# Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price · Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better · Why AI Is So Overhyped · The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund 20VC · May 12, 2025 · 62 min · 12,658 words Speakers: Immad Akhund, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-53939f23/ ## Cold open **Immad Akhund** [0:00]: Sequoia does not take their position lightly. Like, they did the most work. I think it is very hard as an entrepreneur not to chase the highest valuation. You know, we did our Series B at 120x, which was not rational. This is 2021. But we did it, and I would do it again. I mean, I just prefer serial founders. Like, I have such a bias towards them. A serial founder with a chip on their shoulder. Oh, yeah. A 100%. **Harry Stebbings** [0:23]: This is 20 VC ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:25]: with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I'm very honored by the show today. I had this amazing guest on the show six years ago, and he pinged me recently and said that he had some news that he wanted to share on 20 VC first. And so today, we have an exclusive. With that, I'm very excited to welcome back to the hot seat, Immad, founder and CEO of Mercury. Launched in 2019, Mercury has raised $500,000,000 in funding from Sequoia, Andreessen, Coatue, CRV. He's also a former partner at YC, and he's an active angel investor with over 350 investments in companies like Rippling, Airtable, Rappi, and Substack to name a few. But before we dive into the show today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [1:03]: I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data, and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products, and tools. That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. 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Thank you for joining me again today. **Immad Akhund** [4:25]: Yeah. Excited to be here. I'm I'm always listening to the **Harry Stebbings** [4:27]: show, so it's fun to be on the other side every now and then. Dude, that is very, very kind. Listen, I want to start with some news that you have. I'm thrilled that you said you'd share it with us. So what is the news that you have for us today? **Immad Akhund** [4:38]: Yeah, I finally closed on my first institutional fund. We raised $26,000,000 I'm partnering with a friend of mine. Actually, he invested in Mercury seven years ago. His name is Yash Doshi. He was at EQ2 Ventures. I've been doing angel investing actually since 2016. So I've done about three fifty investments. I've been working with them for the last year, and I was like, hey, I just need to bring him on full time and gonna do this a little more properly. I've so far been investing mostly on AngelList outside of AngelList rolling fund. I actually just closed it, I think, last week or the week before, and already have invested in five or six companies. **Harry Stebbings** [5:12]: Dude, I want to kind of take this chronologically before we dive into the fun. You mentioned the 350 angel investments you made. Yeah. What are the biggest lessons that you have from 350 angel investments? **Immad Akhund** [5:24]: Yeah. Number one, I think this is gonna something that entrepreneurs, especially if you're an active entrepreneur, but once you become an investor, you're used to running a company, you're used to having your ideas. And what you do at the start is you're like, okay, yes, you're talking about something really interesting, but here's another idea that I think is way better. And then the other entrepreneurs, especially if they're young, they're like, Yeah, I love this. Yeah, you know, Immad, like, please invest. You know, we love your ideas. And then you invest and obviously, like, that's not their idea. And, you know, it's not even fair to push an idea on other people, but you really have to actually remove your ego and your ideas and really listen to what they want to do. You're much more along for their journey rather than like a major part. Actually, when I first started investing, so I sold my company in 2016 and I was like, hey, maybe I want to be a VC, right? And I started investing and that's kind of what was my approach. I was like, I'll be really hands on. I'll be really helpful. And then I realised actually Rappi was one of my first investments. Rappi is like a DoorDash for LATAM. And I literally invested and they did not talk to me again. Like, they were just so busy and they grew that thing like crazy. And it was a unicorn within a year and a half. Invested at like a 20,000,000 cap. And I was like, okay, what is the point of being an investor if my best investments don't even talk to me? And, you know, that's what I want, right, in terms of like a capital returner. If someone like I invested, they just do their thing and I **Harry Stebbings** [6:48]: have a big return. That's great. You said that like, you know, you don't want to intrude and put your vision on them too forcefully or too actionably. I would see it as a big red flag if I put my views across and they're like, oh, that's a good idea. That's a better idea. And they run with it. I want someone to say, no, no, you're wrong. And here's three reasons why. Do you agree that if they listen too much, it's almost a red flag? **Immad Akhund** [7:09]: So this is actually another mistake I made. I think sometimes we if you're a second time entrepreneur, you have experience when you talk to an entrepreneur investor, you're like, yeah, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, this is obviously wrong for these reasons. But there's a lot of young entrepreneurs out there that have great ideas, right? I have actually not invested in companies because I was like, okay, you know, these people are not pushing back on me and they're not, they're not coming up with a ton of experience and ideas. Actually, they were just young entrepreneurs and they were often as young entrepreneurs, you're intimidated by investors. So you have to kind of judge people by what their life situation is and, like, you know, how they are approaching the situation. And you do have to kind of cut some slack to kind of people who are new to their career rather than saying like, oh, you know, they didn't push back on me and **Harry Stebbings** [7:54]: they should have, etcetera. You said about Rappi, brilliant, fast growing company to a unicorn status, and they didn't call you. It makes me think of Keith Raboi, who's like the best founders, they don't need you. Do you agree with that statement? Yeah. I mean, **Immad Akhund** [8:09]: they definitely don't need me. I think it's very rare. And, you know, I have at Mercury, I had like seven or eight unicorn founders that invested in Mercury, and I didn't need them. But because they are active entrepreneurs, and every now and then I have a question, I'm like, I'm hiring a CFO, how do I hire a CFO? I've never done this before. Or when I did a Series B, I was like, I don't know, what are the multiples in Series B spaces? Tell me about it. So I did contact them. And this is kind of how I see my role as an investor. It's like, you don't need me, but I'm an active entrepreneur. I've got a big company. I've dealt with a lot of issues. If something comes up, send me a text. If I have time, I'll talk to you. **Harry Stebbings** [8:51]: Do you buy venture value add from venture platforms? The BD teams, the hiring teams, the all the teams that come. I think they're bluntly an excuse for management fees. I **Immad Akhund** [9:01]: think depends what type of company. I mean, I would say, you know, Andreessen Horowitz was our seed investor. So they invested basically on a deck for Mercury and a lot of their kind of value add wasn't super useful. At the end of the day, I think the two most valuable things from any VC firm is, who's the partner, right? Like, is this someone that you know, every conversation you have, you know, I've been talking to Alex Rappi, who's our partner over at Andreessen Horowitz, I've been talking to him since 2017, like once a month ish, right? So imagine doing that with someone who's not value add or like annoying to talk to. Whereas, know, he's smart. I love hearing his take on things and riffing off ideas of him. So those are the types of people you want as investors. I think that is by far the biggest thing you're choosing as an entrepreneur. And then the second thing, which I think is under understood by people, is you do get a founder network with the portfolio companies of that VC firm. Andreessen Horowitz and I guess now Sequoia, I actually was just at a founder networking event with some Sequoia companies. These people have valuable networks and the best VC firms do make us situations where like founders can connect with each other. I've always found that valuable. **Harry Stebbings** [10:06]: You mentioned Sequoia that. Is it a needle moving event when Sequoia invests? Does the world see you in a different way? Do candidates see you in a different way? Is it that needle moving event? I've been an entrepreneur **Immad Akhund** [10:17]: since 2006, and Sequoia has always been the top brand, right? And I've always wanted to get Sequoia as an investor on a personal level. So, you know, finally, and I pitched them many, many times and got a no from them, both for this company. So for me, it was a needle moving event because it was just like something I've always wanted to get. And, you know, they invested in our Series C. **Harry Stebbings** [10:40]: How did that C go down with them? Like, did you have to go into the partnership and present to everyone and Roloff sat there at the kind of head of the table and **Immad Akhund** [10:50]: Well, you know, number one, something I'm impressed by by the top firms is like, Sequoia does not take their position lightly. Like, they did the most work. Right? I'm talking about, like, I pitched a bunch of people. I pitched more than 20 funds as part of the Series C. Sequoia did the most work. They did the most diligence with customers. They did the most work in the data room. They just really put their effort into it and they ask really good questions. And I like that. Like, I don't want someone to make this decision lightly. Don't want to get a term sheet just because like someone's like FOMO ing. Like I want them to really believe in Mercury and feel like they've done their diligence before they make that decision. So A) that's one thing. Number two, I had a conversation kind of later, so Sonya is our partner at Sequoia and she said she had conviction in that first meeting. She said 95% she was in after that initial meeting, which I was like, okay, because they did so much work after that meeting. That was actually kind of surprising to me that they got so much conviction just in the first meeting. Most of the time, by the time you get to the partners meeting, there's been so much work done that yeah, a roll off is not like making the decision. It's kind of like the lead partner and a lot of the work has already been done. **Harry Stebbings** [12:04]: Was **Immad Akhund** [12:04]: that as **Harry Stebbings** [12:05]: the highest offer? **Immad Akhund** [12:06]: Yeah, in the end it was, but I probably would have taken it if it was a little lower. But most of the time, the good firms are willing to match or beat, like, whatever's the highest offer. And it's gonna sound lame, but it's not necessarily about the money for either side at that point. Like, I wanna have a fair valuation and I wanna have, like, the, yeah, the best firm too that's focused on the long term. **Harry Stebbings** [12:27]: What would be your biggest advice to founders on price? Having multiple startups, but also having raised through crazy times, through more difficult times with Sequoia. What would you advise them on valuation in a I **Immad Akhund** [12:39]: have a little bit of a contrarian take on this. I think it is very hard as an entrepreneur not to chase the highest valuation. So this whole thing about like, oh, you know, if someone gives you 100x revenue, don't do it. Like, you know, we did our Series B at 120 x, which was not rational. This is 2021. But we did it, and I would do it again. I think the actual thing that was **Harry Stebbings** [13:02]: Let's let's just go to that. So how much did you raise there? **Immad Akhund** [13:05]: We raised a 120,000,000. **Harry Stebbings** [13:07]: Okay. And so your thinking there, I guess, was, hey, I've raised enough money that I can grow into it over a several year period at worst. **Immad Akhund** [13:14]: So this is what I was gonna say. I think the the mistake is to not raise enough money. Like every now and then someone gets like a billion dollar valuation, they raise like 50,000,000. I think that's a mistake. Like you want to raise enough money at that high valuation. And then number two, don't spend the money, which is really hard. When I raised 120,000,000, I was like, I don't know how I'm going to spend 120,000,000. We had a 40 person company, but I was like, we'll raise enough that either I'll never need to raise again, or if I'm growing really aggressively, then I can spend into it. But that was our thinking at that time. But it it does take a lot of kinda confidence to not spend the money once you raise it. **Harry Stebbings** [13:51]: So me and Parker always have this debate. He's like, Harry's selling his own book when he says don't raise the crazy rounds. And I I don't think I am because I see the truth, Immad, which is you and Parker may be wise enough and mature enough to not go and blow it. But most younger founders, especially, when you give them the money, they spend it. **Immad Akhund** [14:10]: Yeah. I think that is also a mistake of the VCs. Like, their VCs are like, Hey, go spend the money. Make sure this return happens. But a lot of the returns come from the anomalies, right? So it's from the Immads and Parkers of the world that you're going to get the decacorns or whatever. So that's what VCs care about. Like, they really want to go for the home run. So I think the reality is younger founders, like, most founders will do it. So I think we have to set up frameworks for, like, how you can do it but still be successful, which is tricky. **Harry Stebbings** [14:40]: What was your biggest win as an angel investor? And when you reflect on that, are there any takeaways for you? **Immad Akhund** [14:46]: So the biggest kind of win that's returned me money, was True Bill. I mean, the reason it was a win in the end is, like I'd say two things. Number one, those founders are just incredible. Like that's super hard business. Like we're talking about like fintech, consumer business where you have to like really fight for like every user acquisition. Can I be blunt? You did the pre seed? Yeah, invested, I think my first investment was at 16 mil, so I did it before. And it sold for how much? Was a 1,250,000,000 exit. And so your multiple on that was? I don't know if I should say the exact multiple, more than like 30x. It was a great multiple. And it was a short time period, like 2016 to 2021. So two lessons for me there was like repeat founders really do matter. That team did webs.com, which is also a difficult space, website creation space. I've just seen it again and again. I'll take Rippling, like I'm also an investor in Rippling. When you have repeat founders, can go into these difficult competitive spaces and somehow just completely own them. That was one thing. And the second thing, I have never been great at, is timing. The TrueBull founders, they sold at just the perfect time. They sold in December 2021. Amazing timing. I wish I'd taken some more chips off the table in 2021. But as an angel investor and as an active CEO, I don't have time to necessarily go and look at every single unicorn and say, Oh, should I be taking some secondaries? They obviously nailed down market timing and lots of respect to **Harry Stebbings** [16:20]: them for doing it. If I push you into one camp because nuance doesn't work on a podcast, do you prefer serial founders or do you prefer first time founders? I mean, **Immad Akhund** [16:30]: just prefer serial founders. I have such a bias towards them. A serial founder with a chip on their shoulder. I don't think it works if it's a serial founder where they've had a unicorn exit and they're kind of like if there are other choices, hey, could just retire and have $100,000,000 anyway, I think that doesn't work. But if it's a serial founder where like, you know, they have something to prove. Did you feel you had something to prove after your first? Oh, 100%. I mean, our exit was 45,000,000, but it was a real struggle. We pivoted four times. And for me, I just really wanted to build a big company. I've been an entrepreneur forever. I want to have the biggest impact possible, but it is irrational. Being an entrepreneur is irrational, but being a CRO entrepreneur is especially irrational because at least the first time you can kind of blame me on naivety. That's actually one of the qualifying criteria, right? Like a serial entrepreneur knows how hard it's going be, but they're willing to do it again. Right? That is so unusual by itself that you have to kind of go, okay, know, they **Harry Stebbings** [17:25]: must really want to do this. Do you prefer it when they are new to a market, bringing fresh ideas, naivety in some respects, or when they are seasoned pros coming out of the market with ten years experience? **Immad Akhund** [17:38]: I think both can work, but my preference is on naivete. I feel like when I did Mercury, I didn't know anything about fintech or banking. Yeah, I knew that entrepreneurs would use this product and I would use the product, but I was like, how does one go set up a neobank, right? And that's what most my first kind of one year of education was, was just going super deep on like, how do you even do this? But I genuinely think, actually, like, my seed round, Andreessen Horowitz invested, but it was very hard. Even after Andreessen had come in with a lead check, it was so hard to get any fintech fund to invest alongside them, because all fintech funds saw was all the problems. They were like, this doesn't work for this reason and that reason. I was like, I really wanted them as well because I was like, oh yeah, they're going to this deep fintech expertise that I really am lacking, but super hard to get them on board. Mean, did get a bunch of fintech entrepreneurs on board, could not get a fintech and a dedicated seed fund on board, which in hindsight is ironic. But yeah, you really need to have that outsider **Harry Stebbings** [18:36]: perspective most of the time to be successful. That's a miss for many of those investors. When you reflect on your angel misses, what's the biggest miss for you? And how did that impact how you think about investing? **Immad Akhund** [18:48]: Well, actually, like I talked about it earlier, looking at young founders and saying, why don't they have these things figured out? I was a part time partner at the time, so I saw scale AI, and I was like, okay, idea, but these people are so young. I think they were 19 and 20 at the time or something. I was like, I think I could run this company better if I was doing it, and I don't see how they're going to figure it out. And I was just so wrong because obviously they proved me wrong. But also, I think there is some power to that youth that I think is hard to judge, to be honest. You kind of have to yourself suspend belief to say, okay, you know, this person's gonna figure out how to run a huge company. **Harry Stebbings** [19:28]: If I were to push you to give one piece of advice to another founder who wants to start angel investing, what would that piece of advice be? So for example, I'd say, hey, make sure you write the same size check every time. You don't have different levels of conviction, just every time You **Immad Akhund** [19:44]: you're know, one thing is, this is a rich person's game, sadly. I didn't start investing until I had made an exit, I think doing one or two is not going to make a difference. So mostly I say to people, hey, if you have enough money, I mean, we're not talking about a ton of money, but if you have enough money to do at least 20 or 30 investments, that's when you start entering the game because you learn a lot by, like, doing subsequent ones. You know, if you're only doing, like, five, you're not gonna have this kind of iteration. B, you need a diversified portfolio to have any return in this space because what we're really doing as seed investors is unicorn hunting, or I would say even like at these current evaluations, like you're hunting for decacons. And that doesn't yeah. Even if you're great at picking and you have a great network, etcetera, you're not gonna get to them with like five bets. Like, you need a portfolio of bets. Is the age of chasing unicorns **Harry Stebbings** [20:39]: over? You said they're hunting for decacons. **Immad Akhund** [20:42]: Yeah, I mean, you can do the math, but like if your entry price is like $20.25 mil, you know, after you get that dilution, you know, unicorn, like, I've seen as low as like 8x return from like a seed stage investment to unicorn, which I'm like, this is awful. I mean, obviously, there's also you can get like thirty, forty x there. But yeah, I think if your entry price is like that, you're mostly like unicorns, like you need a few of those, but you really want to get like a 10,000,000,000 plus to to have, like, an outsized return. Like, I want you know, I'm not happy to get, like, a two x or three x. Like, I wanna have a 10 x fund, and that's not gonna happen with unicorns. **Harry Stebbings** [21:17]: Did you take cash off the table on any of them? And any thoughts on proactive secondary selling? **Immad Akhund** [21:22]: Well, guess I won't name the company, but there was a company where SoftBank came in with this crazy number and they offered everyone a secondary, I was like, you know, if SoftBank's doing it, I should probably take some money off the table. So I did do it. In hindsight, I probably should have done more. But, you know, I'm really aligned with, like, let's go long. Like, I don't need the money I'm in it for. I'm in it for the game as it was. And, you know, these kind of compounders like Airtable, you know, like, there's companies I'm in where I'm like, okay, I can see this being a $50,000,000,000 company, and if I just stick with it for maybe it's fifteen years instead of ten years, yeah, that return will be worth it. How is Airtable a $50,000,000,000 company? Like, paint the bull case for me there. I mean, A, the bull case for me is how he's like an incredible founder and I think he's gonna figure it out. B, yeah, if you look at AI, I think it actually like really improves their position. Like you have a bunch of data, you have people building basically like internal apps on Airtable, and they've done a good job of kind of incorporating AI. But I mean, mostly I would say they already have the last valuation was 10,000,000,000, so they're only talking about five x. Like, I'm **Harry Stebbings** [22:27]: pretty sure he can figure it out. You know, there's one rule that I go back to again and again, which there are kind of conventional rules, which are conventional for a reason. And one of them is Bill Gurley's brilliant article on the 10 x, you know, how companies are valued as 10 x of revenue across cycles, really. That's $5,000,000,000 of revenue to be a $50,000,000,000 company. It's a lot. **Immad Akhund** [22:48]: You know, you're seeing these companies scale to like a 100,000,000 in revenue in like two, three years now. So, like, yeah, 5 yeah. Billion Totally. **Harry Stebbings** [22:56]: Does revenue mean less than ever before? Given the transience of it, the lower quality of revenue that we apply to revenue today, does revenue mean less than before? **Immad Akhund** [23:07]: I think it really matters on what type of revenue it is, right? I think the revenue that I am most skeptical on right now is this kind of labor replacement revenue. You take AI and it's like, Hey, we're going to be a third of your labor cost, just install us. Initially people see the ROI, they're like, Oh, wow, I get something for a third of the price, and maybe it's slightly worse in some situations, but I still have like humans as back off, but it's just like an obvious cost saving, everyone will do it. You take AI and it's like, hey, we're going to be a third of your labor cost, just install us. And, you know, initially people see the ROI, they're like, oh, wow, like, I get something for a third of the price and maybe it's slightly worse in some situations, I still have humans as back off. But it's just like an obvious cost saving, everyone will do it. The reason that's particularly transient is, especially in this environment, you're going to have three or four competitors also selling that same thing. And eventually a company is going to go like, okay, this actually worked, right? But this competitor is doing it half the price because the cost basis of the software is way lower than a third of the cost. So the sell that VCs get and entrepreneurs are making is, oh, we're replacing your labor costs, therefore we should charge a third of that. But the reality is once you have a competitive market dynamic, the actual margins are going to compress massively and will end up on like a tenth or maybe even a twentieth of the labor cost as like actual eventual revenue. And in these spaces, like everyone's using the same foundation models, like we're going to get incredible competition and like the margin compression is just inevitable. And there's very little moat and network effect against it. So that's one side of it. I do think the other side, we've seen Cursor with, I think they're saying 400,000,000 in revenue or something like that. I think that's SaaS revenue and it's actually like the value they give is relatively high for the revenue. Again, if they try to charge for the productivity gain, they could charge a lot more, but competition will ruin that, right? Like Windsurf will come along and charge $20 So because of these competitive markets, it's not possible to charge for the value you generate. It's actually more you end up charging for what you can charge against competitors and have people not think about it. But yeah, those things are very sustainable, right? I think once engineers are using Cursor or Windsurf, like engineers don't like changing tools, the value is much higher than the charge. So I think there's that set of it is is much more sustainable. **Harry Stebbings** [25:29]: Do you think we have no defensibility anymore? And what I mean by that is you see people very quickly moving from, you know, a Cursor to a Windsurf, and it seems like the moat or switching cost is almost replaced now. Do you think we've lost moats? I mean, **Immad Akhund** [25:45]: we're still in the kind of flashlight slash fart apps era of AI, if you know what I mean. There's going to be so much change and churn in the next few years, but eventually things will settle down. And then we'll have the same defensibility that like SaaS apps and other things have had forever, which is like, what's the strongest brand? And who do people say like, Hey, I love this thing. I used it forever, etc. And that brand is going to be able to continue investing more and more in the product because they've consolidated a market position and they can keep improving the product and they'll become multi product. And now you're getting like two or three things from the same place and you know, that's sticky in its own way. And they built up the enterprise connections, etc. We're just in this place right now where like, no one knows anything, everyone's trying to try everything, but I don't see why like same things that, like, allowed people to create, like, big companies like HubSpot and Salesforce, etcetera. Think most of those things will exist with the modern AI stuff. We're just in this, like, moment of, like, extreme change. **Harry Stebbings** [26:44]: What do your team use engineering wise internally? Is it Windsurf? Is it Cursor? What do they I think Cursor is still by far the biggest one. I mean, haven't heard too many people using Windsurf internally. Given the productivity gains that it provides engineers, HubSpot recently said that they are producing more code that they can ship in features. Salesforce said 20 or 30% of their code is now written by AI. Will you have more or less engineers in five years' time? Maybe I'm contrarian about **Immad Akhund** [27:14]: it a little bit, but to me, if my engineers get more productive, I'm gonna come up with more things to do. Like, I'm gonna have, like, so much stuff that I wanna do. Like, I have, like, infinite ambition. So I think that just, like, unlocks more rather than, like, constraints, like, means that, like, you don't hire people. **Harry Stebbings** [27:30]: Immad, what have you strategically not done with Mercury that with the benefit of hindsight you think you should have done? **Immad Akhund** [27:38]: Yeah. The obvious one and the data we had at the time, I don't know if we would have done any differently, is, we launched Mercury Banking in 2019, and at that point, Brex was the main player in the credit card space, and I was like, Hey, we'll do banking, you do credit card, we're all good. And then what happened is, Brex then entered the banking space, and then later, Ramp came along and they launched a new credit card. And at that point, was like, okay, that was a little silly that we didn't just launch a credit card because, you know, it wasn't, in some ways, the credit card was easier than banking because we already had debit cards. So we didn't end up launching our credit card until 2022 because I was like, let's just focus on banking and let's go really deep here. And I think that was a mistake. We could have launched our version in 2020 probably. We instead worked on some other products. So in hindsight, I think we waited too long to launch that second product and we decided to kind of focus longer on banking. And it wasn't like a mistake that couldn't be corrected. We did launch in 2022 and now Mercury, for Mercury customers, Mercury credit card is bigger than all other kind of corporate credit cards on the platform. But it was, yeah, it was two years **Harry Stebbings** [28:48]: later than it should have been. How do you think about competition? You are in the most competitive environment now, as you see with Brax, with Ramp and with you, all very well funded, all doing very well. Ironically, there's not one that's like not doing well. How do you think about competition when you go to sleep at night? I have two **Immad Akhund** [29:07]: responses. Number one, yeah, I've been doing startups since 2006. And every single year, there's been some competitor that was like better funded, that was seemed really scary. 99% of the time, it didn't matter. Like what mattered is just focusing on customers, building a great product, and most of the time, if we failed, we all failed because it was a bad market, and if we succeeded, it's because we did our own thing and we just listened to customers and had that long term vision. I think it's really dangerous to be very competitive focused. I don't let our team speak about competitors very much. I'm just like, Hey, if you have something you want to do, tell me why the customer wants it. Tell me why it's part of the long term vision of the product. But if anyone says, We should do this because someone else did it, I'm like, I don't care. This is not a reason we do anything at Mercury. So that's one thing. I think most of the time it really doesn't matter. And if you're copying someone, you're copying their mistakes as well as their successes. **Harry Stebbings** [30:07]: Pose an alternative counter positioning, one of the seven powers. You know, Ramp and Eric looked at Braxton saying, hey, spend more, get points. And went, what's the opposite? Save more and have that as your incentive mechanism. And so they used the inverse as their value prop. Maybe that **Immad Akhund** [30:25]: worked for Eric and Goranam, that just doesn't resonate with me. Like, I approached this market and said, hey, I want to be your first bank account. No one else has actually approached it like that. It's like, we want to be at inception with you and we have 200,000 plus customers. Our scale is much bigger than Brexit Ramp, not because, like, they're doing something bad, they're just in a different business. Like, they have bigger companies, they do more enterprise stuff, whereas we're much more at inception stage. **Harry Stebbings** [30:54]: Go ahead. You're gonna hate this question, so forgive me for it. If you're valued at 5,000,000,000 and you're the first bank account for 200,000 companies, why are they valued then at double you? Yeah, **Immad Akhund** [31:07]: I mean, company has to prove out its own thing, so I don't know if valuation is like the thing I focus on personally. It's a different market, right? People understand enterprise SaaS and payments a little bit more than they understand banking. Apart from Mercury, who else is at scale in banking in The US? There's not that many companies, right, like Chime and a few others. So it's a different market, it's just valued differently. **Harry Stebbings** [31:32]: My question to you, my friend, is the angel investing is going so well, three fifty. And then we're like, you know what, we're going do a fund. Why is that? What was the decision making process for you from transitioning from angel to fund? There was kind of two factors **Immad Akhund** [31:48]: for me that drove it. Maybe three. Number one, I had a bunch of LPs recently approach me saying, we're not going to put money in your angel list, but if you set up a fund, we will back you. Secondly, my deal flow kind of went up another level when 30 to 40% of all startups use Mercury. Everyone knows about me. Then that tends to mean that a lot of people want me to invest. I got to a level where I just can't look at all of these things. So I really wanted to work with someone on the deals and on the fund. I don't like doing things badly. And I felt like I was being a bad angel investor because if I can't even look at all the things that are coming at me, how can **Harry Stebbings** [32:25]: I **Immad Akhund** [32:25]: do a good job of it? **Harry Stebbings** [32:26]: Okay. So I get all those reasons. And so why do we decide to raise 26,000,000? Can you talk to me about the thinking behind that? **Immad Akhund** [32:33]: So, you know, what's a little unusual about the Fund is it's a fairly diversified Fund. The idea is to invest into 60 companies. The reason that works is, you know, we're doing these non lead checks. That makes sense, like I'm an active CEO, I can't lead around because I just won't have that time for the company. But also on the other side, I get a lot of deal flow. The best entrepreneurs want me on their cap table, but isn't it better if Sequoia or founder's fund is leading around and I get to invest alongside them because I'm not competing with them? So the average check size is gonna be 150 ks. So if you do the math, if you're doing non lead checks with a smallish kind of average check size, at least we're targeting 60 company portfolio, it doesn't make sense to have like 100, 200 companies in one fund. Then you can kind of **Harry Stebbings** [33:22]: I'm just diving into 60 times 150. We're putting 9,000,000 out the door in initial checks. **Immad Akhund** [33:29]: Yeah. I mean, there's going to be a few other like the strategy also involves like some kind of initial conviction checks. Like if I if I know someone for years and I could put, like, a million dollars into their seed round. Do we do do reserves? Reserves, but I want to be kind of more selective about it. I've never believed in this. Like, every company gets a pro rata check because that's just what I do. I'd much rather Can go like **Harry Stebbings** [33:52]: I be so rude as to advise you, don't have a reserve strategy. You have access to great later stage capital that would happily do SPVs. For your personal finance, I would suggest you do a spray and pray with as large a check as you can get into these rounds. I think $1.50 to 200 is probably there. But then just do SPVs in the best with a deal by deal carry. **Immad Akhund** [34:15]: I find that SPVs, like, don't like SPVs. I think it's like **Harry Stebbings** [34:20]: Entrepreneurs don't care if it's from someone they like and respect, and it's done in a timely manner. If it's imagine you being a founder. Yeah? And one of your friends is like, hey, dude. I wanna work with you. It really means a lot to me. I'm really bored in because it's a deal by deal. Do do you mind? You'd be like, no. Sure. **Immad Akhund** [34:38]: Yeah. Maybe. The other issue I've had with SPVs is like, normally they're FOMO SPVs where it's like, oh yeah, you know, some lead check comes in and you're like, okay, you know, let me give me an allocation. Let me go do this SPV. I don't like that game. Like, I want to do these reserves when I'm like, hey, invest in the seed stage. I look at their progress and like, you know within six months whether that company is gonna kill it. Right? Like, at least that's been my experience. Do **Harry Stebbings** [35:01]: think you do? Because I tweeted the other day the opposite. I was in Clubhouse, be real. And and my point of that is like, if I had Yeah. Actually, no in both **Immad Akhund** [35:10]: directions. Like, you have signal. I mean, doesn't mean you have a guarantee, but like six months later, if you see that progress, like, and if you I would bet that Harry, even in your portfolio, six months later, if you invested in every one of the things that you think will be a hit, like, 50% are gonna get hit? **Harry Stebbings** [35:27]: No? If I look at, like, my fun one, I've got, like, Linear, I've got Linktree, I've got Captions, Next Health, Agent Sync, which are all, like, really solid, 50,000,000 about revenue companies. I would say they were all pretty slow burns, actually. And they weren't that obvious. Maybe it's because they're enterprise. **Immad Akhund** [35:48]: Yeah. Maybe. I mean, if I look at mine, like, Rappi definitely knew within six months. Truebill definitely knew within six months. Rippling, I mean, Rippling was just hard to get into, but like, was pretty freaking obvious. Airtable definitely knew very early on. So there's definitely like Airtable even like, you know, there was like a three year period where they kind of took a while to ramp up. So maybe six months is too early, but you definitely know before everyone else knows you're in Do the company and you can you care about price? First check. I mean, you end up being a price taker as like a non lead, so I care about it. Like, if it's silly, I won't do it. But, you know, often the seed market actually as a whole is a little silly. And, you know, I've ended up especially recently avoiding AI. I think AI is overhyped and overvalued. Woah, **Harry Stebbings** [36:35]: woah, pause on that. Why is AI overhyped? **Immad Akhund** [36:39]: At seed stage, it's so hard to do AI. I mean, I don't know what you're seeing, but like, it's like the fourth time I've heard the pitch of the same idea. The founder's raising at like a 40,000,000 valuation, they even have like great investors, there's a little bit of traction, but the math is just so hard right now in AI. I mean, I'm still doing it, like, you know, in the last eight investments that we were just looking at, four of them are AI. So it's hard to avoid AI completely. I'm just way more selective. There's actually a lot of, like if you look at fintech or I'd end up doing a lot of space tech or hard tech, there's not that much competition there right now. I think as a seed investor, you can't be doing too many investments at the top of the hype cycle. The same thing happened in 2021. 2021, I mean, it was everything **Harry Stebbings** [37:24]: above All the AI companies that you've done there, **Immad Akhund** [37:27]: you **Harry Stebbings** [37:27]: said the bar's higher or the qualification process in your mind kind of tougher. Yeah. What did they have that the others didn't have? What did you need to see to get excited? A, the **Immad Akhund** [37:38]: founder needs to be probably more of a second time founder where they deeply understand that space and they happen to be applying AI to it, but it's not like AI for the sake of it. I did one where like really deep in prop tech and they have like a really specific AI application there. So either that or this is like, you know, they already have the traction. Like this is like already seems like a rocket ship and, you know, and I really believe that that traction is real. And yeah, the valuation is a little high, but I like you have to kind of jump on some of these rocket ships. Those are like probably the two that I am still doing. But the vast majority of AI at seed out there does not have traction, is like someone doing like the fifth time the same idea is getting funded right now. That's just what you see mostly happening. But like great VCs are funding these things, right? One is doing **Harry Stebbings** [38:28]: of the biggest changes from like five or six years ago in Basten, there was always two or three competitors in everything five or six years But now there's 15. There's 15 ex they're raising, like, 10,000,000 plus. Like, it's not like they're, like, early bets. Yeah, it's crazy. Totally agree with you there. So, Yash, you mentioned space tech. Dude, you're literally having to go to another planet to find the deal. I mean, literally. And I know nothing about space tech. No offense, do you know much about space? Can you help me actually? Just fuck it, help me. **Immad Akhund** [38:58]: How I think about it is when I enter a new space that I don't know that much about, I will make a couple of investments and I'll try to learn from them. So I made my first space investment, I think 2016 or 2017, it was Momentous Space, they ended up doing a SPAC that didn't work out. But when you make a few investments and you need to make one or two investments, you end up speaking to maybe 10 people, right? And these people tend to be like, you know, they're at the edge of their space. Yeah, it's like people from SpaceX and Blue Origin. So you end up learning quickly about like, okay, what are the markets? The thing about space that maybe is unobvious is like, it's no longer that hard to get into space, right? Like SpaceX is very repeatable. Like these people are not doing space. Well, they are doing difficult hardware things, but they're not doing scientifically impossible things, right? They're literally saying like, hey, I'm going put a computer and a satellite. I'm going to put it on space. It is tricky though. Like there's three, I don't know how deep you want to go in spacetech here, but there's like basically three existing markets in spacetech. There's rockets, right? Like getting things up and down, which obviously SpaceX dominates. There's taking pictures from space and that's actually like a pretty big market, like $40,000,000,000 market. And then there's communication, which like obviously Starlink and other people are doing. Those are the three markets. There's almost no other market in space right now. And I have investments in, like I did Stoke space, which is like doing reusable rockets, I did Albedo, which is like taking very high resolution pictures from space. Are **Harry Stebbings** [40:20]: rounds for these companies not mega? And if the rounds are mega, they're very high **Immad Akhund** [40:25]: priced? Not at seed stage. I mean, at seed stage, these companies are like I mean, they're like better than these AI SaaS companies at seed stage, because they're like, you you get there and these are like It's hard for them to raise big rounds when they're just starting out, and then they have to prove some stuff out. I can't remember the initial Stoke round, it was probably like 20,000,000 valuation. You know, they had to prove out like a rocket test and then they got funding from the government and now they've raised, I don't know how much they've raised, like more than 100,000,000. But yeah, you do have to take the time and be careful to understand it. I don't personally do bio because, you know, I speak to someone and they're like, 'We've cured cancer' and I speak to the next person and they're like, 'We've cured cancer' I'm like, 'I don't know, you sound good'. But I really think space is not as hard, but I have spent years kind of trying to understand it. **Harry Stebbings** [41:08]: 60 companies, Immad. You're a pretty busy guy. You run an amazing company already. When a founder takes a check from you, they do expect to be able to have you return their calls. How do you think about gating Immad and preventing a free for all? Honestly, I am so **Immad Akhund** [41:25]: surprised how considerate people are. And I wish they would actually ask more for help. So normally I'm like, hey, here's my phone number. Just text me if anything comes up. And most of the time you can actually be pretty helpful in like a ten minute conversation and I can slot that in most times. I would say I end up speaking to an entrepreneur maybe three or four times a week. But like, I think one thing that people don't understand about time is like, time is about energy, not time. There are things that drain your energy, and those are hard to do and they suck up time. And then there's things that are fun. I love talking to entrepreneurs and helping them out. Can do that. I'm literally like, I'll go for a walk to like, go get lunch and I'll just like talk to an entrepreneur. And it's like so easy. And it's like, it's just like having a chat with a friend. **Harry Stebbings** [42:08]: So we've got four pillars in venture. We've got sourcing, you've got selecting, we've got securing, which is winning, and then we've got servicing. Which do you think you're best at, and which do you think you're worst at, and why? **Immad Akhund** [42:21]: I mean, I'm very good at winning right now with the strategy we have of like non lead checks. Yeah, I mean, I've done rounds recently where the round is fully done with like some hotshot VC and then I still get my 150 ks in after the round is fully done. So winning is definitely easy right now. I would say the most fun is those kind of selecting side of things in the sense that you you have these entrepreneurs that are really teaching you the future. Like, I think it's just so fun to talk to entrepreneurs and go like, oh shit, I'd never thought about that. Like, that's super interesting. You know, I did this company Etched. It does like ASIC chip for Transformers. And it's super interesting. That's my only ever semiconductor investment. I probably won't do another one, but you learn so much in just a short conversation. You're like, oh wow, **Harry Stebbings** [43:06]: I had no idea it works like that. When we think about funding this, we have $26,000,000 How did the fundraise process go? **Immad Akhund** [43:13]: Honestly, it was surprisingly easy and, you know, I have a really good track record and obviously that made it easier. What do you **Harry Stebbings** [43:21]: what do you don't Joe's side it, man. Did you just, like, WhatsApp a load of mates and be like, hey. **Immad Akhund** [43:25]: I'm doing **Harry Stebbings** [43:25]: a fund. I mean, **Immad Akhund** [43:27]: I didn't want to have even to get to 26,000,000 having a bunch of mates with like 250 k each just takes forever. So, yeah, we had like three kind of anchor LPs that are like more fund of funds. And actually the biggest, the easiest ones are definitely like Did you get a send on? But yeah, the easiest ones are definitely like a mate that I'm like, Hey, do you want to invest? Then they're like, you don't even have to pitch them. They're just like, Hey, there's a million or whatever. But yeah, it was a quick process. I mean, actually the hard bit is getting the LPA done is ridiculous. Like, I don't know how you all do it. Like, it's like a multi party negotiation for like these kind of esoteric terms. I mean, there wasn't like any real staking point, but it just took like a month and a half to get it done. I was like, this is a silly process. How long did the raise take? The actual, like, getting, you know, the core allocations done was basically, like, three weeks. Okay. Three **Harry Stebbings** [44:14]: weeks. What's the biggest check? Not who, but just what is it? It's 7,500,000. 7.5 of 26. That's a lot. Shit. Yeah. I mean, it made it easier. It makes it much easier. What was the biggest surprise of fundraising for a fund? **Immad Akhund** [44:28]: Maybe this is a little harsh. It's boring. It's very boring. Obviously, when you're pitching a company, you're saying the same story again and again. But you do learn something from the questions you get asked and you kind of do change the story over time. I feel like pitching a fund, there's not much to learn in the process. It's very much do a bunch of very repetitive meetings. I don't know if that's surprising. Yeah. I'm sure you know this. But, yeah, it was, like, less fulfilling than I wanted it to be. Like, I wanted to go, like, oh, yeah. I'm gonna speak to some smart people and learn something. But I was, okay. You know? It's I didn't feel like I really got that much out of it beyond, like, doing the process. **Harry Stebbings** [45:02]: What's the composition of the LPs? It's like, fund of funds, how how much percent is that? Like, 50%? **Immad Akhund** [45:08]: Yeah. Fund of funds is like 60 ish percent, and then a bunch of kind of entrepreneurs and GPs is like the bulk of the rest of it. **Harry Stebbings** [45:17]: Can I be really rude? I have a problem with founders that raise money from VCs, and that's your responsibility to build a company. And then you raise money from other LPs where you have another responsibility to optimize the value of a portfolio. I view them at odds. When I raise money from someone, that deserves my time, and then I'm being pulled away with another responsibility. Why am I wrong to think it's wrong for founders to raise external money for funds? And you think it's **Immad Akhund** [45:49]: different when it's like an angel list rolling fund, or you're saying same criteria? **Harry Stebbings** [45:54]: I'm kind of saying the same thing. If you're raising a different Angel money is totally different. It's your money. Do what you want with it. Cool. But raising additional money from additional different LPs I **Immad Akhund** [46:06]: feel very transparent about it. Like, this has always been the story I've said. Like, I'm a successful CEO, and this is what you're getting. Mercury is my main job. I think that's one thing. B, does it work for both sides? So I have always done, like even before I started Mercury, was an active investor with other people's money, then during it I was. And I would say part of Mercury's success has been my connection with early stage founders. Actually from the first 30 alpha customers of Mercury, think 100% of them were companies I'd invested in. It's always been a core part of building Mercury, has been my investor journey alongside it. And I talked to my co founders about it, was like, Hey, do this, do you mind? And they were like, No, this is part of what makes Mercury successful. So that's one side of it. Then on the other side, Mercury's success gives me access to that deal flow, gives me the ability to win. I do invest in a lot of B2B companies and fintech companies where I have this unique perspective of being an active fintech entrepreneur. So I think as long as it works for all sides, and it probably doesn't work for all entrepreneurs, Mercury is in a unique position where we do sell to startups and that ends up being like, you know, my investing is helpful Mercury is helpful to my investing and my investing is helpful to Mercury. That's probably not true for everyone. **Harry Stebbings** [47:22]: The other question that I had was, with absolute respect, you have a lot of Mercury and you can sell secondary. Why bother raising external money? No offense. Like, if you took look at carry, like, 20% on '26 is 5.2 of your own money. I know 5,200,000 is a lot of money. I'm not belittling it. But you could easily sell 5,200,000 in secondary. Many people will buy it off you. Why bother? **Immad Akhund** [47:45]: Yeah. I mean, I think it's fun to build institutions. You know, I'm working with Yash on this fund. I think it can be bigger than just me and just a few angel investments and **Harry Stebbings** [47:55]: What do you want it to be? **Immad Akhund** [47:57]: I don't know exactly, like this is the first fund, so I'm not coming at it like, yeah, I'm coming at this like, oh, let's explore it. But, yeah, I want to be helpful to entrepreneurs, and I think I can be helpful to entrepreneurs and I can scale that. And working with someone to get the best investments to kind of scale that portfolio approach and doing it with more money allows me to have a bigger impact. And yeah, eventually there'll be opportunities where we maybe are the biggest check at seed stage. Or maybe instead of doing 60, we do a 150 in one fund, or, like, maybe we incubate ideas. I mean, I have a lot of ideas. So that all everything's on the table, but at the same time, you know, it's the first fund, I'm I'm I'm definitely approaching it with, like, an open mind. **Harry Stebbings** [48:36]: I think seed is very, very hard today because the multistage fund product is so efficient. They are so good, fast, and their cost of capital is so different to a pure play seed funds, which is like me and you, much smaller funds. Do you agree that multi stage funds have made seed very difficult with such efficient seed products? They've made it **Immad Akhund** [48:55]: difficult for you, but not for me necessarily, because I'm just like, okay, sure. Andreessen is leading a ride, let me join in. Yeah, there's not that many multistage billion dollar funds, right? There's eight or nine that have a brand. Seed is, by definition, there's so many unknowns, and those multistage funds are only going to do a certain flavor of entrepreneur, right? Often it's either an exec from a big company that's doing this thing or it's like a multi time kind of entrepreneur. So if there is that flavour that ticks the boxes for those kind of multi stage big funds, yeah, it's very hard to try to lead around against them. But there's entrepreneurs come in all flavors. And, you know, I don't think like these first time entrepreneurs that are, like, hungry and don't know a space, but, like, figure stuff out, those you know, the multistage funds, like, have a much harder time with those. **Harry Stebbings** [49:47]: How do you expect venture to change in the next five to ten years? **Immad Akhund** [49:50]: That's a great question. I mean, it seems inevitable that a few of these multi stage funds will IPO and be public companies, right? Like we heard some stuff about GC doing it. I think that's just going to happen, and I actually think more and more money is going to come to this space, which ironically, we as investors are like, Oh, it'd be better if there's less competition, less money. But I think the big changes, right, like these companies are huge now, right? We have trillion dollar companies, right? When I started investing, a $100,000,000,000 company was huge. So the end results are so big that people want to put more money in the space. And yeah, I know we're in a current liquidity glut, but I think that will work out through the system. So yeah, probably bigger multi stage funds and they're public. I think the bit that's probably hard is, you know, there's this kind of idea of like the barbell kind of stuff, right? People like me that are investing kind of smaller checks, like we'll do fine and the multi stage ones will do fine. I don't know what happens in the middle. I think the middle will have more of an issue. **Harry Stebbings** [50:46]: I think you do suffer because you pay higher prices. That definitely impacts your returns with the multi stage seed product. I would say you mentioned there the liquidity glut. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this. The Collisons have said very publicly, Why do we need to go public? We don't need some I can't remember which brand of bank, so I don't want to misquote them but a brand of bank, twenty five year old, to tell us that margins are important? And the question is, why would anyone go public today? **Immad Akhund** [51:14]: I think about it as well, and yeah, I want Mercury to be like a legacy long term company, so being public is inevitable. But yeah, why do it today and not five years from now, six years from now, seven years from now, and obviously Stripe and a few others have delayed it, you know, multi decades even. I think the biggest issue is kind of structural issues in the public markets. So the two things are number one, the cost and rules around being public are just so much right now. So it's not it's just not easy being a public company, so you might as well delay it longer. And then number two, there's so few active investors in public markets now. Between the passive index funds, if you're not going to be in the S and P five hundred or one of these other index funds, it's hard to get anyone's attention as a sub scale public company, right? Even if you're like a $5,000,000,000 company in the public markets, you could hardly get an analyst to look at you. So we've created these structural things that just mean that you want to be as big as possible. I mean, Stripe could definitely do it, obviously, but you don't want to be a Mercury sized company in the public market. I think most people are saying like 10,000,000,000 is probably the minimum before you want to be a public company. So, I mean, I don't know how to fix it. I mean, ideally, we'd make some like actual structural changes to make it easier to be public. Otherwise, we just all have to wait. I would say there is a lot of liquidity now in private markets. **Harry Stebbings** [52:37]: Have you done secondaries for the team and for yourself? **Immad Akhund** [52:40]: Yeah, just did a tender, employee tender. And even without that, there was a lot of people selling secondaries along there since 2021 when we became a unicorn. There's been a lot of early investors, early employees selling secondaries, and there's a pretty liquid market for it. **Harry Stebbings** [52:56]: Are you okay with that? Like, Nick at Revolut is incredibly tight on secondaries, especially in between rounds, it can set prices. It can cause some problems if you're not careful. **Immad Akhund** [53:05]: My take on it is, if we were a public company, we're getting priced all the way in every direction, right? It's better for employees to feel like they have a relatively liquid thing as comp. I don't want this to be a lottery ticket that you get it at some point if I decide to go public. I want this to be actual valuable stock that you feel that ownership and you feel the upside. Part of that is a viable liquidity option. So I'm relatively open about it. So far it's not been an issue. **Harry Stebbings** [53:35]: Immad, who, when they send you a deal, are you like, oh, this is gonna be a good one, because it came from them? So like for me, when Elad sends me a deal, I'm like, Oh shit, I'm paying attention. He sent me agent sync and he sent me Vanta. I did agent sync, I didn't do Vanta, and I fucking should have done Vanta at pre seed. **Immad Akhund** [53:55]: Yeah, that's great. I really like fifty year, you know, fifty year fund? Yeah, that's found that's I'm an LP in the fund as well, but they do like these real long term focus, often strange seeming deals that I kind of like the entrepreneurs they invest in. I think they're high quality. Other people, I mean, I'm a big fan of Shield and Jake at Tomorrow Ventures. They do fintech specific stuff, but they really know that space really well as well. So, yeah, tend to, for deals that I receive, thesis driven funds are not that great. Like, I think it's better to have, like, a broad investing strategy. But for deals that I receive, kind of like thesis driven funds because I'm like, okay, they know that's faced really well, they tend to tend to be good at picking it. **Harry Stebbings** [54:36]: Listen, dude, I want to move into a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yeah. What what have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months? **Immad Akhund** [54:47]: Yeah. I don't know if I've quite changed my mind all the way on this, but I would say twelve months ago, I was very skeptical we're going to get to advanced super intelligence. Now, I'm like a lot more, I don't know whether we'll get there very soon in the next five years, but the advancement in AI has just been relentless, and it's kind of persuaded me more on the train that it's probably going to happen sooner than we think. **Harry Stebbings** [55:12]: What is your favorite AI tool? **Immad Akhund** [55:13]: I use ChatGPT for everything. Actually, I was just doing a presentation yesterday and I basically just talked to ChatGPT for thirty minutes about the presentation. And I was like, oh, like, this and that. And it's just like basically, like, the end, I was like, okay. Can you write that all in, like, a slide format? And it just did it for me. And I was like, okay. That's pretty freaking cool. **Harry Stebbings** [55:31]: What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started? **Immad Akhund** [55:34]: Yeah. One thing that has been really powerful at Mercury, and I tell every entrepreneur to do this, is like, first thing when there's like three or four people, write down what is your company culture. You know, we wrote down like six attributes, and these things have to be like things that have some trade offs to them. The hardest one is we look for humble people and often, especially really successful people aren't very humble and you have to kind of make that trade off. You're like, oh, this is like a successful exec and they seem great but they just have a massive ego and we never hire those people. But we wrote that down like day one and we've always stuck to it and we came up with like, we had these six attributes and we came up with like interview questions against them and we've always encouraged them internally and it's really helped build, even at, like, near a thousand people, we have this, like, really strong cohesive culture, but it's because we did it at day zero, and it's very hard to do it later. **Harry Stebbings** [56:26]: I asked you earlier, what did you not do that you wish you'd done? And you said about launching credit before. What did you do that you wish you hadn't done? Probably **Immad Akhund** [56:35]: like the most obvious thing, but anyway, it's probably fine. It's like we raised too much money in our seed round. Like we raised 6,000,000 at like a 23,000,000 valuation. And this was because I was like, okay, fintech is hard. I want to have so much money that I can go on for three years without raising a gain, etc. But it was like such a high dilution round for us. It's by far the highest dilution thing we've done at Mercury. And in hindsight, if I knew we would be instantly successful when we launched, I didn't need to raise that much money. **Harry Stebbings** [57:02]: So you would have preferred to raise three on '23? **Immad Akhund** [57:04]: 3.5 is probably the exact money I would have needed to get to my Series A and have a buffer. So I was a little too conservative. I was like, okay, you know, we need to be really safe and have a lot of money and I could have raised that much. Yeah, very high dilution. **Harry Stebbings** [57:19]: Final one for me, Immad. Can you paint the bull case for Mercury being a $100,000,000,000 company? **Immad Akhund** [57:26]: I mean, we're in these two huge markets, right? Like banking in The US is a $2,000,000,000,000 market, and then financial software tools is another $500,000,000,000 market. And to me, these two markets should be the same market. You have your bank account, that's where you do invoicing, that's where you do bill pay, that's where your credit card and employee spend tools are. The only reason these markets are separate markets is because banks don't know how to build software. I think in ten years' time, it'll be obvious that your bank is really powerful and it can do all of these things and it's all fully integrated. Yeah, that's just a freaking huge opportunity. That's just The US, right? There's a global opportunity around it. There's lots of different types of businesses, lots of consumer financial stuff as well. Yeah, I think this opportunity is like ridiculously huge. That's why like, you know, when you're like, oh, it's so competitive, I'm like, I don't know. Mean, for how big this opportunity is, I'm always like, this seems very uncompetitive. You think about like all the B2B SaaS companies out there, there's like thousands, and that market is smaller than this market. **Harry Stebbings** [58:28]: Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. Hey, Immad, listen, I'm so excited for the new fund. I hope that we can do some deals together. I'm less of a space investor, and so if you do some on this planet, I might be more game. But I'd love to do some together, and thank you so much for doing this with me, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Harry. This was fun. Such an exciting time ahead for Immad with the new fund. And if you wanna watch that episode, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's two zero VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [58:57]: I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. 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