I Built A $1B Company... Here's 7 Business Ideas I Would Start This Year

Immad Akhund

You hear about these companies that are going from like 0 to a hundred million in like two years or three years or whatever like the equation is very simple from a company perspective

Shaan Puri

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 a billion dollar company dude you did it you did the thing that all of us when we were living in san francisco and and in our twenties trying to build these companies you finally did it how does that feel

Immad Akhund

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 of twenty twenty one and then we're just announcing our series c which is a 3,500,000,000.0 valuation with sequoia leading but in 2021 when I raised my round that was at a 1,600,000,000.0 valuation and it was so weirdly anticlimactic because it's like I'd started as an entrepreneur in 02/2006 so 2021 what is that like fifteen years so I'd been working towards this objective of like building a unicorn company right like that's as you say like you I moved out 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 like nothing changes so I have this like I have this helmet behind me because that's like this is from joe montana he was he's an investor and he's 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 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

Shaan Puri

dude joe montana should make that his thing he's just he should send a helmet to every founder who becomes a unicorn why

Immad Akhund

I mean at least he sends it to the ones he funds because it says like billion dollar club on air it's kinda cool

Shaan Puri

alright 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 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

Immad Akhund

yeah so I 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 you know I'm 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. Where like there's all of these kind of enablement factors so you know number one like just a few years ago getting anything to space was like a hundred million endeavor right like we're talking about like literally a hundred million dollars to get something in space that works because you know there was no spacex and all of the space satellite stuff was like these hardened like you know radiation proof like satellites now the other week like spacex did like eight flights or something in one week like it's insane so you know there's this repeatable kind of channel to get things in space it's much much cheaper and it's getting cheaper every month basically and nowadays people have these kind of microslapped platforms where it's basically a computer in space like it's not gonna 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 centimetre kind of resolution pictures from space yeah everyone's kind of excited by ai which I'm also excited about that but that's a heavily you know everyone's doing it

Shaan Puri

super competitive yeah

Immad Akhund

whereas I think that actually space is still like 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 like we need to come up with like why we should do this but I think a nuclear power plant in space would be really cool like potentially we put this thing on the moon and then we mine water from the moon and you know one of the cool things about water is if you can split water you get hydrogen and oxygen and oxygen and hydrogen together make rocket fuel but it's also like you get breathable oxygen which is useful so having power in space is pretty useful and there's lots of interesting things on the moon and you know if you have a nuclear power plant there you could probably like there's this other cool company that does this thing I don't know if you've seen it I can't remember the name but like it spins things super fast and then like basically fires them out I think it's very hard to get something from earth's surface into space by like spinning around and 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 you know there's kind of two trends well actually three trends in defense tech that I think are interesting number one yeah there's a lot of geopolitical disturbance everyone is basically yeah we're living in like or moving into a multipolar world which means like you know there's india there's china there's america and america is no longer kind of the policeman right like the only way america since the 1990s has been able to be a policeman is there hasn't been any other power to really challenge that right so it's not just the us needs to rearm it's all of europe india whatever like everyone is like arming so you have like all of these people that are in the market now that weren't and then number two autonomous vehicles have changed the game right there's drones ai in general can be applied to all of this stuff and then number three yeah you're gonna get a tonne of drones like it's not just like big billion dollar fighter planes right it's gonna 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 so I think there's like two types of ideas that I think are interesting number one like how do you make more things autonomous so people are doing autonomous drones but you could do autonomous subs autonomous boats autonomous tanks right like I think a lot of these things are not being head 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 the second aspect is like a lot of these autonomous things kind of favour defence 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 neither of them has air superiority the drones actually make it hard to get air superiority because you can have like a tiny drone knock out at like a million dollar plane so in that world like you know so we've got one side is autonomous side second side is like the kind of how do we build more defensive autonomous things as well so like you know maybe we automatically have these machines that are building trenches you could have autonomous mines that are like smart and they don't I mean I guess that sounds like bad to people but you could have it so like if it's a civilian it doesn't blow up if it's a tank it does blow up right like you can make these like safer mines that move around and then to tie back to the space thing you know I think in the next kind of war space warfare will be a big part of it right like if you can knock out satellites you can like you know cut down on starlink and all of this kind of communication you can remove the visual side of things right like these kind of satellites that are viewing things you can knock out gps so some of that actually happened during the ukraine war there was like some you know there's some rumors about like some satellites being knocked out but I think that's gonna be a big thing so the counter to that is how do you create defense around satellites right how do you maybe you'll have like stealth equivalent or stealth satellites right like you kind of only move them when like 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 yeah there's a ton of ideas around like defensive kind of stuff in space as well

Sam Parr

alright so a lot of people watch and listen to the show because they wanna hear us just tell them exactly what to do when it comes to starting or growing a business and really a lot of people who are listening they have a full time job and they wanna start something on the side a side hustle now a lot of people message sean and I and they say alright I wanna start something on the side is this a good idea is that a good idea and again what they're really just saying is just give me the ideas well my friends you're in luck so my old company the hustle they put together a hundred different side hustle ideas and they have appropriately called it the side hustle idea database it's a list of a hundred pretty good ideas frankly I went through them they're awesome and it gives you how to start them how to grow them things like that it gives you a little bit of inspiration so check it out it's called the side hustle idea database it's in the description below you'll see the link click it check it out let me know in the comments what you think

Shaan Puri

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 gonna 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 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 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 he colored in the middle and 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 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 eight out of 10 people who first hear it say nah no way right and so you so that's the first thing it's like a great idea typically comes disguised as a bad idea the second thing is some inflection.

Shaan Puri

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 already gonna be up there so I think that's a huge inflection like you're talking about the other one you're talking about with defense is autonomy so just the ability to make things self driving self flying self you know self swimming yeah 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 kinda 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 kinda hits all three even though my first reaction when you say nuclear power plant space I'm like alright I don't even that breaks my brain a little bit I don't even know what that means it's not even possible I kinda like the underlying thought process you have going in even though I don't fully get the like you know the end product idea because I just don't know anything about the space

Immad Akhund

yeah I mean I have like some simple ideas that are maybe good but not great but like you know more achievable here's a fun one I thought about last night I thought it would be fun to have a billboard in space

Shaan Puri

so you know I think you did in space so

Immad Akhund

so I had this like a few years ago I was like going camping and I didn't have internet and like yeah there was this like starlink satellite launch I don't know if you've ever seen it but like I think they fixed it so it doesn't do this but they basically launched the satellite so they were like they were kind of positioning them so they were all visible and there was like 20 in a string in space and you could see the naked eye in the telescope

Shaan Puri

with a telescope oh just naked eye no

Immad Akhund

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 like they're like completely in a line and they're moving quite fast because they're in like leo right but I was like oh yeah that's kind of sick like I you know you can literally as a human like launch this thing that changes like everyone's view from earth right I thought that was like kind of insane but yeah I think I don't think it would 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 like I mean you could probably do the natural eye thing but like obviously people will complain but making it so you could do it with a telescope I think would be actually kinda 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 really odd idea but well dude other than that

Shaan Puri

remember there was a a whole service around buying and naming stars do you do you remember this this was kinda like a big idea in the nineties maybe early two thousands

Immad Akhund

'3 body problem that's like one of the one of the ideas

Shaan Puri

I haven't I haven't actually read it no I don't it's like on my kinda 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 to to buy a star in someone's name and that company was doing like 20,000,000 a year I remember and it was just like a couple of guys and they were just 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

Immad Akhund

I thought the other one that would be kinda cool is like you know when I die if I it would be cool to send like I actually don't wanna be cremated but if I was cremated it would be cool to send some ash to space mhmm I having like some sort of memorabilia being sent to space I think is kind of interesting as well and that would be easier and the more practical ideas I do think intelligence as a service is kind of like an interesting idea so you mentioned ai agents so there's tons of these companies going after these big categories right like the 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 super structured yeah 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 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 or whatever the doctor is doing

Shaan Puri

is there somebody doing that somebody has to be doing that right because I

Immad Akhund

haven't heard of anyone doing a great job of it

Shaan Puri

yeah nobody's won yet which is amazing but like you know you look at kaplan and you look at you look at the 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 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 you're right about the like the the two statement 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 a basically 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 kinda debated and people say no that was it was measured wrong and it's not true

Immad Akhund

I think intuitively it's like feels right like when I'm learning something if I talk to someone like I if I had to get my head

Shaan Puri

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 pace and self study no would I choose a library of videos no if it was like a a tutor comes to my house and sits with me for six hours a day and that's how I study for this I'd be like that's my best shot and if it was the smartest most patient tutor with infinite knowledge and knew exactly where my level was and was ready to work with me the moment I was ready to do it all times of the day right that's an ai tutor so I think that's kind of kinda great because it's so scoped to you know one chat one specific test which people are not doing because they voluntarily wanna you know educate themselves with like I need to pay x dollars to get y grade to get into z college yeah you're willing to pay

Immad Akhund

yeah I 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 y ideas that you can expand from later right rather trying to do like all tutoring right I think that's actually like quite a hard problem and ai is not quite there yet like if you pick just one thing and you just like completely nail it then you can always expand from there as well

Shaan Puri

right right right I like that what are some of the most interesting companies you've invested in recently so have is there any company that's like taking off or doing well that you you you feel like more people should know about but they don't they don't know about it yet

Immad Akhund

you know this like what I put put as like intelligence as a service company so I I'm an investor in 11x which does kinda ai sdrs and I'm also an investor in dekogon that does kinda 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 100,000,000 in like you know two years or three years or whatever like all of these ones that hit where they're like you know like the equation is very simple from a company perspective it's like hey I'm paying a ton of money for customer support or sdr like if you can do the same task with some sort of like 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 you know sales customer support legal accounting a bunch of these and I'm an investor in like 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 scs 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 right 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 nine month twelve 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

Shaan Puri

would you let's say you weren't doing mercury right now you had all your free time and you know everything you know today yeah and you wanted to find an ai idea a winning ai idea what would be your process like explain to me how imad finds like kinda comes up with the ideas and vets them and sort of figures out what idea to do versus what idea not to do

Immad Akhund

I approach things like both top down and bottom up so top down and I actually did this as part of like your podcast prep stuff you know I went to chat gpd and said like hey tell me every human worker in the us that like does knowledge work give me a list of all of them and tell me how much labour costs across each of them right so that's very top down and you're like okay you know there's education there's medical there's lawyer there's accounting there's

Shaan Puri

right

Immad Akhund

yeah whatever like all these like knowledge worker type things like design coding etcetera 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 yeah maybe you wanna vote regulated spaces or maybe you wanna 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 a amazing doctor for like I don't know africa or something because like you know there's less regulation there and you can prove it out etcetera 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 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 you know know there's a few companies doing this but I would love to have like an ai twin of emad that like is like continuously absorbing all the knowledge across like the company and maybe across the internet and telling me stuff it's like I think mr should really pay attention to this and like or like even like actually that would be kind of fun to make it so like on the slack like there could be an mr twin and someone could ask you questions say like oh what would mr think of this idea yeah actually like a funny thing that just came up the other day and I was like I'm pretty sure my ai twin could answer this someone was like oh you know our boardroom is like kind of small and we just added two people to the board like hey should we do the board meeting at our law firm and and I was like no fuck no I'm never gonna do a board meeting at a law firm like that sounds awful I'd rather stuff like 16 people in a tiny room than do that so I feel like in my ai twin could have answered that question so that would be like my bottoms up approach and I yeah I do think like you should really work on things like get you really excited like you know an ai sdr like I'm happy for those guys I personally would not get excited about that like I hate receiving sales emails and calls so I think doing things that you would wake up in the morning and say like I'm excited to solve this problem because these things take such a long time right like I've been doing mercury now for like eight years and if I you know if I was doing something boring I would probably wake up in the morning like why do I have to do this again so I think that's like the bottoms up approach where you try to think of like what do I care about what do I wanna see in the future and try to come up with that and then you know you kind of merge those two kind of concepts together and you know often you do something and you find out actually it's a bad idea as well so yeah mercury actually had like a very smooth ramp where 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 so you know that's part of like ideation is to like actually go build things

Shaan Puri

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 kinda 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

Immad Akhund

let's do the yeah let's do the digital twin I think that's like kind of the most fun

Shaan Puri

cool so you have a a you know you're digital twin ceo who's basically reading all the slacks the documents and and Google drive the con 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 etcetera alright so now first few weeks what are you doing is it is it like I trust these five people I'm gonna 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

Immad Akhund

that's a great question where where

Shaan Puri

do you go next

Immad Akhund

you know with mercury I I had this moment where so we 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 a hundred and I remember like getting kind of depressed after I talked to them because I talked to a hundred most of them were like oh yeah that sounds kind of cool but like there was very 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. Like you know it was like a it took us a year and a half to build this so this is like one year in so you know you're like you're kind of running out of momentum anyway because it's taking so long to build something and then you go talk to a hundred people and everyone's kinda lukewarm I was like what am I doing but you know I've always like I would really want this so I just like powered through it and it turned out you know a if 2% of people want something and the market's big enough that's like probably big enough for like an early adopter base right but if you think about it like you 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 you know 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 you know I would do that talk and I would go talk to some vcs a lot like I talk to a bunch of users I talk 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 you know first thing for me like one of the things that gets me excited about mercury is that you know 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 etcetera and then some ideas like turn out to like fork like a thousand ways and mercury is one of those things because a there's just so few people in banking that like a lot of these spaces are unexplored and b banking is like this kind of platform where it has all your money it has all your finance team so you can build a lot of things on top of it so I'd wanna think about like okay you know if I did the digital twin idea like what are the forks like why does this become even more interesting the more users that you get on it and 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 you know maybe you have like a comms person at the company that's just literally just ai I'm just like riffing off this maybe your ai twin shows up at the zoom calls yeah maybe it's like becomes your coach and it's like helping you through difficult times right like I think that is an idea that could probably fork a lot of ways because like it has all the knowledge it learns a lot about you it's in your communication channels like it's got these core ideas that like yeah sounds like a pretty good idea now that we're riffing on it I was getting excited yeah so

Shaan Puri

well you also with mercury you it seems like this maybe is too simple but like it seems like you you had been a founder for ten + 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 wanna 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 your the bet was that there's gonna be a lot of other founders that think like me that like what I like is that fair or is that oversimplifying it

Immad Akhund

no no that's a % fair I think generally speaking I'm a little unusual I get like if I have to call someone to do something I get so annoyed about it yes

Shaan Puri

I won't even do it

Immad Akhund

press a button yeah I will delay for weeks for sure but like if I have to do it and like that's the way banks are in after you know except for mercury like you have to call to like get a wire done like you know I don't wanna like I guess they're kind of gone so I can probably bitch about them a little bit bit but like first republic like if you wanted to send a wire like you know 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 they would go to the next phase and then they would call you and you'd have to authorise it then someone else would have to call after it was like it was like a multi week process just to figure out how to send wires so I was like this is what it is

Shaan Puri

so so you guys started sponsoring me and I was like alright 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 I was like I know you have all these fancy features but like for me as a founder I move at a certain pace and as a founder it's one of the only advantages you have right you don't have 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 in the 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 wanna talk to a lawyer and schedule a call if I wanna 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 of a 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 ecom 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

Immad Akhund

oh man

Shaan Puri

make an appointment which I always forget to do go inside they gave me this

Immad Akhund

freaking take a freaking hour to do it yeah they gave

Shaan Puri

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 50 k or a hundred k at a time it was super annoying and so it's amazing that literally just feeling like okay these people get me and they'll build a product that moves up my speed how important that was and I also then took that to hiring I was like oh my 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

Immad Akhund

yeah let's just get it done

Shaan Puri

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 gonna work I want my software fast and my my employees fast

Immad Akhund

yeah so actually you know like once you describe that process like it sounds awful so I think like there's like people just get used to being abused by the current products right like I think it's in some ways like because I came from the uk I didn't I didn't I had a slightly better expectation of banking like 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 painful person

Shaan Puri

let me do something with my own money yeah exactly yeah like convince them and sometimes they say no yeah dude it that 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 suit it was I went to that dialogue conference I don't know if you've ever been but like oh yeah

Immad Akhund

and look at the room was this is the dialogue couple

Shaan Puri

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's a a a dean of a very famous university was basically like arguing that you know crypto I don't know I'm 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 wanna park your money in something like the dollar right cool got it I understand a bunch of reasons why but the the abuse that was normalized was so the dollar which has a a whole arm the fed whose job is to have a two to 3% target inflation oh oops sometimes we go way above that but we'll try to get back to two to 3% and I was like so your your default expectation is that in thirty 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 thirty years your purchasing power gets cut in half

Immad Akhund

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

Shaan Puri

inflation even measured where it doesn't include your house or your rent like you know like the the kinda screwed up version of inflation even that even that like gain the the the adjusted the adjusted ebitda of inflation right where it's like this 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 of savers getting penalized right anybody who saves gets penalized in the the dollar system but it's it's a blind spot people really don't they've accepted that abuse they're so used to that abuse that that it's just taken as as as fine you know it's not even a problem it's not even like a known problem for them

Immad Akhund

yeah yeah yeah I mean I think the part of the reason it's not a problem for like richer people is because they get the asset appreciation right so they're 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 they're living paycheck to paycheck and like most of their money is not in assets right 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 has obviously done particularly well in the last ten years but but yeah it's it's definitely like something where like there's something a bit weird about the system for sure

Shaan Puri

yeah exactly you could 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 twenty four forty eight hours what did that look like and what happened to mercury during that time because it seems like you were the big you were a big beneficiary of of that situation in terms of customers coming to you guys or adoption

Immad Akhund

yeah I mean just 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 always remember that and when you know when I was working on mercury right like spb is part of the cdec right it's like hey this is the 800 pound gorilla like this is what everyone in the silicon valley uses at that? They were like worth 16,000,000,000 and I think in peak covid they were worth 40,000,000,000 so this is a big company so yeah when this started happening yeah I wasn't we had obviously been competing against each other but yeah it was like kind of a weirdly indirect competition in the sense that like sbb just offers something very different right like this is like the stolid silicon valley bank that's been around forever and then mercury is you know this upstart of fintech right like so and like you know we use svb in my previous company I like those guys like they were like they were friendly they like cared about startups I mean their software wasn't great but none of the banks had great software so like to be clear I didn't feel anything bad about them and I felt really bad about for the people there and you know I thought they'd be fine right like when thursday rolled along I was like hey everyone's freaking out like people like panicking about things on the internet

Shaan Puri

did you find out about it at the same time as all the rest of us or did you have some inkling or some some foresight that that might happen

Immad Akhund

in the december like so the most of the the bank run happened to sbb in march 2023 in december 2022 there was like this article about like the fact that the msps their mortgage backed security mbs their 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 was calling some crisis and you know like if you wanna 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 kinda 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 you know normally like banking like people don't wanna switch banking services right like this is a lot of the customers at mercury winds are like a 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 so did

Shaan Puri

you have like a like kind of emergency meeting like hey here's the game plan or how did you how did you organize that to like sprint

Immad Akhund

I I initial thing was like hey you know I was like we do not say a word of this publicly like we don't wanna like jump on their misfortune but anyone that comes to mercury let's like support them and we did a bunch of things so we changed the product so you know we're like hey if you're a non svb customer we can always onboard you next week right right but if you're coming from svb let's make it in just two and a half an hour so we you know we had this plat connection thing and we put that right at the top and we said above it svb customer connect your svb and we'll like prioritize you and like svb customers were really easy to prioritise because they're like you know they tended to have more money they're already vetted by a bank they're not new customers so you know we basically like tried to think of all the ways we could speed up the process for them and we

Shaan Puri

really focused on the volume was it like two x five x 10 x normal like what did you see

Immad Akhund

as spike so right now mercury has like 200,000 customers and we had like maybe a hundred thousand back then but yeah spb had a lot of money but not at like an insane number of customers so I wanna 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? 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 you know everyone was saying to us like hey svb failed like why won't mercury fail and you know I would say to people like verbally it's like hey you know we are not a bank ourselves we work with partner banks and your money is like has extra fdic insurance so at that time we had 1,000,000 in fdic insurance and then I would say okay you know if you have more than a million put the rest of it in us government t bill mutual funds which we have as part of the platform so I would say this over and over again to people but obviously like you know if emaard says like hey your money's safe like that's not very fulfilling right like the sbb ceo was also saying your money's safe yeah so what we did over that- you're saying

Shaan Puri

your bank been freed

Immad Akhund

yeah exactly so I was like that's the one thing I don't wanna say online so what we did over that weekend is we built this product it was called mercury vault and it would basically visualise where your money is we'd say okay you know this much of it is in fdic insured account up to this much so if you had yeah and we also actually worked with our partner banks to extend the fdic insurance so we went from 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 over that week so it's you know if you had 6,000,000 in your mercury checking account we'd say okay 1,000,000 of that is no fdic insured 5,000,000 is and then you know we'd help you set up your treasury system so you'd put in us government t bills so we built this product and that really worked like it's so powerful to- so you

Shaan Puri

used product to build trust instead of words exactly

Immad Akhund

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 you 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 ema'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 are going to something where like you get this extra fdic insurance and mercury's a fintech it's not you know at that. 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 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

Shaan Puri

yeah that's dope you have those- also

Immad Akhund

I actually felt good as a entrepreneur because like I think sometimes yeah when there's a crisis moment you can feel a little bit like like it's like oh man what am I supposed to do here like obviously you can talk to customers and things like that but building product is like what we are about so as an entrepreneur I was like okay you know let's spend the weekend everyone like let's go do this like you know it gave you like something really tangible to do so actually the whole team thinks like even I guess two years later like we yeah the whole team is like hey we worked that whole weekend we built this product together and like everyone's like still like excited about that moment because like it like it did the thing that we were good at doing to solve that problem

Shaan Puri

yeah yeah you got the adrenaline rush but you stayed in character you didn't go out of character

Immad Akhund

and try

Shaan Puri

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 yeah can you unpack that

Immad Akhund

I feel like a lot of people kinda try entrepreneurship or do things but they don't go all in on them and you know when I did my first startup for seven months in the uk and I was like you know it was really a moment for me where like I was like okay this is what life is about for me 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 I and that was like the first time I did something where I was like oh shit like this is so much fun fun and that startup did nothing right like I went nowhere had no users but just the idea of like working 9am to like midnight building something myself launching it like I just I don't know there's just something about it that like so speaks to like my core so I was like okay if I wanna do this you know what is where can I do this the greatest and that at the time was san francisco I would still say san francisco but at that time it was like 100% like I had to be here to do it so I was just like you know 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 you know even in that seven months when I was in london I was all in like I would like code and build this thing all day and then I would go to every single event that was possible to go to and like honestly half of them or maybe all of them were waste of time but just you know if you work really really hard and you do all the things you'll eventually like build up a network right that's how actually like the way I came to san francisco is I met someone through this like just extreme networking I did and they'd already got into y comdata and they needed a technical co founder and I was like okay you know I wanna 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 or you're just like all in on things that just pays dividends in a way that's like half doing things just that I don't think really does and I feel like you know over time like going all in on things like you know another part of my things is like going all in on family like basically like I you know I'm 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 still in like the startup grind but I was just like okay you know I'm all in on like having this family I don't know so I just feel like going all out of things has just like this like big upside that like half doing things just doesn't and I think the asymmetric side of it is like you know 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 like basically like I was always like okay you know at that?

Immad Akhund

I was getting paid like £40,000 a year or something so I was like okay you know I'm losing £40,000 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 better 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 they're 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 an important thing that like I think if you find something that is like that you should go all in on that

Shaan Puri

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 the front of mind or I needed to 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 start up straight out of school and I I had this idea and I was having all this fun with my friends and I was either gonna go to med school as I had planned took the mcats all that or I was gonna do the start up I decided I'm gonna do the start up thing right then I start with that and then I got this gravitational pull I got this job offer someone's gonna pay me a hundred and $20,000 I had to move to indonesia where the opportunity was but it was like this guaranteed salary blah blah blah and I remember my cofounders my two buddies I was like yeah and we told ourselves this stupid story which is you know we're 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 kinda 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 kinda 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 gonna be like good for me in the long run so I flew back and I was like alright I'm all in and we moved that was the first thing because I was like is this the best place to build this company and if not why are we building 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 were have been launched or most of them have been launched in in colorado like chipotle and smash burger 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 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 friend 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 gonna do the winning idea you're gonna need to be able to go all in in order to make that idea work

Immad Akhund

yeah %

Shaan Puri

alright the last last philosophy I wanna 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 why what makes you say that

Immad Akhund

you know I feel like when you're in silicon valley everyone's got these like you know there's so many people who are trying to be influencers like vcs like you know everyone's got these ideas they're like hey you know like I remember when you know in 2011 when I had my first kid like it was very unfashionable to have a kid and have a startup like people were like literally like what are you doing like you're gonna fail your startup or whatever but actually one of the things that's like a completely contradiction is like the only way you succeed is by doing things that are unusual right because if you're doing the normal things how can you succeed because like everyone's doing those things right so weirdly like you know if you look at every single success it's a contradiction because there had to be a really common thing in silicon valley is don't do consumer startups but actually the biggest startups like amazon facebook Google they're consumer startups right like so why we why are we telling everyone not to do consumer startups but like those are the $3,000,000,000,000 companies so I find like you know in general like most knowledge is like you have to understand where it comes from and why it comes from and like why you're the exception but like the only way you succeed is being an exception so like you kind of have to like just ignore the rules and like just do the thing and be the exception because that's the only way you succeed but I do think there's like knowledge out there and like there's a reason people talk about these things and you should understand why it is that you are different and like you know what are the problems with consumer startups and there's lots of them but I've just generally found in life that like actually the best things I've ever done have been like ignoring the rules and just doing things that that like yeah I just think like most of the time if you do the not the opposite but like if you if you pick the set of rules that you're ignoring because you have like a strong reason to ignore them you're gonna be much more likely to be successful

Shaan Puri

that's a that's a great. You know there's that I forgot what the phrase is but it's like experts know all the rules and masters know when to break them so so yeah that's the the sort of the best signal of mastery is when you know the rules and you intentionally choose which ones you're gonna 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 stop part of the scale but it works because of this and it's like and

Immad Akhund

they make up the reason why it works

Shaan Puri

yeah they make up the reason but it's post post fact right exactly it's you know now 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 breaks that rule and and that's what all the all the best ones do what I like about what you just said is it it made me think it's worth writing down I'm gonna try this after this podcast it's worth writing down like not just how I wanna win how I wanna live my life but specifically like what rules what kind of common best 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 wanna 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 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

Immad Akhund

yeah and

Shaan Puri

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 and yeah sometimes it doesn't work out and sometimes it gets a little hairy but like I choose this mess it's like I choose that rule to break and I'm I'm comfortable living with that you know and I I can always go back and change my approach but for now that's a rule I'd wanna break

Immad Akhund

but that's a good example where you you wanna understand how to break the rule as well right like it's not just like I'm gonna break the rules therefore I don't care about it you wanna go like okay you know if I'm putting money in a start up I'm gonna 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 the breaking the rule is doing the harder thing normally right so you have to understand why and how and how do you mitigate the place

Shaan Puri

the rule you broke was as a startup founder in sf with all the options to choose you chose the like highly regulated highly compliance based hard have to build for a year and a half before you launch you know that's not that's not the the quick and dirty prototype vibe code like you can't do that playbook there so you're like alright I'm gonna choose to break that norm and go this way because that's what I want

Immad Akhund

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

Shaan Puri

yeah alright 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 wanna have your api you wanna tell people who should connect with you and and and and on what basis so give give me a sense of that where where should people find you and what should they reach you about

Immad Akhund

easiest way is on x or twitter as it used to be I'm just imad yeah who should reach out you know I'm always willing to try to be helpful to entrepreneurs so you know if you have an idea you wanna pitch me something or whatever yeah 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 alright

Shaan Puri

love it thanks for coming on dude

Immad Akhund

yeah thanks for having me sean