Mercury is a banking platform people actually like. It’s also Immad Akhund’s fourth company. I spoke to him about deciding that banking didn’t need to suck, especially given how central it is to every entrepreneur’s journey.
Nearly a decade in, he hopes to fight decay and build a company that gets better over time, not worse. 1-in-3 startups use Mercury, and he's betting that the next 10 years of entrepreneurship will be greater than the last.
"I think just being annoyed about the world is quite a useful attribute as a CEO... why does it have to be like this?"
21 of my favorite lessons below. Full episode is available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Twitter, and here on Substack. Transcript and all links here. Follow Dialectic on Instagram and Twitter for clips.
Dialectic 57: Immad Akhund - The Art of Irrational Effort
Description
Immad Akhund (X, LinkedIn) is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury. He is also a prolific angel investor and co-hosts the Founders in Arms podcast.
Mercury is a fintech banking platform used by one in three startups. It is Immad’s fourth company in 20 years of entrepreneurship. Mercury is in the process of becoming an FDIC-insured bank and recently launched Mercury Books, AI-powered accounting software.
Immad grew up in Pakistan, moved to London at nine, and left for San Francisco at 23 to become an entrepreneur “for real.” Mercury is built on something rare in finance: a willingness to spend a disproportionate amount of energy on details, the kind of care Immad admits “seems irrational.”
We start with a simple question (what is a bank?) and discuss why banking stayed bad for so long, what stays hard as AI makes software easy to build, and why Mercury’s motto is “be extremely helpful.” Entrepreneurship has shaped Immad’s life, and he hopes Mercury can empower a generation of entrepreneurs.
I hope you come away a little more annoyed by the mediocre things we’ve all learned to tolerate and inspired to put an irrational amount of care into making them better.
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Timestamps
(0:00) Opening Highlights
(1:50) Intro: Immad Akhund
(4:16) Start: Banks and Why Immad Was Suited to Build One
(20:30) What Traditional Banks Do Well & What Mercury Got Right
(29:33) Why Mercury Wants a Bank Charter
(35:57) What’s Scarce When Software Is Easy
(49:00) Becoming the Default for New Entrepreneurs
(53:34) Product: 100 Little Things Better
(1:06:51) The Right to Win
(1:09:19) Brand as Care
(1:15:19) Culture and Being Extremely Helpful
(1:22:51) Command, Agents, and AI
(1:34:26) Ambition, Investing, and Leading
(1:46:54) Family, Pakistan, and America
(1:52:56) Money, Freedom, and Energy
(1:59:14) Outro
The Bar Was Not That High: 21 Lessons on Obvious Advantages, Irrational Care, and Fighting Entropy
Greatness seems achievable once it’s familiar. Immad grew up poor in London, but twelve generations back, an ancestor ruled the Durrani Empire, so greatness was part of the family story. Later, sitting beside billion-dollar founders at Y Combinator dinners made it feel human-sized: “I don’t think I’m amazing or anything, but I also don’t think everyone else is that amazing either.”
Look for risk with a floor and no ceiling. Quitting a $50K job meant $50K of downside, “but I could make a billion-dollar company.” He now teaches his kids to chase capped downside with unbounded upside and to avoid the reverse.
Banks are bad at product because the product doesn’t pay. Immad estimates lending supplies 80–90% of most banks’ revenue, making them “mid-market enterprise sales companies selling loans.” This explains their neglected everyday banking interface.
When the default is mediocre, doing the obvious is an unfair advantage. Immad assumed a law explained why banks hide transactions older than 90 days. In fact, they all share the same backend software and its 20-year-old limitation. Mercury refused to accept limits like that, and “the bar was not that high.”
Enough small improvements can add up to something new. Mercury launched without a novel hook. Just “the thing that you might expect your bank to do, but we did it much nicer.” Immad believes “80% of the fight is doing the little things,” and that doing them consistently compounds.
Two percent of a big enough market is a big market. Six months before launch, Immad spoke to 100 companies and found only two that were really excited: a dispiriting result after so much work. His eventual lesson: *“If 2% of people are like, ‘F\*k yeah,’ that’s actually a lot of people if the market’s big enough.”
Trust is the foundation of a right to win. Most products don’t begin with “Step one: Send me all your money.” Banking does, which makes trust painful to build. But once customers clear that bar, they’re already in a trusted relationship when the next high-trust product arrives, like accounting.
Go long entrepreneurship. Only about a quarter of Mercury’s customers switched from another bank. The rest opened their first account for a new company. Immad wants to compound with them: “The future is defined by those companies, not the existing companies.”
Make the product the relationship. “I really hate talking to people if I don’t need to.” While Silicon Valley Bank tracked how often its bankers talked to customers, Immad built Mercury to be “the thing you come to if you don’t want to talk to people,” because it’s so easy to use.
You can’t pitch cohesion. You have to show it. Mercury is difficult to sell through one headline feature because “100 different things are better”—search, virtual cards, signup, and how they fit together. So they put the whole product online with fake money at demo.mercury.com, and visitors who click through are roughly 30 to 40% more likely to become active customers.
Annoyance is a good product strategy. Mercury runs on Mercury, putting its own builders on the receiving end of their decisions: “I just want (our team) to be clicking around and getting annoyed about things all the time.”
Care can look like wasted effort. An elaborate animation in Mercury’s accounting onboarding seems to have gotten an irrational amount of attention. Immad sees art in that excess—“Why did you even do this?”—and a way to show customers how much the team cares.
Most products & companies decay. Build one that gets better with age. Products ship and go unmaintained, culture drifts, and focus slides from customer value to customer extraction. His defense is a high bar for everything Mercury launches, plus constant upkeep: “It’s like entropy is sucking it out of you all the time and you got to fight it.”
When code gets cheap, look to what’s difficult. Mercury may have started roughly half software and half other moving parts. As software gets 10x easier to build, “then the other part becomes 95% of the hard part”—trust, brand, network effects, and now, the bank charter.
Leave culture undefined, and the loudest voice will define it. At his last company, culture came down to whether people stayed for drinks, and it drifted toward “whoever was the loudest voice in the room.” At Mercury, they wrote down the traits they wanted at four people, then hired and managed against those values.
If you’re not going to be helpful, what’s your purpose? His older sister asked him that when he was a bratty teenager. It stuck, and Mercury’s motto is “be extremely helpful,” because “just being slightly helpful is not good enough.”
Words scale. Context doesn’t. On a three-person team, “I hate this” is candor, because everyone knows how you mean it. At 1,300 people, many of them don’t know him, so the same words can be disheartening. He’s learned to react less emotionally and prioritize context.
Don’t fight the future. Speed it up. When COVID shut people out of bank branches, Mercury was already online, and Immad sees AI as “another accelerant.” Other companies will protect their position, but “the worst thing you can do is fight the future.”
The best finance tool may be the one you never open. The chat box on Mercury’s AI agent (Command) is only “a stepping stone.” The goal is to cc Mercury on a customer thread and have it get the contract signed and make sure they pay on time, until “people don’t come to Mercury, maybe at all.”
Time isn’t about time. It’s about energy. At his first job, Immad showed up at 10 a.m, left at 4 p.m., and still went home exhausted. At his own startup, he worked 9 a.m. to midnight and felt energized. The question isn’t how many hours you have but “am I doing things that give me energy?”
Forever is too long to put your life on hold. Wanting to be an entrepreneur forever meant Immad couldn’t sacrifice the rest of his life for it: “I just have to find a way to do this alongside my life.” Family is part of what gives him the energy to keep going.
