You hear about these companies that are going from like zero to a hundred million in like two years or three years or whatever, like the equation is very simple from a company perspective.
What's up, uh, we got my buddy Emad here.
He's the founder of Mercury and awesome company that I use and love and is, uh, you've created a billion dollar company, dude, you did it.
you did the thing that all of us, when we were living in San Francisco and in our twenties trying to build these companies, you finally did it.
How does that feel?
Uh, it's funny you say that, uh, you know, we raised our series B in 2021, uh, which is actually like four months, uh, after we did our last podcast together at My First Million in January 2021.
Uh, and then we just announcing our series C, uh, which is a 3 .5 billion valuation with Sequoia leading.
But in 2021, when I raised my round, that was at a 1 .6 billion valuation.
And it was so weirdly anticlimactic, uh, cause it's like, I'd started as an entrepreneur in 2006.
So 2021, what is that like 15 years.
So I'd been working towards a subjective of like building a unicorn company.
Right. Like that's, as you say, like you, I moved here when I was like 22.
And like, that's all it was about for me for a long time.
It was like getting this like really successful company.
and then you hit this objective like becoming a unicorn.
And like, nothing changes.
So I have this, like, I have this helmet behind me, because that's like, this is from Joe Montana.
He was, he's an investor and he's a footballer.
So he sent me the helmet and that's literally the only thing I got when I became a unicorn.
I mean, obviously I had a successful company but I keep it there to show like, you know, like these objectives don't really matter.
It's like, you have to enjoy the journey because you hit the objective and then you're like, okay, now what?
Dude, Joe Montana should make that his thing.
He's just, he should send a helmet to every founder who becomes a unicorn.
I mean, at least he sends it to the ones he funds, because it says like billion dollar club on it.
Uh, it's kinda cool.
All right. I told you, I said, uh, love to brainstorm with you ideas.
I thought you would come with a bunch of FinTech ideas cause you're the bank guy, but you came with a bunch of, you, you sent me a list of bullet points, none of which sound like FinTech!
So I'm excited. Give me some of these ideas, things that you think founders today could be going and doing.
or if you weren't doing Mercury that you would be interested in doing?
Yeah, so I had three trends that I think are interesting.
Trend number one is space and space tech. There's a few reasons I like the trend.
Number one, I'm just a sci -fi nerd, like I love space.
So I think it's really exciting as a space and it's finally hit this point where there's all of these kind of enablement factors.
So, number one, like just a few years ago, getting anything to space was like a hundred million endeavor We're talking about literally a hundred million dollars to get something in space that works.
Because there was no SpaceX and all of the space satellite stuff was like these hardened, you know, radiation proof satellites.
Now, the other week, like SpaceX did like eight flights or something in one week.
Like it's insane. So you know, there's this repeatable kind of channel to get things in space, it's much, much cheaper and it's getting cheaper every month basically.
And nowadays people have these kind of micro platforms where it's basically a computer in space Like it's not going to cost you a million dollars to get like just to build the satellite.
Like you can do it for like a hundred thousand dollars or something.
So this is like huge enablement thing.
And I've invested in a bunch of companies.
I did this company called Albedo that's doing that's doing kind of very low Earth orbit pictures of things so you can get like 10 centimeter kind of resolution pictures from space.
Yeah, everyone's getting excited by AI, which I'm also excited about that, but that's a heavily, you know, everyone's doing it.
Whereas I think that actually, space is still like super open.
There's not that many people kinda attempting things in space.
So the crazy idea sent to you, which I don't love this idea in terms of like, we need to come up with like why we should do this, but I think a nuclear power plant in space would be really cool.
Like potentially we put this thing on the moon and then we mine, mine water from the moon.
and one of the cool things about water is if you can split water you get hydrogen and oxygen, and oxygen and hydrogen together make rocket fuel but it's also like you get breathable oxygen which is useful.
So having power in space is pretty useful and there's lots of interesting things on the moon and you know if you have a nuclear power plant there you could probably like there's this other cool company that does this thing I don't know if you've seen it I can't remember the name, but like it spins things super fast and then like basically fires them out.
I think it's very hard to get something from earth's surface into space by like spinning around and round and flicking it.
But I think on the moon it's much easier.
The gravity's low and there's no air resistance.
So yeah, if you had a nuclear power plant you could power that.
So I thought that was cool.
Let's see what else.
I'll talk about my second theme because it ties into space as well.
So the second theme is defense tech in general.
Obviously, we've seen Andoril, but, you know, there's kind of two trends, actually, three trends in defense tech that I think are interesting.
Number one, yeah, there's a lot of geopolitical disturbance.
Everyone is basically, you know, we're living in, like, or moving into a multipolar world, which means, like, you know, there's India, there's China, there's America, and America is no longer kind of the policeman, right?
Like, the only way America since the 1990s has been able to be a policeman is there hasn't been any other power to really challenge that.
So it's not just the US is...
needs to rearm. It's all of Europe, India, whatever, like everyone is, like, arming.
So you have, like, all of these people that are in the market now that weren't.
And then number two, autonomous vehicles have changed the game, right?
These drones, AI in general, can be applied to all of this stuff.
And then number three, yeah, you're gonna get a ton of drones.
Like it's not just like big billion dollar fighter planes, right?
It's going to be actually like a thousand or million like tiny drones that are easy to manufacture.
So, so all of these things kind of make it so startups can now compete again in a way that like wasn't possible before.
Hey, quick message from our sponsor HubSpot, you know, marketing in 2025 is wild customers can spot fake messages instantly, privacy changes are making ad targeting a nightmare and everybody needs more content than ever.
That's why HubSpot has a new marketing trends report.
It doesn't just show you what's changing, it shows you exactly how to deal with it.
Everything is backed by research and it's about marketing plays that you can use tomorrow.
So, if you're ready to turn your marketing challenges into results, go to hubspot .com slash marketing to download the report for free.
So I think there's like two types of ideas that I think are interesting, number one, like, how do you make more things autonomous?
So people are doing autonomous drones, but you could do autonomous subs, autonomous boats, autonomous tanks right like I think a lot of these things are not being hit on and when you make them autonomous you can change the form factor as well like you can make them smaller you can make thousands of them so that's one aspect and then second aspect is like a lot these autonomous things kind of favor defense so I was reading about this and the Ukraine Russia war is like actually like trench warfare which is kind of crazy like we haven't had it since world war one but they're literally digging trenches
and like that's why the lines like hardly changing because it's like neither of them has a superiority the drones actually make it hard to get a superiority because you can have like a tiny drone knock out of like a million dollar plane uh so in that world like yeah so we've got one side is autonomous side the second side is like the kind of how do we build more defensive autonomous things as well so like you know maybe we automatically have these machines that are built in trenches you could have autonomous minds that are, like, smart, and they don't, I mean, I guess that sounds, like, bad to
people, but you could have it so, like, if it's a civilian, it doesn't blow up.
If it's a tank, it does blow up, right?
Like, you can make these, like, safer minds, and move around, and then to tie back to the space thing, you know, I think in the next, kind of, war, space warfare will be a big part of it, right?
Like, if you can knock out satellites, you can, like, you know, cut down on, you know, and all of those kind of communication, you can remove the visual side of things, right, like these kind of satellites that are viewing things, you can knock out GPS.
So some of that actually happened during the Ukraine war.
There was like some, you know, there's some rumors about like some satellites being knocked out, but I think that's gonna be a big thing.
So the counter to that is how do you, how do you create defense around satellites, right, how do you, maybe you'll have like stealth, equivalent of stealth satellites, right, Like, you only move them when, like, the sun is kind of obscuring the view print and you move them to a place and then obscure them completely so they're not reflective.
Yeah, there's a ton of ideas around, like, defensive kind of stuff in space as well.
So what I like about what you just said is that there's probably three core things I think about when it comes to great ideas.
And I will differentiate a great idea from a good idea.
So on this podcast, a lot of times we'll talk about good ideas.
A good idea means a business where there is demand, there might even be competition, it might even be established, but that gives you a bit of a playbook and it's not going to be winner -take -all.
There's room for everybody to eat.
And a good idea, what it profiles out to is that you make millions of dollars, maybe tens of million dollars, maybe a couple hundred million dollars with a higher likelihood of success, but you'll pretty much never get to the billion dollar or sort of groundbreaking and new category creation type of companies doing that.
And what you're talking about is a different criteria for great ideas and a great idea, I would say there's three tests.
The first is the Peter Thiel test. So famously, Thiel went to YC and he was asked to give a talk and he went and he drew two circles on the whiteboard like a Venn diagram.
And he basically said, he colored in the middle and he labeled one circle, sounds like a bad idea, and the other circle was, Is actually a good idea.
And he's like, you're looking for the overlap because the best ideas sound initially like a bad idea, but actually are a good idea.
So now that's hard to do because you don't know what's actually a good idea.
You have to sort of think for yourself there.
But what it is good at is it sort of reminds you not to run away if your initial idea sounds a little crazy, sounds a little out there or, you know, eight out of 10 people who first hear it say, no, no way, right?
And so you - so that's the first thing, it's like a great idea typically comes disguised as a bad idea.
The second thing is some inflection points.
So you talked about how for space, suddenly if SpaceX is doing eight trips in a week, right?
It's like going to space went from somewhat impossible to possible, now a regular thing.
It's like, oh, I could just hitch a ride on one of these trips.
And the trips are getting cheaper and cheaper every year.
Or somebody's already taking a payload up and I can just add something to it or I can build on top of their satellite platform that's already going to be up there.
So I think that's a huge inflection like you're talking about.
The other one you talked about with defence is autonomy.
So just the ability to make things self driving, self flying, self, you know, self swimming.
You know, just basically give a thing eyes and now it has a brain because of AI and suddenly you can take humans out of the equation for that job.
And when it comes to like warfare or defence, great because that's, you know, lives saved when you do that.
So you know, you have these inflections.
and so that's thing number two.
And thing three, I would say is scares everybody off.
So like, you know, you were saying AI in general, like, you know, if I said I'm building an AI agent startup that's probably like the biggest bloodbath competition right now, but you're kind of right that smart, capable teams that are doing interesting things in space, there's still like way more opportunity versus the number of teams pursuing them.
And same thing in defense, that, you know, still the average smart capable team is not, not going after that right now.
And so there's just like a lot of room and, you know, these are huge Tams, right?
So obviously like, you know, space and satellites, that's a, that's a huge market.
And then defense is obviously huge, especially as you said, the whole world is rearming.
So it kind of hits all three, even though my first reaction, when you say nuclear power plant in space, I'm like, Oh, that breaks my brain a little bit.
I don't even know what that means.
Is that even possible?
I kind of like the underlying thought process you have going in even though I don't fully get the end product idea because I just don't know anything about the space.
Yeah, I mean, I have some simple ideas that are maybe good, but not great, but more achievable.
Here's a fun one I thought about last night.
I thought it would be fun to have a billboard in space.
The first ad in space.
I had this a few years ago.
I was like going camping and I didn't have internet and like yeah There was this like star link satellite launch I don't know if you've ever seen it but like I think they fixed it so it doesn't do this But they basically launched the satellite so they were like they were kind of positioning them so they were all visible and there was like 20 in a string in space and you could see them naked eye with a telescope or just naked eye just naked eye you just look up and there's like a string and And initially I was like are those stars are the UFOs because they like Yeah they're like very bright like
they're brighter than a star but they're like they're like completely in a line and they're moving quite fast because they're in like LEO right but I was like oh yeah that's kind of sick like I you know you can literally as a human like launch this thing that changes like everyone's view from the earth.
Uh right. I thought that was like kind of insane but yeah I think I don't think it'd be that hard to put a billboard in space and make it so you could view it from a telescope I don't you could do it like, I mean, you could probably do the naturalized thing, but like, obviously people complain.
But making it so you can be able to telescope I think would be actually kind of cool and then people would like buy that.
So this one's more a good idea.
I mean, I don't think that's a bad idea.
Well, do you remember?
There was a whole surface around buying and naming stars?
Do you remember this?
This was kind of like a big idea in the 90s, maybe early 2000s.
A three body problem.
That's like one of the ideas.
I haven't actually I read it now, it's like on my to do to read list. But we, back in the day, we had this business called Birthday Alarm and Birthday Alarm was like a to remind you of when it's your friends and family's birthday and then you can send an e -card, just like a greeting, you know, animated e -card. But there was this company that had approached us that was like, hey, if you add the gift of naming a star after someone, you get a certificate, blah, blah, blah, and it was like, whatever 30 bucks, to buy a star in someone's name.
And that company was doing, like, 20 million a year, I remember.
And it was just like a couple of guys, and they approached us through that.
We said no, but when we had gotten to know them, I was stunned that they were doing, you know, that much revenue, at least at that time.
I do think it was a bit of a fad, but still, that was very impressive to me.
I thought the other one that would be kind of cool was, like, you know, when I die, it would be cool to send, like, I actually don't want to be cremated, but if I was cremated, it would be cool to send some ash to space.
I mean, like, some sort of memorabilia being sent to space, I think is kind of interesting as well.
And that would be easier.
And the more practical ideas, I do think intelligence as a service is kind of like an interesting idea.
So you mentioned AI agents.
So there's tons of these companies going off to these big categories, right?
Like this AI SDR, AI customer support agents.
I haven't seen too many companies kind of go after more niche ideas where people are willing to pay.
So AI SAT tutor, right?
Like imagine like actually like AI is great as education because A.
Like the content is like extremely easy for AI to do.
Yeah. Yeah. B can be completely personalized.
C it's just extremely, uh, patient, right?
Like, I mean, when I tried to teach my 13 year old, I'm like pulling my hair out after like a few minutes.
Uh, so there's a whole class of like, you know, you take any test and you could probably make an AI agent.
That's like great at that.
And great at teaching that.
So like you could do the bar exam you could do, whatever.
That's such a no brainer.
Is there somebody doing that?
Somebody has to be doing that, right?
Because I haven't heard of anyone doing a great job with it.
Yeah nobody's won yet, which is amazing.
But like, you know, you look at Kaplan and you look at the big test prep companies they were built like decades, like many decades ago, right.
And they were built in the...
I mean, I used to buy like those giant books with, you know, the practice tests and them from Princeton I think Princeton Review or whoever when I was studying for the SATs, and then sure it moved to like video and online after that.
But now you're right.
Like if you just did AI, a personal one -on -one tutor, I think that's, you know, obviously that's obviously the best. I don't know if you've seen the studies of like, are you right about the, like the two significant thing when it comes to tutoring it's basically like nothing has shown as measurable of an effect as one -on -one tutoring in education yet and it's basically the problem for a long time was I I think you basically would get something like two standard deviations above the mean.
And then by the way, this is kind of debated and people say, you know, that was, it was measured wrong and it's not true.
I think intuitively it's like, feels right.
Like when I'm learning something, if I talk to someone, if I had a gun to my head and it was, get the best grade possible on this test, right.
If my life depended on it, would I choose, uh, just showing up cold?
No. Would I do a book where I self paste and self study?
No. Would I choose a library of videos?
No. if it was like a tutor comes to my house and sits with me for six hours a day and that's how I study for this, I'd be like, that's my best shot.
And if it was the smartest, most patient tutor with infinite knowledge and knew exactly where my level was and was ready to work with me the moment I was ready to do it all times of the day, right, that's an AI tutor.
So I think that's kind of great because it's so scoped to, you know, one specific, um, test, which people are not doing because they voluntarily want to, you know, educate themselves.
But like, I need to pay X dollars to get Y grade to get into Z college.
Yeah. You're willing to pay.
Yeah. I think like the, the good ideas right now, in these kind of AI agent whatever things are like these like kind of more niche ideas that you can expand from later, right, rather trying to do like all tutoring, right, I think that's it's actually like quite a hard problem and AI's not quite there yet.
Like if you pick just one thing and you just like completely nail it, then you can always expand from there as well.
Right, right, right.
I like that. What are some of the most interesting companies you've invested in recently?
So is there any company that's like taking off or doing well that you feel like more people should know about but they don't know about it yet?
You know, this is like what I put as like intelligence as a service company, so I'm an investor in 11X, which does kind of AI -SDRs, and I'm also an investor in Decagon that does kind of AI customer support agents.
You know, they just have, like, these insane numbers.
I don't think they're public, but you know, you hear about these companies that are going from, like, zero to 100 million in, like, you know, two years or three years or whatever.
Like, all of these ones that hit with it, like, you know, like, the equation is very simple from a company perspective.
It's like, hey, I'm paying a ton of money for customer support or SDR. If you can do the same task with some sort of fall back to humans at half the price, sure, let's do it.
So there's definitely, across a bunch of these spaces, and the big ones are sales, customer support, legal, accounting.
A bunch of these, and I'm an investor in many of these companies, there's definitely a moment where they're really winning, and obviously, it's still early, but it seems obvious to me that a bunch of these things will be delivered by AI.
So on the other side, every company that has sales or SCS or whatever, the CEO, the board is saying like, hey, how do you make yourself more efficient through AI?
So the buyers are really looking for solutions and anyone, there's not that many actual, in each of these spaces, there are a lot of companies, but normally it's really hard to do enterprise sales.
Like this is like a nine month, 12 month cycle.
but when you have like buyers that are just like, Hey, I need to deploy something to show something that I'm like, I'm doing stuff in AI.
It creates this like moment where you can actually like have this explosive enterprise sales growth, which is actually very rare.
It only happens like in these kinds of rare trends.
Alright, my friends, I have exciting news for that business idea that's been sitting in your notes app.
The hustle, which is my old company, has partnered with Indy hackers, one of my favorite websites to launch a pitch competition.
It's called The Hustle's Big Break.
And it's a pitch competition with a simple premise.
You tell us your business idea in 60 seconds or less, and the winner gets $5 ,000 to turn it into a reality.
Here's how it works.
Record a 60 second video pitch of your business idea.
Include your business name, description, revenue model, and tagline.
And finally, submit it at TheHustle .co, slash, Big Break and it all has to be done by April 4th.
The winner gets $5 ,000 in cash to kickstart their business journey.
Plus, we're going to feature them in The Hustle's daily newsletter, which is read by around a million and a half people.
And these are the smartest business and tech folks out there.
The winner will be announced on April 11.
So again, if you have a business idea, go to the hustle .co slash Big Break.
Alright, back to the pod.
Would you let's say you weren't doing Mercury right now.
You had all your free time and You know everything you know today.
And you wanted to find an AI idea, a winning AI idea.
What would be your process?
Like explain to me how Emad finds, like kind of comes up with the ideas and vets them and sort of figures out what idea to do versus what idea not to do?
I approach things like both top -down and bottom -up.
So top -down and actually did this as part of like your podcast prep stuff, I went to Chat GPD and said like, Hey, tell me every human worker in the US that does knowledge work.
Give me a list of all of them and tell me how much labor costs for across each of them.
So that's very top down.
And you're like, okay, you know, there's education, there's medical, there's lawyer, there's accounting, there's whatever, like all these knowledge worker type things like design, coding, et cetera.
So that's like a top down approach. And you can say, okay, here's the most interesting and you could do like a matrix kind of thing.
It's like, okay, here's all the interesting ones.
Here's the tam, here's all the companies that are in those spaces.
Here's all the bits that are not done.
Here's, maybe you want to avoid regulated spaces, or maybe you want to go all in on regulated spaces.
Maybe you're like, hey, no one's touching doctors because everyone's scared of doctors.
Like, why don't we just make an amazing doctor for like, I don't know, Africa or something because there's less regulation there and you can prove it out, et cetera.
So that's one top down approach. And then I'd also go bottoms up and I'll go, okay, what gets me excited, right?
I love serving entrepreneurs because I'm an entrepreneur.
All my friends are entrepreneurs, I love the idea of people making things, so maybe I'd say, okay, what are things entrepreneurs struggle with?
One thing that I still don't have a great solution for is as a CEO, there's so much knowledge across the company, I'd love something that, yeah, there's a few companies doing this, but I would love to have an AI twin of Emad that is continuously absorbing all the knowledge across the company and maybe across the internet and telling me stuff it's like I think I'm another should really pay attention to this and I think oh like even like actually that would be kind of fun to make it so like on on the slack like there could be an MR twin and someone could ask you questions say like oh what would MR
think of this idea uh yeah actually like a funny thing that just came up the other day and I was like I'm pretty sure my AI twin could answer this it's like uh someone was like oh you know our board room is like kind of small and we just added two people to the board like hey should we do the board meeting at our law firm.
And I was like, no, fuck no, I'm never gonna do a board meeting at a law firm, like that sounds awful.
I'd rather stuff like 16 people in a tiny room than do that.
So I feel like, and my AI twin could have answered that question.
So that would be like my bottoms up approach. And I do think like you should really work on things like get you really excited like, an AISDR, like I'm happy for those guys.
I personally would not get excited about that.
Like I hate receiving sales, emails, and goals.
so I think doing things that you would like wake up in the morning and say like I'm excited to solve this problem because these things take such a long time, right?
Like I've been doing Mercury now for like eight years and if I you know if I was doing something boring I would like probably wake up in the morning like why do I have to do this again so I think that's like the bottoms -up approach where you try to think of like what do I care about what do I want to see in the future and try to come up with that and then you know you kind of merge those two kind of concepts together and you know often you do something and you find out actually it's a bad idea as well.
So yeah, Mercury actually had like a very smooth ramp where I was like, I was like, okay, I like this idea.
And then I executed on the idea and we never had to prove it.
But yeah, often you do, like, as you learn something, you're like, Oh, actually this doesn't make sense, but this makes sense.
So, so, you know, that's part of like ideation is to like actually go build things.
Do you, uh, so let's, let's take an idea.
We'll role play it real quick.
So pick, pick one of the ideas like plausibly, you'd be like, Oh yeah, That's kind of checks the boxes.
It kind of top down makes sense, bottoms up, it resonates with me.
Like what would be an example of that?
Is it the digital twin thing or is it?
Let's do that. Yeah.
Let's do the digital twin.
I think that's like kind of the first one.
So you have, uh, either your digital twin CEO, who's basically reading all the SLACs, the documents, and in Google drives, he knows everything about the contracts that are all there.
He looked at this ES access to the CRM, so you can see anything in the dashboards, etc. Um, all right.
So now first few weeks, what are you doing?
Is it like, I trust these five people, I'm gonna bounce the idea off them.
Do you make a deck?
Cause that clarifies your thinking.
Do you just go build a prototype?
Do you go look at competition?
Where do you go next?
With Mercury I had this moment where, so we'd raise the money, we were doing the thing, and I was like, okay, let me go talk to a bunch of like potential companies that could use this, create like a big pipeline and also just learn what it's about.
And I talked to basically a hundred and I remember getting kinda depressed after I talked to them because I talked to 100 and most of them were like oh yeah that sounds kind of cool but like they were saying it's very lukewarm and it was only two of the 100 companies that were like oh yeah like I would fucking use this like give it to me right now kind of thing uh and at that point like you know it was like it took us a year and a half to build this so this is like one year in so you know you're like you're kind of running out of momentum anyway because it's taking so long to build something and then
you go talk to 100 people and everyone's kind of So I just like powered through it and it turned out, A, if 2 % of people want something and the market's big enough that's like probably big enough for like an early adopter base.
But if you think about it, like talking to a hundred people and having only two people get excited about something is like actually like kind of like tricky.
And maybe I wouldn't have talked to those two people because like, yeah, if I talk to 50 people I might've missed out on it completely.
So I think it's actually like surprisingly hard to vet an idea against humans.
People just don't know.
And it's hard to imagine an idea as well.
So what I think I would do is, I would do that talk and I would go talk to some VCs a lot.
Like I'd talk to a bunch of users.
I took to some VCs, just get an idea of like, what is the reception like?
But then I would like try to spend a lot of time.
And firstly for me, one of the things that gets me excited about Mercury is that after, last year we launched a bunch of new things, Like we launch invoicing and bill pay and reimbursements and personal banking.
And some ideas are like hit a dead end over time, right?
Like, you kind of do the idea and then you end up like five years later, you're just like making like small features and just selling it more, et cetera.
And then some ideas like turn out to like fork like a thousand ways.
And Mercury is one of those things, because, A, there's just so few people in banking that like a lot of these spaces are unexplored, and B, banking is like this kind of platform where it has all your money, has all your finance team.
so you can build a lot of things on top of it.
So I'd wanna think about like, okay, if I did the digital twin idea, like, what are the forks?
Like why does this become even more interesting the more users that you get on it?
Then, and maybe the interesting thing is like, okay, it's not just a CEO twin, everyone at the company has a twin.
And maybe some of the people don't even exist at the company, maybe these are like the, maybe you have like a comms person at the company that's just literally just AI.
I'm just like riffing off this.
maybe your AI twin shows up at the Zoom calls.
Maybe it's like becomes your coach and it's like helping you through difficult times, right?
Like I think that is an idea that could probably fork a lot of ways because like it has all the knowledge, it learns a lot about you, it's in your communication channels.
Like it's got these core ideas that like, yeah, it sounds like a pretty good idea now that we're riffing on it.
You're excited. Yeah.
Well you also, with Mercury, you, it seems like this, maybe it's too simple, but like, it seems like you had been a founder for 10 plus years and you were like, I don't personally like have a banking product I love, but every startup needs a banking product.
So I want to build for startups.
There's nothing that anybody loves.
Maybe they don't hate their thing or they don't spend too much time thinking about it, but they don't have one that they love.
And you basically built the one you would want.
And then you're, the bet was that there's going to be a lot of other founders that think like me, that like what I like, is that fair or is that oversimplifying it?
No, no, that's 100 % fair.
I think generally speaking, I'm a little unusual.
I get like, if I have to call someone to do something, I get so annoyed about it.
Like, I can press the button there.
I will delay for weeks for sure.
But like if I have to do it and like that's the way banks are after you know, except for Mercury, like you have to call to like get a wire done like, you know, I don't want to like, I guess they're kind of gone.
So I can probably bitch about them a little bit.
But like First Republic, like, if you want to send a wire.
Like, you know, firstly, you tried to do it and you'd hit a limit.
So you called them raise the limit and then you do it and then it would go to the next phase and then they would call you and you'd have to authorize it.
Then someone else would have to call it.
It's like, it was like a multi -week process just to figure out how to send wires.
So I was like this is what, so, so you guys started sponsoring me and I was like, all right, cool.
I have an idea for the AdRead because I got six Mercury accounts myself.
So I was like, uh, trust me, I already know.
You don't need to give me the talking points.
I know why I use it.
And I was, I was like, I know you have all these fancy features, but like, for me as a founder, I move at a certain pace.
And as a founder, it's one of the only advantages you have, right?
You don't have the biggest team, you don't have the most money, you don't have a lot of things, you don't have the most experience, you don't have a brand in the market that everybody knows.
But like your pace is the one thing that you have that all the big companies don't have. The problem is if you just start hitting walls because you can't move fast, that becomes very problematic.
So like, I like to have an idea, I like to buy a domain on GoDaddy in two seconds, right?
I like to file my, if I have a trademark, I like to just be able to file it online.
I want to talk to a lawyer and schedule a call.
If I want to start a bank and those little things, they sound like one offs, but they add up and they create momentum and momentum begets momentum.
And so I just will always default to using any tool that can that can operate at founder speed.
So with mercury, it was like, Oh cool.
I can just type don't have to talk to anybody.
Human being don't have to call anybody.
Don't have to drive and park somewhere.
And I can get my bank account open.
I can get money in, and I can wire money, because I used to wire for my e -com business out of Wells Fargo.
And I would have to, every single month, just to pay our suppliers, I'd have to drive to a Wells Fargo bank, make an appointment, which I always forget to do, go inside.
They gave me this freaking keep -up.
It takes like a freaking hour to do it, yeah.
They gave me this thing like it's the nuclear codes, and I had to have that.
And then, I had to sit there an hour.
And then, she would ask me questions, and I'd have to make sure that the number's right.
And I'm like, dude, I wish I could just copy -paste, push a button and be done with this.
And then I had to get my limits raised.
Then they had to call another lady to raise the limits cause they would only let me do 50K or a hundred K at a time.
It was super annoying.
And so it's amazing that literally just feeling like, okay, these people get me and they'll build a product that moves at my speed how important that was.
And I also then took that to hiring.
I was like, Oh, my best hiring heuristic is basically did this person speed up the pace, keep pace or slow down pace?
And anybody who slows down pace for me, even if they have other strengths I've found that it rarely works out, to work with somebody who operates at a slower speed.
Like if we have a discussion or an idea, and you're like, cool, I'll get to you next week.
It's like wait, wait, wait.
We said this was important.
There's still eight hours left of the day.
What are you talking about?
Like, how long could that possibly take you?
And if it's not that they won't do it, it's just if their default expectation, if their default clock speed is slow, it's just not gonna work.
I want my software fast and my employees fast. yeah so actually you know like once you describe that process like it sounds awful so I think like there's like people just get used to being abused by the current products right like I think it's in some ways like because I came from the UK I didn't I didn't I had a slightly better expectation of banking like you know in the UK you can move money instantly and like the software was better for various reasons so so I think there's like some element of the fact that like I had this outsider perspective as an immigrant.
And I do think that's part of it, that people in America were okay with once a month having to drive to Wells Fargo to do something basic and having this painful process.
And like, beg them to let me do something with my own money.
Convince them and sometimes they say no. Dude, the term abuse is so good, that's going to be a new filter for me on ideas is can I describe the current abuse that the product is doing.
I was in this conversation the other day and it was like super, it was that, I went to that dialogue conference, I don't know if you've ever been, but like, this is the dialogue cup.
Oh perfect, perfect.
So I went there like two days ago or whatever and in the room was like the CEO of Renaissance Technology like the Renaissance, like the best investors of the world, the CEO of Bridgewater or like it was basically like the who's who.
And in the in the money conversation, it was like a group of 10 people.
In the money conversation the topic of crypto came up and somebody who was a Dean of a very famous university was basically arguing that crypto, I don't know.
I'm not convinced. And I just sort of...
It was the abuse thing.
So I was like, so you want to park your money in something like the dollar, right?
Cool. Got it. I understand a bunch of reasons why, but the abuse that was normalized was so the dollar, which has a whole arm, the Fed, whose job is to have a two to three percent target inflation.
and, oh, oops, sometimes we go way above that, but we'll try to get back to two to 3%.
And I was like, so your default expectation is that in 30 years, your purchasing power's cut in half.
That's like the accepted financial abuse of saving all your money in US dollars, is that every 30 years, your purchasing power gets cut in half.
It's a lot worse than that because of like asset appreciation, right?
Like people don't think about it, but like houses and a lot of other things are like way above inflation.
Inflation even measured where it doesn't include your house or your rent, you know, like the kind of screwed up version of inflation, even that, even that like the adjusted EBITA of inflation, where it's like this specific basket, even that's supposed to be 3%.
So it's like, that's a system where that abuse of like what if savers getting penalized, right?
Anybody who saves gets penalized in the dollar system, but it's a blind spot.
People really don't, they've accepted that abuse.
They're so used to that abuse that it's just taken as, as, as fine.
Uh, you know, it's not even a problem.
It's not even like a known problem for them.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the part of the reason it's not a problem for like richer people is because they get asset appreciation, right?
So like, you know, people aren't sitting on cash.
It's, uh, unfortunately a lot of the abuse actually happens to like poorer businesses and like poorer people where they have to sit in cash because, you know, they don't have the living paycheck to paycheck and like most of their money is not in assets.
Uh, so I think that part is like, particularly sad.
Uh, I don't necessarily think crypto is the only answer there.
Right? Like you could buy gold, you could buy a stock.
Like Bitcoin has obviously done particularly well in the last 10 years.
But, but yeah, it's, it's definitely like something where like, there's something a bit weird about the system for sure.
Yeah, exactly. You can debate the solutions, but the problem seems like not debatable, but it's not, but it's just accepted as an accepted abuse.
Tell me, uh, you guys had this crazy situation.
where Silicon Valley bank goes through this crisis.
Tell me where you were when that happened and then what the next, I don't know, 24, 48 hours, what did that look like and what happened to Mercury during that time?
Cause it seems like you were the big, you were a big beneficiary of that situation in terms of customers coming to you guys or adoption.
Yeah. I mean, just at the scene, right?
Like SVB has been around one year longer than I was alive.
So it was like started in 1983.
So I was remember that.
uh, and when, yeah, when I was working on Mercury, right?
Like SPB is part of the seed deck, right?
It's like, Hey, this is the 800 pound gorilla.
Like, this is why everyone in the Silicon Valley uses, uh, at that point they were like worth 16 billion.
And I think it peaked COVID, they were worth 40 billion, uh, so this is a big company.
So yeah, when this started happening, yeah, I wasn't, we, we had obviously been competing against each other, but yeah, it was like kind of a weirdly indirect competition in the sense that like, just offers something very different, right?
Like, this is like this solid Silicon Valley bank that's been around forever.
And then Mercury is, you know, this upstart of fintech, right?
And like, you know, we used SBB in my previous company.
I like those guys. Like, they were like, they were friendly, they, like, cared about startups.
I mean, their software wasn't great, but none of the banks had great software.
So like, to be clear, I didn't feel anything bad about them.
And I felt really bad about, for the people there, and, you know, I thought they'd be fine, right?
Like when Thursday roll along, I was like, hey, everyone's freaking out.
Like, people like, panicking about things on the internet.
Did you find out about it at the same time as all the rest of us, or did you have some inkling or some foresight that that might happen?
In the December, like, so most of the bank run happened to SVB in March, 2023.
In December, 2022, there was like this article about like, the fact that the MSPs, the Mortgage Backed Security, MBS, And the mortgage backed securities were massively underwater.
There even been some VCs that had freaked out and pulled their portfolio companies out.
So I had seen some of those rumors in that December 2022, but again, people was calling some crisis and freaking out, like, right now, there's someone freaking out about something.
So the default is to ignore that stuff.
But yeah, on Wednesday, it kind of kicked off and we started seeing, just people were And they were like, hey, how quickly can I get a mercury bank account right.
And it went from like, you know, normally like banking, people don't wanna switch banking services, right?
Like this is a lot of the customers and mercury wins are like a day zero.
Like you just start a new business.
You don't have a bank account and you need something and we were there for you.
It's much harder for us to switch people.
So yeah, we obviously like hitting up every startup in Silicon Valley with like our sales team and other marketing stuff.
Did you have like kind of emergency meeting, like, hey, here's the game plan or how did you organize that to like sprint?
When it's time to sprint.
My initial thing was like, hey, I was like we do not say a word of this publicly, we're like we don't want to like jump on the misfortune but anyone that comes through Mercury, let's like support them and we did a bunch of things that we changed the product.
So, you know, we're like, hey, if you're a non -SVB customer we can always onboard you next week, right?
But if you're coming from SVB let's make it in just two and a half an hour.
So, you know, we had this flat connection thing and we put that right at the top and we set above it SVB customer connect your SVB and we'll prioritize you.
And SVB customers were really easy to prioritize because they tended to have more money, they're already vetted by a bank, they're not new customers.
We basically tried to think of all the ways we could speed up the process for them and we really focused on just providing that process.
Was it like 2X, 5X, 10X normal?
Like what did you see?
even so right now mercury has like 200 ,000 customers um and we had like maybe a hundred thousand back then but yeah svb had a lot of money but not at like an insane number of customers so i want to say they had like 30 000 or 40 000 kind of total customers so uh the volume was big in terms of dollars but not necessarily in terms of like numbers it was significant um i think what we published is like around eight thousand customers moved over to us like in a two -week time period Yeah, which is like big but not like crazy compared to like the normal kind of monthly growth we get.
So the other thing we did is, you know, everyone was saying to us like, hey, SPB failed, like, why won't Mercury fail?
And, you know, I would say to people, like verbally, like, hey, you know, we, we're not a bank ourselves.
We work with partner banks, and your money is like, it has extra FDIC insurance.
At that time, we had 1 million in FDIC insurance.
And then I would say, okay, you know, after, if you have more than a million, put the rest of in US government, tbill mutual funds, which we have as part of the platform.
So I would say this over and over again to people.
But obviously, like, you know, if Emad says like, hey, your money's safe, like, that's not very fulfilling.
Like, the SPC CEO was also saying your money's safe.
Yeah, so what we did over that...
Start with Sam Boardman -Fried?
Yeah, exactly. So I was like, that's the one thing I don't want to say online.
So what we did over that weekend is we built this product, it was called MercuryVault, and it would basically visualize where your money is.
We'd say, okay, this much of it is an FDIC insured account up to this much. And we also actually worked with our partner banks to extend the FDIC insurance.
So we went from 1 million to 5 million over that week.
So if you had 6 million in your Mercury checking account, we'd say, okay, 1 million of that is not FDIC insured, 5 million is.
And then, we'd help you set up your treasury system so you'd put in U .S. government T -bills.
So we built this product and that really worked.
Like, it's so powerful...
So you used product to build trust instead of words.
Exactly. Yes. And it's also spoke to the moment.
It's, like, okay, you know, instead of us, like, hiding away from it, we weren't saying, like, you know, let's not talk about your money safely or not.
We were, like, okay, let's show you, right?
Like, you know, you don't have to, like, trust, like, Emma's word or, like, some marketing.
Like, we were, like, here's a product that shows you.
And it wasn't like something completely new.
My general view on things is if you're saying something over and over, if customer support is doing something over and over, how do you make that in the product so people don't have to ask you.
And it's just so much more powerful.
Like it feels tangible to people.
Also just felt to people, like, instead of us going to another bank that could also get a run, we're going to something where you get this extra FDIC insurance and Mercury is a FinTech, at that point, like, you're like, we are not holding your money.
The money never touches Mercury's bank account.
And it never does like it goes to our partner banks and that they have an FDIC sweep network.
So that was really important to people that like we was speaking with product and like, it's also, you know, I think entrepreneurs appreciate that, right?
Like the one, they were like the fact that like we spend the weekend building a product for them that like actually answered their biggest question.
Uh, like made people go like, oh shit.
Like mercury gets it.
Right? Like, I think that was like a really powerful moment for us.
Yeah, that's dope. You have this...
Also, it actually felt good as a entrepreneur because like, I think sometimes...
Yeah, when there's a crisis moment, you can feel a little bit like, it's like, oh man, what am I supposed to do here?
Like, obviously you can talk to customers and things like that, but building product is like what we were about.
So as an entrepreneur, I was like, okay, you know, let's spend the weekend.
Everyone, like, let's go do this.
Like, it gave you like something really tangible to do.
So actually the whole team, Like even, I guess, two years later, the whole team is like, hey, we worked that whole weekend, we pulled this product together.
Everyone's still excited about that moment because it did the thing that we were good at doing to solve that problem.
Yeah, you got the adrenaline rush, but you stayed in character.
You didn't go out of character and try to do something you don't normally do.
You have these philosophies that you sent over.
One of them, maybe it's related to what we just talked about, it's go all in on asymmetric upside bets.
Can you unpack that?
I feel like a lot of people, um, kind of try entrepreneurship or do things, but they don't go all in on them.
And, you know, when I...
I did my first startup for seven months in the UK and I was like, you know, I, it was really a moment for me where like, I was like, okay, this is what life is about for me.
Uh, I was very, you know, I did college, I did computer science, but I was never like that excited about it.
I just did it because I was good at it, and it was kind of fun.
And then I worked at a job and I hated it.
I worked at Bloomberg for a year and I was like, wow, like, you know, I was worried that that's what life is, right?
Like having this like grind and like, and then, you know, one of my friends was like, Hey, let's do this like startup thing.
And I was like, okay, you know, let's try it out.
And that was like the first time I did something where I was like, oh shit, like, this is so much fun.
And that startup did nothing.
Right? Like it went nowhere.
It had no users, But just the idea of working 9 A .M. to midnight, building something myself, launching it, there's just something about it that so speaks to my core.
So, I was like, okay, if I want to do this, where can I do this the greatest?
At the time it was San Francisco, I would still say San Francisco, but at that time it was 100%, I had to be here to do it.
So, I was just like, had basically no money, I backed up my stuff, I did get into Y Combinator with my second startup and moved to San Francisco.
And I just spent, you know, even in that seven months when I was in London, I was all in.
I would, like, code and build this thing all day, and then I would go to every single event that was possible to go to.
And like honestly, half of them, or maybe all of them were a waste of time.
But just, you know, you just, if you work really, really hard and you do all the things, you'll eventually, like, build up a network, right?
That's how, actually, like, the way I came to San Francisco I met someone through this like just extreme networking I did and they'd already got into YComnator and they needed a technical co -founder And I was like, okay, you know, I want to get to San Francisco.
So I'll join you guys so I think like I just feel like some a lot of people that do things just kind of half do them they're like Oh, you know, it's my side gig and I'm doing this thing I'm like, yeah, whatever I'd had no money when I quit my job to like do my first startup, but like that kind of like forceful like Uh, grind like, are you just like all in on things, uh, that just pays dividends in a way that's like half doing things just, I don't think really does.
Uh, and I feel like, you know, over time, like going all in on things like, you know, another part of my things is like going all in on family, like basically like I, you know, I married, like I met my wife three weeks before I moved to the US and I had a long distance relationship and then I married her and then we had a kid like two years later, uh which like i was doing like the startup grind but i was just like okay you know i'm all in on having this family i don't know so i just feel like going all in on things has just like this like big upside that like half doing things just doesn't uh
and i think the asymmetric side of it is like you know the worst thing that could happen to me is if i my startup didn't work i'd have to go and get another job so like i basically like i was always like okay you know at that point i was getting paid like 40 000 pounds a year or something so i was like okay you know i'm losing 40000 pounds a year on Saturday, maybe 50000, if I get a raise or something.
But the asymmetric bet is like, you know, I could make a million or whatever.
But, you know, it's also asymmetric life better.
It's like I could I could either like my downside was like, you know, I'm going to have a shitty time and not enjoy my life.
And my upside was like, I'll have a great life.
I'm extremely motivated and excited about that to me is like extremely asymmetric, like doing things where you're like extremely excited and like having fun.
Like, that's a rare gift, right?
Like, I think a lot of people don't do things that they enjoy every day.
And then, like, you know, I have some friends that are like that, and like it's just kinda depressing talking to them.
Like having like the ability to do things that you really enjoy in life is such a important thing that like, I think if you find something that is like that, you should go all in on that.
Hey, can I tell you a Steve Jobs story real quick?
So Jobs once said that design is not just how something looks, it's how it works.
And a great example of that is my new partner, Mercury.
Mercury has made a banking product that just works beautifully.
I use it for not just one, but all six of my companies right now.
It is my default. If I start a company, it's a no brainer.
I go and I open up a Mercury account.
The design is great.
It's got all the features that you need.
You can just tell, it was made by a founder like me, not of a banker somewhere who hired a consultant in an agency to try to make some tool.
So if you wanna be like me and 200 ,000 other ambitious founders, head over to mercury .com and open up an account in minutes.
And here's the fine print.
Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank.
Banking service is provided by Choice Financial Group and involved bank and trust members, FDIC.
All right, back to the episode.
I love what you just said cause I wrote going all in, right?
As a reminder, I have these note cards which are usually just reminders.
Like the best information is not brand new information.
It's just true information that I needed to hear again.
Needed to bring it to the front of mind or I needed to remember in my current context.
And I think that, um, the way you described it actually made it click for me in a, in a new way, which is going all in is a skill.
And I did the same thing as you, I had a startup straight out of school and I, I had this idea and I was having all this fun with my friends.
And I was either going to go to med school as I had planned, took the MCAT's all that, or I was going to do this startup, I decided I'm going to do the startup thing, right?
Then I start with that.
And then I got this gravitational pull.
I got this job offer.
somebody's gonna pay me $120 ,000.
I had to move to Indonesia where the opportunity was.
Um, but it was like this guaranteed salary, blah, blah, blah.
And I remember my co -founders, my two buddies, I was like, yeah.
We told ourselves a stupid story, which is, you know, we're always telling ourselves stories.
And I was like, I'm going to go through the lessons I'm going to learn there are going to be so useful for us.
Like, I didn't have the courage to just say, I'm going there because I really want this, this guaranteed kind of safe salary thing.
Um, and instead we told ourselves this story that I needed to learn business over there before I could go do business here.
And within two months when I was there, I was like, this was a mistake.
I need to be all in.
And I, I quit my job.
I told the owner, I was like, Hey, I'm out of here.
He's like, it's only been two months.
And I just told him, I was like, I need to, I need to see this through.
Like I'm I'll always wonder, right?
Like I kind of know what this is.
Same thing. Like, I'm not like lit up every day.
I had more fun over there.
Yeah. There's no guarantees over there, but like, I think the guarantee of feeling lit up every day is going to be like good for me in the long run.
And so I flew back and I was like, all right, I'm all in.
And we moved. That was the first thing, because I was like, is this the best place to build this company?
And if not, why are we building a here?
Just because we're already here?
Like, that seemed like a terrible reason to just do it.
So we immediately moved to, like, the hub of where that type of company was built.
It was a restaurant chain and all the top restaurant chains have been launched or most of them have been launched in Colorado, like Chipotle, and Smash Burger, and Quiznos.
There's, like, Noodles and Company.
There's like eight of the big fast casual chains have started in that area.
It's all, it's, it's the Silicon Valley of like, you know, shitty fast food.
And so, so we go all in there and it was the same thing, which nothing really came of that startup, you know, like I lost money.
I lost arguably a year of time working on something that didn't work, but I absolutely didn't lose because not only did I set myself on a different trajectory, but I more importantly learned the muscle of going all in, which once you fast forward five years and you look back at your same smart friends, friends from school who have just been in, you know, a bit of a corporate life that whole time, you see that that muscle has atrophied.
They don't have that muscle and that muscle is really important because whatever you're going to do, the winning idea, you're going to need to be able to go all in, in order to make that idea work.
Yeah, 100%. All right, the last last philosophy I want to hear from you, because I dig these is, there are no rules.
Just construct your work and your life the way you want.
What do you what do you mean by that why what makes you say that?
You know I feel like when you're in Silicon Valley everyone's got these like you know they're there's so many people who are trying to like be influencers like VCs like you know everyone's got these ideas they're like hey you know I remember when you know in 2011 when I had my first kid like it was very unfashionable to have a kid and have a not have a startup like people like literally like what are you doing like you're gonna fail your startup or whatever but actually one of the things that's like a completely contradiction is Like the only way you succeed is by doing things that are unusual,
right? Because if you're doing the normal things, you how can you succeed because like everyone's doing those things.
So, so weirdly like, you know, if you look at every single success, it's a contradiction because it had to be a really common thing in Silicon Valley is don't do consumer startups, but actually the biggest startups like Amazon, Facebook, Google, they're consumer startups, right?
Like, so why are we telling everyone not to do consumer startups?
But like those are the $3 trillion companies.
So I find like in general, like most knowledge, like, you have to understand where it comes from and why it comes from and like why you're the exception.
But like the only way you succeed is being an exception.
So like you kind of have to like just ignore the rules and like just do the thing and be the exception because that's the only way you succeed.
But I do think there's like knowledge out there and like there's a reason people talk about these things and you should understand why it is that you are different and like yeah, what like there are other problems with consumer startups and there's lots of them, but I've just generally found in life that like actually the best things I've ever done have been like ignoring the rules and just doing things that like, yeah, I just think like most of the time, if you do the, not the opposite, but like if you, if you pick the set of rules that you're ignoring, because you have like a strong reason to
ignore them, you're gonna be much more likely to be successful.
That's a, that's a great point.
You know, there's that, I forgot what the phrase is, but it's like experts know all the rules and masters know when to break them.
So that's sort of the best signal of mastery, when you know the rules and you intentionally choose which ones you're gonna break.
So like I'm learning the piano right now, and my teacher will be like, oh yeah, this is Bach, or this is what Beethoven did, and he'll be like, he'll specifically call out, he did this thing, normally you wouldn't do, right?
This doesn't make sense, these are two different keys, that's not part of the scale, but it works because of this.
And they make up the reason why it works.
Yeah, they make up the reason, but it's post -fact, right?
It becomes a new rule later.
It's like, no, oh yeah, but if it resolves tension, then it works.
Like, okay, cool. But at the time, this sort of breaks that rule.
And that's what all the best ones do.
What I like about what you just said, is that it made me think it's worth writing down.
I'm gonna try this after this podcast. It's worth writing down not just how I want to win, how I want to live my life, but specifically like what rules, what kind of common, best practices or generally accepted good practices that I am intentionally choosing to break.
I'll give you an example.
The other day I was having a conversation with a guy who's really smart and wise, and he said this great line and everybody nodded and took notes, he was like, when you get money, people come to you, they want to do business with you, they want you to invest in their thing, they want a loan, they want whatever.
And he goes, I have this rule.
Either our friendship is sacred or the money is sacred, but you can have both." And I said, so does that mean you just never do business with friends?
He goes, never. And everyone's like, yeah, that makes sense.
It could be really messy.
And I go, I don't know, I think that everything you said is true.
And yet I choose that mess because I think there's a great upside in like finding the people you love and do and life with them, like, life is a lot more fun when I do projects with friends or invest in people's companies.
And I, I, you know, give people, I bet on people and yeah, sometimes it doesn't work out and sometimes it gets a little hairy, but like I choose this mess.
it's like I choose that rule to break and I'm I'm comfortable living with that you know and I can always go back and change my approach but for now that's a rule I want to break but that's a good example where you want to understand how to break the rule as well right like it's not just like I'm going to break the rules therefore I don't care about it you want to go like okay you know if I'm putting money in a startup I'm going to make sure there's a contract and everyone understands like here's how we work together and like yeah I do think when you break the rule you have to kind of go out of the way
to mitigate the potential downsides of like breaking that rule?
Like, and the breaking of the rule is doing the harder thing normally?
So you have to understand why and how and how do you mitigate that?
The rule you broke was, as a startup founder in SF with all the options to choose, you chose the like highly regulated, highly compliance based, hard, have to build for a year and a half before you launch, you know, that's not, that's not the, the quick and dirty prototype vibe code.
Like you can't do that playbook.
So you're like, alright, I'm going to choose to break that norm and go this way, because that's what I want.
Yeah, yeah, but I spent a lot of time understanding what I was in for, right.
I spent, like, three months just talking to people and researching compliance and rules and laws and, like, all this stuff, and, like, I wasn't doing it blindly.
Yeah. All right. So, Ahmad, where should people find you, and who should reach out to you?
Who do you want to reach out to you from things like this?
Because when you're out there, you attract certain people.
but I like to say you want to have your API.
You want to tell people who should connect with you and on what basis?
So it's like, give me a sense of that.
Where should we find you, and what should they reach you about?
The easiest way is on X or Twitter as it used to be.
I'm just Imad. Yeah, who should reach out?
You know, I'm always willing to try to be helpful to entrepreneurs.
So, you know, if you have an idea you want to pitch me something or whatever, reach out, and I try to be like quick and say yes or no if I'm interested or not.
And obviously, if you're interested in Mercury, go to mercury .com and sign up.
All right. Love it.
Thanks for coming on, dude.
Yeah. Thanks for having me, Sean.
Hey, Sean here. Quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story.
He started Twitter.
And before that, he sold a company to Google for $100 million and somebody asked him, they said, Ev, what's the secret, man, how do you create these huge businesses, billion dollar businesses?
And he says, well, I think the answer is that you take a human desire, preferably one that's been around for thousands of years, and then you just use modern technology to take out steps.
Just remove the friction that exists between people getting what they want and that is what my partner Mercury does.
They took one of the most basic needs any entrepreneur has, managing your money and being able to do your finance or operations and they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades.
it's no more clunky interfaces, no more 10 tabs to get something done, no more having to drive to a bank, get out of your car just to send a wire transfer, they made it fast, they made it easy.
You can actually just get back to running your business, you don't have to worry about the rest of it.
I use it for not one, not two, but six of my companies right now, and it's used by also 200 ,000 other ambitious founders.
So if you wanna be like me, head to mercury .com, open an account in minutes, and remember, Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank, banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust Members FDIC.
All right, back to the episode.
