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- [00:00]
Imad
You hear about these companies that are going from like 0 to 100 million in like 2 years or 3 years or whatever. Like, the equation is very simple from a company perspective.
- [00:08]
Unknown
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it. Like, no days off on the road, let's travel. Never look.
- [00:17]
Sean
What's up? We got my buddy Imad here. He's the founder of Mercury, an awesome company that I use and love and is. 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 twent trying to build these companies, you finally did it. How does that feel?
- [00:37]
Imad
It's funny you say that, you know, we raised our series B in 2021, which is actually like four months after we did our last podcast together at my first million in January 2021. And then we're just announcing our Series C, 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 because it's like, I started as an entrepreneur in 2006. So 2021, what is that, like, 15 years? So I'd been working towards this objective of, like, building a unicorn company, right? Like, that's, as you say. Like, 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, you hit this objective, like, becoming a unicorn, and nothing changes. So I have this, like, I have this helmet behind me because that's like, this is from Joe Montana. 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?
- [01:54]
Sean
Joe Montana should make that his thing. He's just, he should send a helmet to every founder who becomes unicorn.
- [01:59]
Imad
I mean, at least he sends it to the ones he funds because it says, like, billion Dollar Club on air. It's kind of cool.
- [02:05]
Sean
All right, I told you. I said love to brainstorm with you ideas. I thought you would come with a bunch of fintech ideas. Because you're the bank guy. But you came with a bunch of. 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.
- [02:26]
Imad
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, just a few years ago getting anything to space was like 100 million endeavor. Right. Like we're talking about like literally $100 million to get something in space that works because There was no SpaceX and all of the space satellite stuff was like these hardened radiation proof satellites. Now the other week SpaceX did eight flights or something in one week. It's insane. So 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 microslat 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 $100,000 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 about AI, which I'm also excited about. But that's a heavily. Everyone's doing it super competitive.
- [03:51]
Sean
Yeah.
- [03:52]
Imad
Whereas I think actually space is still super open. There's not that many people kind of attempting things in space. So the crazy idea I sent to you, which I don't love this idea in terms of we need to come up with why we should do this. But I think a nuclear power plant in space would be really cool potentially. We put this thing on the moon and then we mine mine water from the moon. And yeah, 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 around and flicking it. But I think on the moon it's much easier. The gravity is lower and there's no air resistance. Right. So yeah, if you had a nuclear power plant you could power there. 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 Anduril, but there's kind of two trends, well actually three trends in defense tech that I think are interesting. Number one, there's a lot of geopolitical disturbance. Everyone is basically we're living in or moving into a multipolar world, which means there's India, there's China, there's America, and America is no longer kind of the policeman. 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 needs to rearm, it's all of Europe, India, whatever, everyone is arming. So you have all of these people that are in market now that weren't. And then number two, autonomous vehicles have changed the game. These drones, AI in general can be applied to all of this stuff. And then number three, you're going to get a ton of drones. It's not just big billion dollar fighter planes, right? It's going to be actually like a thousand or million, like tiny drones that are like easy to manufacture. So all of these things kind of make it so startups can now compete again in a way that like wasn't possible before.
- [06:21]
Sean
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- [06:49]
Imad
So I think there's like two, 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 of 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 I, but they're literally digging trenches. And like that's why the lines are like hardly changing because it's like the neither of them has air superiority. The drones actually make it hard to get air superiority because you can have a tiny drone knock out of a million dollar plane. So in that world, so we've got one side is the autonomous side. Second side is the kind of how do we build more defensive autonomous things as well. So maybe we automatically have these machines that are building trenches. You could have autonomous minds that are smart and they, I mean, I guess that sounds like bad to people, but you can 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 mines that move around. And then to tie back to the space thing, 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 cut down on Starlink and all of this kind of communication, you can remove the, 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 going to be a big thing. So, so the counter to that is how do you create defense around satellites, right? How do you. Maybe you'll have like stealth equivalent of stealth satellites, right? Like you kind of only move them when the sun is kind of obscuring the viewprint and you move them to a place and then upscale them completely so they're not reflective. Yeah, I know there's a ton of ideas around defensive kind of stuff in space as well.
- [09:04]
Sean
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's, there is demand, there might even be competition, it might even be established, but that gives you a bit of a playbook and there's, there's, 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 hundred, a couple hundred million dollars with a higher likelihood of success, but you'll pretty much never get to the, the billion dollar or, or sort of groundbreaking 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 you know, 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, the best ideas sound initially like a bad idea, but actually are a good idea. And 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, or you know, 8 out of 10 people who first hear it say, nah, no way. Right? And so you, so that's the first thing is like a great idea typically comes disguised as a bad idea. The second thing is some inflection point. 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. Or are you 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 defense 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, for that job. And when it comes to like warfare or defense, great, because that's, you know, lives saved when, when you do that. So you know, you have these inflections. 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, 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 and way less versus the number of teams pursuing them. And same thing in, 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, all right, I don't even. 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.
- [12:47]
Imad
Yeah, I mean, I have some simpler ideas that are maybe good but not great, but more achievable. Here's a fun one. I thought about last night. I thought it'd be fun to have a billboard in space. So I had this a few years ago. I was going camping and I didn't have Internet and there was this Starlink satellite launch. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but I think they fixed it so it doesn't do this. But they basically launched the satellite so 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 the naked eye.
- [13:24]
Sean
With a telescope or just naked eye?
- [13:26]
Imad
No, just naked eye. You just look up and there's like a string. And initially I was like, are those stars? Are they UFOs? Because they're like, yeah, they're like very bright. Like they're brighter than a star, but they're completely in a line and they're moving quite fast because they're in leo. Right? But I was like, oh, that's kind of sick. You can literally, as a human launch this thing that changes everyone's view from the Earth. I thought that was kind of insane. But, yeah, I don't think it'll be that hard to put a billboard in space and make it so you could view it from a telescope. I don't think you could do it. I mean, you could probably do the natural eye thing, but obviously people will complain. But making it so you can view it with the 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 billion dollar idea, but.
- [14:13]
Sean
Well, do you remember there was a whole service around buying and naming stars? Do you, do you remember this? This was kind of like a big idea in the 90s, maybe early 2000s.
- [14:23]
Imad
Three body problem. That's like one of the, one of the ideas.
- [14:26]
Sean
I haven't actually read it, no. It's like on my kind of to do to read list. But we, back in the day, we had this business called Birthday Alarm. And Birthday Alarm was like, to remind you of when it's your friends and family's birthday. And then you could 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 were. 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, that was very impressive to me.
- [15:16]
Imad
I thought the other one that would be kind of cool is like, you know, when I die, if I. 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. Having like some sort of memorabilia being sent to space. I think it's kind of interesting as well. And that would be easier in 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 after these big categories, right? Like this, AI SDRs, 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 at education because A like the content is like extremely easy for AI to do.
- [16:02]
Sean
Super structured.
- [16:03]
Imad
Yeah. B, it can be completely personalized. C it's just extremely patient. Right. Like I mean when I try to teach my 13 year old, I'm like pulling my hair out after like a few minutes. So there's a whole class of like, you know, you take any test and you could probably make an like 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 mcat. I mean that's a no brainer.
- [16:26]
Sean
Is there somebody doing that? Somebody has to be doing that, right?
- [16:29]
Imad
Because I haven't heard of anyone doing a great job of it.
- [16:31]
Sean
I'm sure there's nobody's won yet, which is amazing. But like you know, you look at Kaplan and you look at, you look at the big test prep companies, they were built like decade, 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 test in 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 or if you read about the like the, the two saving 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 like the, the problem for a long time was I think, I think you basically would get something like two standard deviations above the mean. And by the way, this is kind of debated and people say no, that was, it was measured wrong and it's not true.
- [17:27]
Imad
I think intuitively it's like feels exactly like when I'm learning something, if I talk to someone, like I, if I.
- [17:32]
Sean
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 just showing up cold? No. Would I choose just a book where I self paced 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 tutorial. So I think that's kind of, kind of great because it's so scoped to, you know, one chat, one specific 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.
- [18:26]
Imad
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 rather than trying to do all tutoring. I think that's actually quite a hard problem and AI is not quite there yet. If you pick just one thing and you just completely nail it, then you can always expand from there as well.
- [18:46]
Sean
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 taking off or doing well that you feel like more people should know about, but they don't know about it yet?
- [19:00]
Imad
You know, this 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 0 to 100 million in like you know, two years or three years or whatever. Like all of these ones that hit where they're 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 fallback to humans at half the price, sure, let's do it. Right. So there's definitely across a bunch of these spaces and the big ones are like sales, customer support, legal accounting, a bunch of these. And I'm an investor in many of these companies, there's definitely like a moment where like they're really winning. And obviously it's still early, but it seems obvious to me that like a bunch of these things will be delivered by AI. So on the other side, every company that has sales or CS or whatever, the CEO, the board is saying like, hey, how do you make yourself more efficient through AI, right? So the buyers are like really looking for solutions and anyone. There's not that many actual in each of these spaces. There are a lot of companies but like, normally it's really hard to do enterprise sales, right? Like this is like a 9 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 kind of rare trends.
- [20:50]
Unknown
All right, 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 indie 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 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 Big Break. All right, back to the podcast, would you?
- [21:51]
Sean
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 IMOD 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.
- [22:11]
Imad
I approach things like both top down and bottom up. So top down. And actually did this as part of like your, your podcast prep stuff. I went to ChatGPT 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 across each of them, right? So that's very top down. And you're like, okay, there's education, there's medical, there's lawyer, there's accounting, there's whatever, like all these like knowledge worker type things like design, coding, etc. So that's like a top down approach and you can say, okay, you know, 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. You know, here's, you know, 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 like, you know, there's less regulation, then you can prove it out, etc. So that's one kind of top down approach. And then I'd also go bottoms up and I'll go, okay, you know what gets me excited, right? I love serving entrepreneurs. So like I'd go, because I'm an entrepreneur, all my friends are entrepreneurs. I love the idea of like people making things. So maybe I'd say, okay, you know, what are things entrepreneurs struggle with? And you know, one thing that I still don't have a great solution for is like, you know, 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 Imad that is continuously absorbing all the knowledge across the company and maybe across the Internet and telling me stuff. It's like, I think IMAD should really pay attention to this. Or even I actually thought it would be kind of fun to make it so on the slack. There could be an Imad twin and someone could ask you questions, say like, oh, what would Emad think of this idea? 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 someone was like, oh, our boardroom is 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 going to 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 in my AI twin could have answered that question. So that would be my bottoms up approach. And I do think you should really work on things that get you really excited. An AI sdr. I'm happy for those guys. I personally would not get excited about that. I hate receiving sales emails and calls. So I think doing things that you would wake up in the morning and say, I'm excited to solve this problem. Because these things take such a long time. I've been doing Mercury now for eight years and if I was doing something boring, I would probably wake up in the morning. Why do I have to do this again? So I think that's the bottoms up approach, where you try to think of, what do I care about? What do I want to see in the future? And try to come up with that. And then you kind of merge those two kind of concepts together. And often you do something and you find out actually it's a bad idea as well. So Mercury actually had a very smooth ramp where it was like, I was like, okay, I like this idea. And then I executed on the idea and we never had to pivot. But you know, often you do, like, as you learn something, you're like, oh, actually this doesn't make sense, but this makes sense. So, you know, that's part of, like, ideation is to like, actually go build things.
- [25:34]
Sean
Do you. 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.
- [25:48]
Imad
Let's do that. Yeah, let's do the digital twin. I think that's like kind of the most fun.
- [25:51]
Sean
So you have a, you know, your digital twin CEO who's basically reading all the slacks, the documents and Google Drive the car. He knows everything about the contracts that are all there. He looked at this. He has access to the CRM, so he can see anything in the, in the dashboards, etc. All right, so now first few weeks what are you doing? Is it like, I trust these five people, I'm going to bounce the idea off them. Do you make a deck? Because that clarifies your thinking. Do you just go build a prototype? Do you go look at competition?
- [26:18]
Imad
Great question.
- [26:19]
Sean
Where do you go next?
- [26:20]
Imad
You know, with Mercury, I had this moment where so, you know, we'd raise the money. We were doing the thing and I was like, okay, you know, let me go talk to a bunch of, like, potential companies that could use this. Like, you know, create like, a big pipeline and also just learn what it's about. And I Talked to basically 100, and I remember, like, getting kind of 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, there was. It's very lukewarm. And it was only two of the hundred companies that were like, oh, yeah, like, I would fucking use this. Like, give it to me right now kind of thing. And at that point, it took us a year and a half to build this. So this was like one year in. So 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 lukewarm. I was like, what am I doing? But I was like, I would really want this. So I just powered through it and it turned out A. If 2% of people want something and the market's big enough, that's probably big enough for an early adopter base. But if you think about it, like, you know, talking to a hundred people and having only two people get excited about something is, like, actually, like, kind of, like, tricky. And, you know, maybe I wouldn't have Talked to those two people because, like, if I talked to 50 people, I might have missed out on it completely. So I think it's actually, like, surprisingly hard to vet an idea against humans. Like, people just don't know, and it's hard to imagine an idea as well. So what I think I would do is, yeah, I would do that talk, and I would go talk to some VCs, as well. Like, I talked to a bunch of users, I talked 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 first thing for me, one of the things that gets me excited about Mercury is that after, like, last year, we launched a bunch of new things. Like, we launched 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 turn out to 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 teams, so you can build a lot of things on top of it. So I'd want to think about like, okay, you know, if I did the digital twin idea, like, what are the forks? Like, why, why does this become even more interesting the more user that you get on it? 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 twins shows up at the Zoom calls. Maybe it becomes your coach and it's like helping you through difficult times. Right? Like, I think there is, 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, in your communication channels. Like it's got these core ideas that like, yeah, it sounds like a pretty good idea that we ripping on it.
- [29:22]
Sean
But yeah, well, you also, with Mercury, you. It seems like this may be 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?
- [29:57]
Imad
No, no, that's 100% fair. I think generally speaking, I'm a little unusual. If I have to call someone to do something, I get so annoyed about it, I want to press a button. I will Delay for weeks for sure. But if I have to do it, and that's the way banks are, except for Mercury, you have to call to get a wire done. I guess they're kind of gone, so I can probably bitch about them a little bit. But First Republic, if you wanted to send a wire, firstly you tried to do it and you'd hit a limit. So you call them, raise the limit, and then you do it. And yeah, 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 them. 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.
- [30:42]
Sean
So you guys started sponsoring me. And I was like, all right, cool. I have an idea for the ad read because I got six Mercury accounts myself. So I was like, trust me, I already know. You don't need to give me the talking points. I know why I use it. And 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 is one of the only advantages you have, right? You don't have, 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 any 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 comm 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.
- [32:02]
Imad
They gave me this to do it.
- [32:04]
Sean
They gave me this thing like, it's the nuclear codes. And I had to have that. And then it's like. 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 because they would only let me do 50k or 100k 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 found that it. 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.
- [32:57]
Imad
Yeah, let's just get it up.
- [32:58]
Sean
There's still eight hours left in the day. What are you talking about? Like, how long could that possibly take you? And. And if you're. 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 going to work. I want my software fast and my employees fast.
- [33:13]
Imad
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 had a slightly better expectation of banking. Like, the. 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, like, part of it, that, like, people in America were, like, okay with once a month having to, like, drive to Wells Fargo to do something basic and, like, having this, like.
- [33:52]
Sean
And, like, beg them to let me do something. With my own money.
- [33:55]
Imad
Exactly.
- [33:56]
Sean
Like convince them. And sometimes they say, no. Dude, the term abuse is so good. It's like, that's gonna be a new filter for me on ideas is. Can I describe the current abuse that the product is doing? Like, I was in this conversation the other day and it was like, super. It was. I went to that dialogue conference. I don't know if you've ever been.
- [34:13]
Imad
But like, oh yeah, this is the dialogue couple.
- [34:16]
Sean
Oh, perfect, perfect. So I went there last like two days ago, whatever. And in the room was like the CEO of Renaissance Technology. Like the Renaissance, like the best investors in the world. The CEO of Bridgewater. Or like, it was basically like the who's who. And in the, in the money conversation, it's 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 like arguing that, you know, crypto. I don't know, I'm not convinced. And I, I just sort of. It was the, the abuse thing. So I was like. So you, you think. He's like, 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 2 to 3% target inflation. Oh, oops. Sometimes we go way above that, but we'll try to get back to 2 to 3%. And I was like, so your, your default expectation is that in 30 years your purchasing power is 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.
- [35:24]
Imad
It's a lot worse than that because of like asset appreciation, right? Like people don't think about it, but like, you know, like houses and a lot of other things are like way above inflation.
- [35:33]
Sean
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 gain the adjusted EBITDA of inflation, right? 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 fine. It's not Even a problem. It's not even like a known problem for them.
- [36:09]
Imad
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think part of the reason it's not a problem for richer people is because they get the asset appreciation. Right? So like, you know, people aren't sitting on cash. It's 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.
- [36:32]
Sean
Right.
- [36:32]
Imad
So I think that part is like particularly sad. I don't necessarily think crypto is the only answer there. Right. Like you could buy gold, you could buy stocks. Like bitcoin is 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.
- [36:50]
Sean
Yeah, exactly. You can debate the solutions, but the problem seems like not debatable. But it's not, but it's just accepted. It's an accepted abuse. Tell me 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? Because it seems like you were the biggest, you were a big beneficiary of, of that situation in terms of customers coming to you guys or adoption.
- [37:19]
Imad
Yeah, I mean to set 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. And when, you know, when I was working on Mercury, right, Like SVB is part of the seed deck, right? It's like, hey, this is the 800 pound gorilla. Like this is what everyone in the Silicon Valley uses. At that point they were worth 16 billion and I think in peak Covid they were worth 40 billion. So this is a big company. So when this started happening, we had obviously been competing against each other, but it was kind of a weirdly indirect competition in the sense that SVB just offers something very different. Right. This is like this dollar Silicon Valley bank that's been around forever. And then Mercury is this upstart fintech, right? So and we used SVB in my previous company. I liked those guys, they were friendly, they cared about startups. Their software wasn't great, but none of the banks had great software. So to be clear, I didn't feel anything bad about them and I felt really bad about for the people there and I thought they'd be fine. When Thursday rolled along, I was like, hey, everyone's freaking out. People panicking about things on the Internet.
- [38:32]
Sean
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.
- [38:38]
Imad
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, their mortgage backed security, MBS, the mortgage backed securities were like massively underwater. There even been some VCs that had freaked out and like pulled their portfolio companies out. So I had seen some of those rumors in that December 2022. But again like here people always calling some crisis and like if you want to, like right now there's someone freaking out about something. So like the default is to ignore that stuff. But yeah, I mean on Wednesday it kind of kicked off and like, you know, we started seeing like just people were freaking out and they were like, hey, how quickly can I get a Mercury bank account? Right? And it went from like, yeah, normally like banking people don't want to switch banking services. Right? Like this is a, a lot of the customers that Mercury wins are like at day zero, like you just start a new business, you don't have a bank account, you need something and we're 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.
- [39:47]
Sean
Did you have like a like kind of emergency meeting, like hey, here's the game plan or how did you organize that to like Sprint?
- [39:55]
Imad
My initial thing was like, hey, you know, I was like, we do not say a word of this publicly. Like we don't want to like jump on their misfortune, but anyone that comes to Mercury, let's support them. And we did a bunch of things. So we changed the product. So we're like, hey, if you're a non SVB customer, we can always onboard you next week. Right?
- [40:15]
Sean
Right.
- [40:15]
Imad
But if you're coming from svb, let's make it in, let's do a half an hour. So we had this plaid connection thing and we put that right at the top and we said above it, SVB customer, connect your SVB and we'll prioritize you. And like SVB customers were really easy to prioritize because they're like, you know, 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.
- [40:44]
Sean
Was it like 2x5x10x normal? What did you see?
- [40:48]
Imad
So right now Mercury has like 200,000 customers. And we had like maybe 100,000 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 the volume was big in terms of dollars, but not necessarily in terms of like numbers. It was significant. I think what we published is like around 8,000 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. Right. So the other thing we did is everyone was saying to us like, hey, SVB failed. Why won't Mercury fail? And I would say to people verbally, it's like, hey, we're not a bank ourselves. We work with partner banks and your money has extra FDIC insurance. So at that time we had 1 million in FDIC insurance. And then I would say, okay, if you have more than a million, put the rest of in US government T bill mutual funds, which we have as part of the, part of the platform. So I would say this over and over again to people, but obviously like, you know, if, if Emma says like, hey, your money's safe, like that's not very fulfilling. Right. Like the SPB CEO was also saying, your money's safe. Yeah, so what we did over that. 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 Mercury Vault. And it would basically visualize where your money is. We'd say, okay, this much of it is in FDIC insured account up to this much. So if you had. 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. If there's no FDIC insured, 5 million is. And then we'd help you set up your treasury system so you'd put in US Government E bills. So, so we built this product and that really worked. Like it's so powerful to.
- [42:46]
Sean
So you used product to build trust instead of words.
- [42:49]
Imad
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 whether your money's safe or not. We were like, okay, let's show you. Right? Like, you know, you don't have to like, trust, like Imad's word or like some marketing. Like, we were like, here's a product that shows you. And it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like something completely new like, we. This basically, like, my general view on things is like, if you're saying something over and over, if customer support is doing something over and over, like, how do you make that in the product so, like, people don't have to ask you? And it's just so much more powerful. Like, it feels tangible to people. It also just felt to people, like, okay, you know, instead of us going to another bank that could also get a run, we're going to something where, like, you get this extra FDIC insurance. And Mercury is a fintech. It's not. Yeah. At that point, like, you know, we'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 they have an FDIC sweep network. So that was really important to people that, like, we were speaking with product and like, it's also, you know, I think entrepreneurs appreciate that, right? Like, they want. They were like, the fact that, like, we spend the weekend building a product for them that, like, actually answered their biggest question, like, made people go like, oh, shit, like, Mercury gets it right. Like, I think that was like, a really powerful moment for us.
- [44:05]
Sean
Yeah, that's dope. You have this also actually felt good.
- [44:07]
Imad
As a entrepreneur because I think sometimes when there's a crisis moment, you can feel a little bit like, oh, man, what am I supposed to do here? Obviously, you can talk to customers and things like that, but building product is what we are about. So as an entrepreneur, I was like, okay, let's spend the weekend, everyone, let's go do this. It gave you something really tangible to do. So actually the whole team thinks, even, I guess two years later, the whole team is like, hey, we worked that whole weekend. We built 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.
- [44:46]
Sean
Yeah, you got the adrenaline rush, but you stayed in character. You didn't go out of character and try to do something that you don't normally do. You have these philosophies that you sent over. One of them maybe is related to what we just talked about. It's go all in on asymmetric upside bets.
- [45:03]
Imad
Yeah.
- [45:03]
Sean
Can you unpack that?
- [45:05]
Imad
I feel like a lot of people 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. Like, 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. 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, 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. 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 users. But just the idea of working 9am to midnight, building something myself, launching it, I don't know, 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 and at the time 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 had basically no money. I packed up my stuff. I did get into Y Combinator with my second startup and moved to San Francisco. And I just spent. Even in that seven months when I was in London, I was all in. I would code and build this thing all day, and then I would go to every single event that was possible to go to. And honestly, half of them, or maybe all of them were a waste of time. But if you work really, really hard and you do all the things, you'll eventually build up a network, right? That's how. Actually the way I came to San Francisco is I met someone through this just extreme networking I did. And they'd already got into Y Combinator and they needed a technical co founder and I was like, okay, you know, I want to go to San Francisco, so I'll join you guys. So I think, like, I just feel like 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 and 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 grind, like you're just like all in on things that just pays dividends in a way that like half doing things just I don't think really does. And I feel like 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, which like I was doing like the startup grind. But I was just like, okay, I'm all in on having this family, I don't know. So I just feel like going all in on things has just this big upside that half doing things just doesn't. And I think the asymmetric side of it is the worst thing that could happen to me is if my startup didn't work, I'd have to go and get another job. So basically I was always like, okay, at that point I was getting paid £40,000 a year or something. So I was like, okay, I'm losing 40,000 pounds a year in salary, maybe 50,000 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 bet. It's like I could either like my downside was like, you know, I'm gonna have a shitty time and not enjoy my life. And my upside was like, I'll have a great life that I'm extremely motivated and excited about. So 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 that. Like, you know, I have some friends that are like that and like, it's just kind of depressing talking to them. Like having like the ability to do things that you really enjoy in life is such a, such an important thing that like, I think if you find something that is like that, you should go all in on that.
- [49:05]
Unknown
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.
- [49:21]
Sean
Right now it is my default.
- [49:22]
Unknown
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. And you could just tell it was made by a founder like me, not a, you know, banker somewhere who hired a consultant in an agency to try to make some tool. So if you want to 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 services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve bank and Trust Members. Fdic. All right, back to the episode.
- [49:53]
Sean
I love what you just said because I wrote go. I wrote going all in, right? As a reminder, I have these note cards which are usually just reminders. Like the, the best information is not brand new information. It's just true information that I needed to hear again, needed to bring to the front of mind or I needed to remember in my current context. And I think that 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 MCATs, 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. Someone who's gonna pay me $120,000. I had to move to Indones. Opportunity was. But it was like this guaranteed salary, blah, blah. And I remember my co founders, my two buddies, I was like, yeah, we told ourselves this stupid story, which, you know, we always telling ourselves stories. And I was like, I'm gonna go, dude, the lessons I'm gonna learn there are gonna 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. 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. The owner. I was like, hey, I'm out of here. He's like, what? 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. So I flew back and I was like, all right, I'm all in. And we moved. That was the first thing. Cause I was like, is this the best place to build this company? And if not, why are we building it 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 Smashburger and Quiznos. This is. 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 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 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.
- [52:50]
Imad
Yeah, 100%.
- [52:51]
Sean
All right. The last, last philosophy I want to hear from you, because I. 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? What makes you say that?
- [53:02]
Imad
I feel like when you're in Silicon Valley, everyone's got these. There's so many people who are trying to be influencers, VCs. Everyone's got these ideas that, like, hey, I remember when in 2011, when I had my first kid, it was very unfashionable to have a kid and have a startup. People were literally like, what are you doing? You're going to fail your startup? Or whatever. But actually, one of the things that's a completely contradiction is the only way you succeed is by doing things that are unusual, right? Because if you're doing the normal things, how can you succeed? Because everyone's doing those things. So weirdly, 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. So why are we telling everyone not to do consumer startups? Those are the $3 trillion companies. So I find in general, most knowledge, you have to understand where it comes from and why it comes from and why you're the exception. But the only way you succeed is being an exception. So you kind of have to just ignore the rules and just do the thing and be the exception, because that's the only way you succeed. But I do think there's knowledge out there and there's a reason people talk about these things and you should understand why it is that you are different. And what are the problems with consumer startups. And there's lots of them. But I've just generally found in life that actually the best things I've ever done have been ignoring the rules and just doing things. I just think most of the time if you do. Not the opposite, but if you pick the set of rules that you're ignoring because you have a strong reason to ignore them, you're going to be much more likely to be successful.
- [54:48]
Sean
That's a great point. 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, is when you know the rules and you intentionally choose which ones you're going to break. So, like, if you. 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 that, you know, normally you wouldn't do. Right? This doesn't make sense. These are two different keys. Or that doesn't it's not part of the scale, but it works because of this. And it's like.
- [55:20]
Imad
And they make up a reason why it works.
- [55:21]
Sean
Yeah, they make up the reason, but it's post fact. Right? Exactly. It becomes a new rule later. It's like, oh, yeah, but if it resolves tension, then it works. It's 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 it made me think it's worth writing down. I'm going to 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 what rules, what kind of common best practices or generally accepted good practices that I am intentionally choosing to break. You know, 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, he said this great line, and everybody nodded and took notes. He was like, you know, when you get money, people come to you, they want to get 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, you know, either our friendship is sacred or the money is sacred, but you can't 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.
- [56:25]
Imad
Yeah.
- [56:25]
Sean
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 doing 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, I 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 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.
- [56:54]
Imad
But that's a good example where you, 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 the rule is doing the harder thing normally.
- [57:18]
Sean
Right.
- [57:18]
Imad
So you have to understand why and how and how do you put together.
- [57:21]
Sean
The rule you broke was as a startup founder and 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 quick and dirty prototype vibe code. Like, you can't do that playbook there. So you're like, all right, I'm going to choose to break that norm and go this way because that's what I want.
- [57:44]
Imad
Yeah, yeah, but, but I spent a lot of time understanding what I was like in for, right. I spent like three months just talking to people and like researching, you know, compliance and rules and laws and like all this stuff. And like, I wasn't, I wasn't doing it blindly.
- [57:58]
Sean
Yeah. All right, so Imad, where should people find you and who should reach out to you? Who do you, who do you want to reach out to you from things like this? Because when you're out there, you know, you attract certain people. But I like to say, you know, you want to have your API, you want to tell people who should connect with you and on what basis. Give me a sense of that. Where should we find you and what should they reach you?
- [58:17]
Imad
The easiest way is on X or Twitter as it used to be. I'm just imod. 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 yeah, 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, you know, go to mercury.com and sign up.
- [58:42]
Sean
All right, Love it. Thanks for coming on, dude.
- [58:44]
Imad
Yeah, thanks for having me, Sean.
- [58:46]
Unknown
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it. Like no days off on a road, let's travel. Never looking back.
- [59:00]
Hey, Sean here, a quick break to tell you an Ev Williams story. He started Twitter and before that he sold a company to Google for million. And somebody asked him, they said, ev.
- [59:08]
Sean
What'S the secret, man?
- [59:09]
Unknown
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, your operations. And they've removed all the friction that has existed for decades. 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 want to be like me, head to mercury.com, open up 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 back to the episode.