Lessons From Building Mercury with Immad Akhund (Co-founder and CEO, Mercury)

The Peel with Turner Novak

Immad Akhund is the Co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a digitally native bank for startups. Mercury is supported by investors like a16z, Coatue, CRV, Chapter One, Ryan Peterson, Scott Belsky, Serena Williams, Terrence Rohan, Zach Coelius, Todd Goldberg, and more. Before Mercury, Immad was a part-time partner at YC, co-founded Heyzap which sold for $45 million, and co-founded and scaled Clickpass to millions of users. Brought to you by Secureframe, the automated compliance platform built by compliance experts: https://secureframe.com/request-demo-4?utm_source=partner&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=062023-thesplit Read the transcript: https://www.thespl.it/p/the-future-of-banking-remote-work
In this episode, we discuss: - The future of banking - Why Mercury’s beautiful onboarding was an accident - Cultural mistakes most startups make - Two lessons from selling his first company for $45 million - How to get free legal advice - Why it’s better to build a network of entrepreneurs than investors - How to fundraise - Why its contrarian to start a non-AI company right now - How Mercury is thinking about AI - Why each operational team has its own engineering team - The embarrassing pitch meeting that raised his Series A from a16z - How crypto used up all its goodwill - The hiring advice he gives every founder Where to find Immad: Twitter: https://twitter.com/immad LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iakhund Podcast: https://curiositypodcast.substack.com/ Where to find Turner: Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak Mentioned in this episode: Mercury https://www.mercury.com The Logan Bartlett Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcL_cjZDeFU Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (5:58) Mercury's "accidentally great" onboarding experience (8:13) The fundamental banking business model (9:34) The basics of banking regulation (11:07) How Mercury works with banks (13:27) The future of banking (19:34) Immad's previous startups (22:30) What culture actually means (27:06) Importance of ideas vs execution (32:03) Learning banking from scratch (35:54) Why the first banking partnership failed (37:56) Why the second banking partnership worked (39:24) The difference between compliance and risk teams (42:08) Why compliance is so relevant for better banking (50:13) The biggest mistake for doing remote work (51:21) Mercury Raise (53:33) The game theory of fundraising (54:54) Playbook for generating fundraising momentum (60:45) Common fundraising mistakes (63:12) Hilarious fundraising mishap in front of a16z (68:16) Companies that aren't like this shouldn't touch AI (70:57) Who will win big from AI? (72:10) Immad's take on crypto (86:14) Outro

Read the transcript: https://www.thespl.it/p/the-future-of-banking-remote-work Production and distribution by: https://www.supermix.io For sponsorship inquiries: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSebvhBlDDfHJyQdQWs8RwpFxWg-UbG0H-VFey05QSHvLxkZPQ/viewform