a bit and had lots of users, but the users would never stick around. But then we started showing ads to those users and we were like, wow, we're making money in this and like i remember someone gave us like we'd never made money for like three or four years at this company and like there's this like japanese gaming uh network was like um just like dc or something like that anyway they gave us a 60 000 check and they were just like give me some users and i was like whoa 60k for users we can do that we have lots of users uh so that got us into advertising and then but the app wasn't working so we were like okay you know why don't we just make an ad network and at that time that app was really big on Android but Android didn't have many focused ad networks so that got us into the ad network space where we weren't big but we actually made enough money and we were profitable like we only had like 13 people but it wasn't like it wasn't gonna be a like a startup success in that network space it's just very hard to build that like you can you can build a company that's successful but you it's very hard to be a huge startup in the ad network space.

9:55And then while we were in ad network, we saw this pain point that people had where they were plugging in us with other ad networks and they didn't know how to do that. And it was hard for us to persuade them to integrate us because it was so much work for them. So we're like, oh, why don't we just make this easy for people? So there was basically like a three-year progression to get to this idea and even understand it well enough that we could come up with this idea. But then once we came up with the idea, we started doing it. And it took us about, I would say nine months from like launching the first version to having something that really, really worked really, really well and was like, just started growing really, really fast.

10:33And the process was kind of interesting. We just like, we had a smallish sales team, like five-ish people, and they would just go talk to developers that we wanted them to use our product. And the developer would say like, oh, if you build this thing, we would probably use this. And we would just build whatever was the top thing that the most people were asking for. And we just kept doing this every month. We would just build whatever is the top thing. And then after nine months, we had like the best product in the market. It was very much just like iterating in that space. Yeah, interesting. So you sold in 2016.

11:08And then how did you start Mercury? Tell me about that journey. Yeah, so I had this idea since 2013. I mean, I always have ideas. Like I think it's fun. like yeah i'm a i'm a real startup nerd or whatever the term is so i'm always thinking of like ideas and problems and i'm like okay you know why can't this be better uh and yeah in 2013 i met this other company that was like doing uh debit cards for seniors uh so completely unrelated to mercury and i was like and there was just two people three people at this company i was like wow you guys are like issuing cards i didn't even know that was possible for a startup that small to do right like it was like i was like mind blown that that was possible i was like why don't we just do this for startups like all the banks kind of suck and i have to use this like bank that sucks uh whereas you guys are you know doing this for seniors so this was just this idea i had i was like okay you know at some point i'm gonna do something which is just gonna fix banking for startups and and yeah that seemed like it seemed like an obvious idea right because since I've been doing startups since 2006, a lot of things had improved, right?

12:20As an entrepreneur, like the tools that you used in 2006 were really bad. I remember when I started Hazep in 2008, like someone came with the, I needed to run payroll and someone came with like a binder to like sign us up. And we were, it was just the two of us living in like an apartment and like running the business from an apartment in San Francisco and someone came to like sign us up to run payroll physically. And I was like, oh, this is crazy that this person's wasting their time to come ahead to get us to fill in a form. Like, why can't we just do this online? And then, you know, a few years later, like, yeah, actually, I know these guys, the Gusto founders, like started doing payroll online.

13:04And basically, all the startups started using that around, I guess, 2011, 2012. So I just thought the same thing would happen in banking, that someone would just build a modern product that would do it. So I had this idea in 2013, there was actually another company called Seed, Seed.co, that tried to do this in actually 2015-ish. And at that point, I was like, okay, nevermind, someone else has solved it, I'll come up with another idea. But by 2017, it was kind of, yeah, obviously, it wasn't working out. I think that was still around, but they weren't quite delivering the vision that I had, which was like a very startup focused power user bank.

13:43Most of the people that had done anything in this space had ended up doing like a, you know, like a mobile app to run your bank. And it's like kind of consumery feeling, but for like a small business, which I think there's a space for, but, you know, I knew that a startup that's going to go raise like$5 million is not going to use a mobile app to do all their banking. They need to have power user tools. They need to be able to do wires and do user management and all of these kind of things. So it was obvious that in 2017, this space still existed and that the problem existed and someone should fix it.

14:21The tricky thing was, I'd never done anything in FinTech. So I had to basically approach this thing as like, I know nothing about how to actually do this apart from like you know i can build a product uh and i can recruit a team for that uh and i knew that the customer problem existed but but i was i mean that was the scariest part like doing something where i was just like i have literally not no clue about fintech and i had to go from kind of zero to like getting enough faith that i could do it uh yeah that was like the first part of the problem hey founder fam i want to talk to you about something super exciting we're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders.

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17:24But yeah, as long as you enjoy the journey, like it doesn't matter. Right. So I really enjoyed making things. I, I tried investigating becoming a kind of full-time investor. And honestly, it was kind boring like you just meet people and you invest in them but then what uh whereas when you make something like you know like i i enjoyed programming i enjoy like having ideas and bringing them to life yeah there's just so much you can have you can have a very broad impact as an entrepreneur and i really uh enjoyed many parts of that i mean it's a grind it's not easy like it's it's definitely would be easier to to relax on a beach or i guess even being an investor i think is a lot easier um but i think it's important to not optimize for easy i think it's like important to optimize for like something that you can be excited about when you wake up in the morning and you've invested in over 250 companies right uh probably more than 300 now i'm still a fairly active investor i invest in like probably like 10 a quarter 10 a quarter and are you getting a lot to inbound or you just go on angel list like yeah yeah and when i started investing again yeah it was all hustle like it was 2016 i sold my company i was kind of bored because i had to work at this other company for a year and you know it wasn't very engaging and i was like oh maybe i want to be an investor so then i you know i'd reach out to companies i saw that launched on twitter and i I would look at all the Y Combinator companies, like, you know, try to find out who they were and try to like invest in them before demo day.

19:02I talked to all my friends and found all the ones that were investors and like, you know, met up with all of them and said, hey, send me leads. And I'd send them leads and I tried to build that network. So the first part of anything is hard and there was like a lot of hassle to get to the companies. Nowadays, thankfully, it's a lot easier. So, you know, when you invest in a bunch of companies and you're helpful to them, they introduce you to their friends. So that's one big source. A lot of investors know that I invest. So they introduce me to companies they invest in. I get a lot of inbound because people know that I invest and Mercury is fairly successful.

19:35And also we target startups. So like a lot of people know about me. So yeah, mostly nowadays, I look at most ideas that people send me and I basically like try to make a judgment on it. I'm fairly opinionated about like what markets are interesting to me and like where the world is going. So that makes it easier. I'll just not talk to someone unless I really like the idea in the first place. And then I'm mostly vetting like that they're thinking about it in a good way. And they seem like strong entrepreneurs, which is much simpler. I've got to, I've got to delve a bit deeper before we go back to Mercury.

20:12Where do you think the world is going? When I say I know, I don't know exactly where the world is going, but I know where I want it to go, right? Like I want it to be, I want to have a space-based civilization where like we have lots of satellites in space and we can send people to Mars and the moon and we can like have an industry in space, right? Like that's one thing I want. I want AI to be way smarter so that like people don't have to do boring jobs. Like we can have robots that like clean the toilets. We can have, you know, we can just move away from like all this boredom and drudgery that like most people have to do so whether it's I think robotics and AI is quite interesting but there's obviously kind of this new level of AI which I think also you know people think humans will be removed from the equation but I think in general we will have humans just doing like things that humans can uniquely do which are like the things that humans want to do I don't think humans want to write like really boring copy for a blog because of SEO reasons, right?

21:16Like there's all, or like people don't want to write emails. Like there's just so many things people have to do that no one really wants to do. And I think AI will help enable that. So those are two interesting things that I think are like particularly interesting right now. Yeah, I think there's lots of interesting things in bio, but like, I'm just not good enough to judge entrepreneurs and ideas there so i mean i would like to see uh crisper be a bigger thing and uh you know we can edit uh our genes and uh like animal genes and plant genes and like become like way more optimal there uh there's some really interesting stuff in climate tech like i would love for i just invested in a nuclear company actually i would love for nuclear to be way more mainstream i think the The easiest way to solve climate change is to have 90 % of our electricity come from nuclear, whether it's like fission or fusion.

22:13So that's an interesting space. But yeah, I think lots of people are really pushing the boundaries of like, you know, people think about like investing in climate tech as like fixing climate change, which is obviously important. But actually, the more important thing is like, well, not the more important, but equally important thing is like coming up with better ways to do energy for humans, right? Energy is like this kind of significant part of the GDP. If you can improve that, that leads to like a lot of really good consequence.

22:46Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying this episode and learning a ton. As you know, in this series, we interview some of the greatest founders of our generation to find out how they did it. However, if you're thinking of starting your own business and you want to hear from some incredible stories from everyday people like you or I who are actually in the trenches, only been building their business for maybe one year or two years, like they're building right now and they're really in the early stages, but they're getting success. You should come and check out our new podcast from zero to founder hosted by our community manager, Molly Flynn.

23:24These are in the trenches stories from our very own successful students that have gone through some of our programs. People just like you who are deep within the process of building their very own successful business. These are the founders of tomorrow. You can find the From Zero to Founder podcast on all platforms. And remember, it's founder. You invest in, you said, around 15 companies a quarter. 10 per quarter. 40 per year. 40 per year. How many people do you have to speak to and meet to be able to do that much worse because i you know i come i come with like a pretty opinionated thing so most people i'm just like there's like a very large set of startups i'm just not going to talk to because they're not i mean there might be reasonable startups they're just not like in my interest area so mostly i think i probably speak to 2x more than i invest in uh so to do 10 i'll speak to 20 that's like whatever that is like eight by a month i mean it helps that Mercury sells to startups as well.

24:23Like, you know, I think, I think speaking to a founder and being helpful to a founder is like kind of a fun job. So doing that on the side basically is like, you know, I'm more than happy to do that. Yeah. And you said something interesting. It's either the idea and you kind of quickly work out if they're a strong entrepreneur or not. What did you mean by strong entrepreneur? How do you define that? How do you work that out? It's definitely like an amalgamation of different qualities. A very obvious one is like how deeply have they thought about the thing that they're doing, right? Like they should be able to answer any question you've posed to them and have like a really thoughtful, meaningful answer.

25:01And you should be able to like really engage and have a deep conversation around their topic. So that's one big thing. Second thing, which is, I guess, a little personal, but maybe leads to a better entrepreneur is like, yeah, how much do I want to like talk to this person? Like if, you know, one of the implicit promises I'm making is if I invest in someone and they send me an email and say like, you know, they're like, it's 6pm and they need some advice. And they're like, hey, can I have a call? I will say yes, right? So like, I really want to invest in someone where I can say yes, and like, look forward to that conversation.

25:34Whereas like, you know, often there isn't a chemistry where I'm like, okay, you know, this person I actually want to talk to, and I would enjoy talking to so that's that's element number two i think the third one is like perseverance um yeah how where have they shown previous ability to like really grind through and fight through things and like you know overcome obstacles uh it doesn't have to be an entrepreneurial thing like you know maybe they launched something else or maybe maybe the athletes it's cool right like it can be a lot of different things but i do think like being an entrepreneur can be a real grind and like you know you can feel like the whole world is kind of against you so how do you how have you shown that you can like overcome that and have that kind of strong fortitude um those are probably like three things uh i think the other one that's like kind of related to the idea space is like uh i really want to understand where they see the future and like and that do they have like a strong kind of ethical and worldview that is in line with mine and in line with that idea, if that makes sense.

26:43I can have what I think the idea should get to, but if they have a very different view of where they want to take their idea, which is fine, they should have their own view. But I want to make sure I'm not pretending that their view is my view, which I've done in the past as an investor like sometimes i i have an idea and i i push that idea on other people and i think that they have it but they have a completely different idea yeah and one last question before we move to mercury what size checks you usually write what's the maximum uh it's normally 50 to 100k i have a small fund that i do it with yep okay yep so you have your own fund not just angel yeah awesome well let's talk about mercury so you had this idea for this incredible fintech startup and uh what what did the what did the founding team look like and uh how do you assemble it how long did it take to kind of build the first version of the product um the founding team sort of my two co-founders are people i worked with at my previous company uh so i'd already worked with them for five years and it's basically like the best best engineer i'd worked with and the best kind of sales and product person.

27:56And then there was eight kind of initial people. Five of them were people I'd worked with at my previous company for five years. So, and then the three others we kind of found through combination of kind of referrals and like online kind of job search. And, you know, at my previous company, because it'd gone on for eight years. I'd already filtered out so many people that I couldn't work with and that hadn't worked out that picking the best people that I'd worked with was a pretty good methodology. And then it took us a while. Number one, in order to provide banking services, you need to have a bank partner.

28:42Most people that do it are not banks themselves. And Mercury is not a bank. We actually work with two different banks right now, Evolve and Choice. So we actually went deep with one bank, I won't name them, but they gave us all of these promises about what was possible, these features that they could deliver for us. We went fully integrated with them. It took us basically a year and we were close to getting ready, but they kept saying, oh, this other feature. So one thing that was really important to me was having support for non... So you'd have to have a US business to use Mercury, but we wanted to be able to support non-US residents because I was an immigrant when I came to the US and I didn't want to be in a position where I couldn't use Mercury, which I thought would have been silly.

29:29So I really wanted to have support for like non-US residents. And this sponsor bank that we were working with had promised us support for that. And every few months they'd be like, oh, we're working on this, we're working on this. And they were just like, it just wasn't happening. So a year into this like integration and these integrations are pretty deep. it was like, you know, maybe half the engineering work we'd done. They were like, oh, we can't do this. So then we had to like pivot and switch sponsor bank. So that delayed our launch quite a bit. So overall, it took us about a year and a half to get to our first version of the product live in market.

30:06But one of the kind of weird benefits of it was because it took so long to get this like backend piece done, we ended up really polishing the product. like we redid our onboarding process like from scratch maybe even twice which is kind of crazy because you know normally the Silicon Valley mantra is like launch as quick as possible and do the MVP but like we just couldn't launch because we didn't have a back-end partner that was working so we ended up like really having a much more polished product when we first launched I actually think that was like part of the reason we were we were successful because people were just so impressed by how much work we put into having this like extremely polished like initial product and how did you use twitter to grow yeah twitter was actually like a kind of a main growth channel especially at the start even now it's actually a significant part of our growth uh yeah i think it's really important understanding like where does your customer live like where do they engage uh and how do they make decisions uh and at least i think this is still true uh And with startup entrepreneurs, they're really influenced by VCs and other founders.

31:20It's much harder to... The way we decide what products to use is we go online and say, okay, what are other people using that are also entrepreneurs or VCs or they think about the world in a similar way, let's say. uh uh we first uh you know back in 2017 when i first started i after i got a lead investor with Andreessen Horowitz i basically was like hey i'm gonna leave like a million dollars and i'm gonna try to get as many angel investors as possible to invest for the extra million dollars so I actually had 60 total angel investors and a lot of them were people that people respect and knew and the two ones at the time that had a pretty big Twitter following that tweeted about Mercury that helped a lot was Justin Khan and Elad Gill I don't know if I've even told them how helpful they were but those two tweets made quite a big difference to not just spreading the word but also making people feel like they could trust mercury because yeah the difficult thing in in banking is like you're actually asking for a lot of trust it's not it's not a software product that you can just try it out like you have to put real money you have to send the money to somewhere and you have to hope that like they don't you know they do a good job with your money like you're you know but uh both the security of it and also the uh the infrastructure supporting it basically uh so you really have to like build that trust with someone and that's hard to do as a tiny startup so you know i think having those kind of people that were influencers that other people trusted and they had a good twitter brand was like a real driver for us uh and still is like we have a you know if you search for mercury on twitter there's a lot of i mean nowadays most of the trust and uh and stuff comes from our users right like there's a lot of users we have that use Mercury and they're big proponents of us, which is obviously even better than an investor because a user is actually using it and they have the real experience.

33:33Yeah, that's really interesting. So that traction channel happened organically, not on purpose. I mean, I think when it comes to distribution, I'm a big fan of just trying everything. Like everything that's reasonable. We tried a lot of stuff. Like we did podcasts, we did events, we did uh we did nowadays we do google ads and i think even early on we we started doing ads to see if that would work but yeah you just never know what's going to work in terms of distribution uh but yeah so yeah there's a there's an element of like because you try a lot of things then the things that you work then you double down on those are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey founder plus has you covered with proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success.

34:29Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. And can you tell us about the Mercury Raise program? What is that and why'd you create it and what's the impact you've seen? So I won't name them, but one of our competitors has had this like trope that they would like hold up against us. So I'm a big fan of taking anything that a competitor holds up against you and like turning into an advantage. So one thing our competitive incumbent bank holds up against us at the start was like, oh, you know, maybe these guys have a better product, but we actually like help you raise money because we have this great network of VCs, right?

35:16And I was like, I don't think anyone really gets help from you from raising money. Like I've never heard of anyone, but it was something they kept saying. So I was like, I always found it annoying. So I was like, you know what, we will actually set up a program that actually helps you raise money because, you know, we can do that. And that's what Mercury raises. We were like, okay, you know, they say they will help you raise money, but we'll actually help you raise money. So we set up raise where, you know, the seed program, like we have, we just actually ran it. We basically like a bunch of people apply.

35:49We had about 3000 applications. We selected 60 of them. And then because we've created this kind of funnel, we can then share with like investors. And we have a, I think a group of about 300 investors now in that program, which maybe it's 500. So that's, so it's grown a lot. Like initially it was just this small idea. I just went to all my investor friends and people who invest in Mercury. And I was like, hey, if we send you some good leads, would you look at them? And they were like, sure. And then we just emailed our customers saying, if you're raising money, tell me and we'll connect you. And then we've kind of made it more of a program over time.

36:25So that's what we do for seed stage companies. For Series A's, making those kind of network connections are not as valuable. uh we actually run a in-person thing i guess about once a quarter where we uh get together about 30 founders are looking to raise a series a and we have like panels from vcs and other founders and we you know help them kind of uh give them kind of pitch advice and things like that to help them raise a series a uh so yeah mercury race it's all about helping you raise you around. Awesome. And you've also said that your smallest customers are some of your biggest advocates.