Four days after Mercury launched publicly in 2019, someone opened up an account and — without contacting anyone on the team — deposited $1 million.
“That blew my mind,” says co-founder and CEO Immad Akhund. “This was before we even had a sales team. I assumed some folks would self-serve, but I never thought someone with $1 million would just move money into Mercury all on their own.”
Akhund first got the idea for Mercury years earlier while he was working on his second startup, Heyzap. He couldn’t believe how much of a slog traditional banking was for entrepreneurs — unclear fees, rigid onboarding, stuck in branches and nowhere to be found online — even as other fintechs like Square and Stripe started to take off. He put the idea on the back burner while he scaled and later sold his company.
In 2017, when he began looking for his next venture, he was surprised no one else had fixed the startup banking problem by then. So he decided to pursue the idea himself.
While Akhund would later view that blind $1M transfer as a clear signal of product-market fit, at the time, he wasn’t convinced. As a serial founder for the better part of two decades, he’d developed some healthy skepticism around early signs of traction. His first startups never found product-market fit. He eventually did get there with Heyzap — but only after grinding through several pivots. He figured this immediate flash of demand wouldn’t last.
“I thought there’d be a trough of disillusionment after a couple months,” he says. “But it never came. We launched and we just kept on growing.”
Now valued at $3.5B, Mercury serves more than 200,000 companies, and recently nabbed a $300M Series C.
In this exclusive interview, Akhund reflects on what he’s learned about company building from his fourth go-around. He shares the lessons he wishes he could have told his twenty-something founder self — from launching slowly to scaling culture. Let’s dive in.
Picking an idea — and sticking with it
After a stint as a part-time Partner at Y Combinator in 2017, Akhund set out to build his fourth company. This time, he knew one decision outweighed everything else: picking a great idea and sticking with it.
“There’s this sense in Silicon Valley that the idea doesn’t matter, and if the entrepreneur is good enough, they can just iterate around and eventually land on the right one,” he says. “But I think people undervalue how much the idea matters.”
Akhund had learned the hard way that a founder’s talent can actually obscure the strength of an idea. He’d taken the iterate-around approach with his company Heyzap, which started as a mobile ad network and pivoted a few times before evolving into a developer tool for app publishers. While he says it did eventually find product-market fit, it took lots of trial and error.
“When you’re a stubborn, high-grade founder, you don't know when to give up. We’d have an idea and say, ‘Let's sell the hell out of it.’ We spent two years working on every idea we had. We made incremental progress, but in hindsight, we clearly did not have product-market fit for a long time,” he says.
If you're a strong founder, you can sell anything. You can get weak product-market fit out of almost any idea, and that's a problem.
The idea for Mercury had been lingering in the back of Akhund’s mind for years. He was reminded of it every time he had to go to the physical bank. “I’d go to send a wire and it wasn’t enabled in my account. So I’d have to spend three hours at a bank branch getting it enabled. It was insane,” he says.
He just didn’t think he’d be the one to tackle this problem. Without any experience in the financial industry and its regulatory hurdles, it felt too far out of his area of expertise. He figured it was so badly needed that someone else would.
By 2017, the problem remained untouched, even with fintech tailwinds starting to pick up. It was a massive market practically up for grabs. Given Akhund’s own frustration with banking as a founder, he figured if someone had to fix it, why not him?
Then he remembered an encounter at Y Combinator’s Demo Day back in 2013 that gave him some initial conviction that it was at least possible. “I met a founder named Kai Stinchcombe whose company, True Link, makes debit cards for seniors, because seniors get taken advantage of so often, and their kids want to be able to set controls,” he says. “At the time, they were just a two-person Y Combinator company. And I thought, ‘Wow, they got a deal with a bank partner. If they can do that, maybe I could do this bank thing at some point if no one else does.’”
Exploring a hard problem
But first, Akhund had to do the hard part: figuring out how to build it.
His first order of business was learning the market. “Fintech was a completely new space to me,” he says. “Everyone knew I could build a product. I knew I could build a product. The hard part was figuring out the framework for compliance, risk and legal to make a bank sponsorship work.”
So Akhund set out to talk to three expert fintech personas who could provide different perspectives on the industry and its challenges: founders, lawyers and investors. “I had 90 of these conversations,” says Akhund. “Some of the most useful people were four intro chains down. I’d talk to someone, and then they'd introduce me to someone, and they'd introduce me to someone else. It was a fun process.”
Here’s what he learned from each persona over a four-month sprint:
- Entrepreneurs: “I talked to every single fintech entrepreneur I could find. I wanted to find out how they built their companies. Many were failed entrepreneurs, and some were successful. So if they failed, I wanted to learn why. These founders weren’t building new banks for businesses, they were building consumer credit cards or other fintech products, but the companies had similar shapes,” he says. “You can get nitty-gritty with entrepreneurs — there are no dumb questions. They’re super helpful people.”
- Lawyers: Akhund says lawyers helped him decode the regulatory landscape. “Lawyers were the most surprisingly useful set of people I talked to,” says Akhund. “Most lawyers will do a 30-minute call with you for free, and there are a lot of financial services lawyers out there.”
- Investors: Akhund turned to fintech investors to figure out what was fundable. “Investors tend to be really good connectors as well, so they connected me to other entrepreneurs and lawyers,” he says.
Asking fintech experts what worked and what failed helped Akhund make an important early decision: he’d build Mercury with a sponsor bank model, instead of pursuing a bank charter. The bank charter route requires getting approval from the government to fully operate a bank — which, he learned, is hard to do. Using a sponsor bank works more like a partnership. “Some fintechs at the time had gone with the sponsor bank model, and some tried to get a charter. I learned that most of the companies that went with the charter model either failed to get a charter or, if they did get it, the company later failed,” he says.
After these conversations, he understood that building the initial product and securing a sponsor bank would require a long execution period. “I realized it might take years to get this product live. My mindset became, ‘This isn’t going to be easy. I’m going to do this for the long run.’”
But he found the challenge ahead energizing. “The more I explored it, the more it turned from impossible to doable — but hard. And ‘doable but hard’ is my favorite place to be,” he says.
In the beginning, spend all your time doing the thing you're the least capable of doing — and the least capable of proving to the world that you can do.
Building (and rebuilding) the early product
Akhund had one simple but ambitious requirement for the MVP: Mercury could be a company’s only account.
He understood that for any fintech product, most important product decisions needed to be locked in from the start. “When you launch something, it’s very hard to course-correct. There are lots of features in Mercury today that we built pre-launch. Trying to change things now is much harder with 200,000 users,” he says.
These were his product non-negotiables to make that true for just about any founder:
- Fully digital. No brick-and-mortar operations.
- Support checks, wires and ACH. The nuts and bolts of a standard business account.
- Allow multiple account owners. Businesses are usually run by a few people, so Akhund had to build infrastructure to make sure more than one person could manage the account.
- Be accessible to immigrant founders. He insisted on making sure immigrant founders like himself could use this product. “But this was really challenging to do,” he says. “We had to get the bank sponsor to be fully on board with infrastructure to support immigrants who didn't have a social security number or US IDs.”
Akhund was prepared to take his time to meet this high bar. “I knew that if we launched without one of these things, people wouldn’t adopt it,” he says.
But he wasn’t thinking about grand expansion plans at this stage — despite investors’ prodding. “I saw no point in building anything beyond this basic framework. I wasn’t thinking about a debit card, a credit card, or fancy analytics before we had these core features,” he says. “I remember VCs told me, ‘Why are you launching a new bank? Why don’t you just use Plaid to provide some analytics around people’s finances?’ And I said, ‘That’s not the point. That’s just a feature of the main thing — a new bank.’”
Akhund and his early team, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher, whom he’d worked with at Heyzap, wanted to line up a bank sponsor that could co-build the product. But the first bank they partnered with didn’t hold up their end of the deal. The bank was supposed to build extra features for the team, and every month, they’d tell them it was coming, but never delivered.
The Mercury team had already built a launch-ready product, but ultimately chose to scrap their original bank sponsor and find a new one, which took another six months. They decided to redo all of the design and front end for onboarding and sending money. But Akhund says that double work ultimately only strengthened the product’s design. “We were perfectionists. We just wanted to make the core experiences really, really good,” he says.
Only around six months before launching did Akhund consult some potential customers. “I didn’t talk to many customers. It just seemed so obvious to me,” he says.
He showed the MVP to around 100 founders — and only two responded enthusiastically. The rest gave a generic (but dreaded), “Sounds interesting.” But this didn’t deter him. “I figured that for this type of idea, people just couldn’t imagine what a better banking experience could be,” he says.
A long awaited launch
Once the product was ready for its official debut after a year and a half of building, Akhund and the team launched in April 2019. Mercury picked up 1,500 signups upon going live — and continued to grow by 40% each month during its first year.
“We had a group of about 60 people blast out our launch news, including our investors. That worked really well, because those people’s credibility gave us built in trust,” says Akhund. “Elad Gil was one of our investors, and he was supportive of the launch. I think the initial spark came from this group.”
Akhund says Mercury’s long gestation period before launching was necessary, which ended up being a real shift from his earlier founder days of shipping-then-pivoting. “I used to have the mindset that I should just launch things in three months and iterate. And maybe that approach worked better back in 2010 when there was so much new space to explore with social media and mobile,” he says. “But now, I think it’s better to spend more time building a deeper, better product. We had a well-developed feature set by launch, and it also looked great. And to make things look great, you have to spend twice as much time.”
Early users loved it. “Most people expect onboarding to be really painful. But because we’d spent so much time building and rebuilding the onboarding experience, people had a great first impression of Mercury,” says Akhund.
Signs of product-market fit
In hindsight, Akhund says these were the first three signs of real market pull after launching:
- Mercury didn’t need a sales motion to land the first customers. When that early user signed up and deposited $1M without contacting anyone on the team, Akhund was shocked. But it validated his hypothesis that the sheer existence of a better banking* experience was enough to stir up demand, even for large accounts.
- Users were patient while the early team worked out kinks. “We thought international wires worked when we launched, but it turned out they didn’t,” says Akhund. “It took us four extra weeks after going live to fix them. But people were surprisingly patient with us, because everyone was sold on this new product.”
- The founders were playing catch up with support requests. “We had no customer support for a while after we launched, and my co-founder and I were completely overloaded just talking to customers and answering their questions. Until around two months after launch, it was just three of us handling the front end.”
At the time, though, Akhund remained skeptical about this post-launch growth. Then a year later, the pandemic struck — and he waited for the other shoe to drop.
“COVID seemed like a disaster at first. We lost 60% of our revenue. Obviously, no one was starting new businesses in March 2020,” he says.
But despite a few initial shock waves, growth continued. April came, and usage doubled. “During April and May 2020, we had this insane growth spurt because ecommerce blew up. Bank branches were shut down, so people needed a digital experience,” he says.
This pandemic boom finally gave Akhund confidence that Mercury had found product-market fit. “I remember thinking, if we can survive COVID, we can probably hang around for a while. It took me a solid year after launching to really believe we’d found product-market fit,” he says.
With the caveat that this doesn’t totally apply to startups selling into enterprise, Akhund now defines true product-market fit as this: “You wake up in the morning with more users, and you don't know where they came from,” he says. “Sure, you still have to figure out distribution in the long term. But at least initially, the market should be so big and the demand for what you're building so strong that people will just come to you, and you don't have to try that hard.”
When I finally found product-market fit for Mercury, I thought, “Why did I waste so much time trying to sell something that no one really wanted at my previous companies, when I could have just learned quickly and moved on?”
Scaling — for the first time
That first year post-launch brought a steady growth rate, so Akhund set out to hire ahead of the company’s needs, expanding the team by roughly 40% year after year.
Today, Mercury has reached a size Akhund had never achieved with his previous startups — a Series C, 1,000-person company. The scaling years that followed product-market fit were uncharted territory for him.
In the process, here’s what he’s learned about becoming more discerning about the advice you receive, operationalizing company culture and navigating a thorny crisis.
Leadership lesson: You can’t copy-paste advice
Akhund’s first piece of grown-up startup advice is perhaps the most meta: “You can't take other people's lessons and make them your own,” he says. “This took me a while to truly learn, but it’s quite an important lesson for me.”
Resisting the MVP dogma and taking a long time to launch was just one example of this. “I think founders run into trouble when they try to copy-paste some Silicon Valley philosophy as a prescription for how they’ll run the business. It just never works,” he says. “The lessons work in that particular way for that particular situation. You have to adapt it to your customer segment, your personality, all these things.”
As Mercury has brought on alums from other great companies, Akhund says he always questions the playbooks that worked for them in the past. “There’s plenty of osmosis in Silicon Valley. We have a bunch of people from Stripe and Block and Google who bring their good ideas. Obviously, you shouldn’t reinvent everything, but I think it’s good to individually assess every idea instead of just saying, ‘If it worked for them, it’ll work for us,’” he says.
Culture lesson: Hire for the traits that matter to you
Culture is one domain of company-building Akhund says you really can’t copy-paste, even if you tried.
"I never understood culture at my first two companies," he says. “People would tell me to ‘do culture.’ And I didn’t know what culture meant. Is it whether you have beer in the fridge?”
Here’s how Akhund describes culture now: The personality of the founders is reflected in the personality of the company.
“At Mercury, we look for people who are humble, helpful, curious, customer-centric and product-minded. Because that’s my personality and my co-founders’ personality,” he says. “But some of those traits run counter to the traits that other companies might look for.”
Akhund says unconsciously hiring disparate personality types at his previous companies led to culture clashes.
Step one to hire for the founders’ personality at scale, says Akhund, is to articulate the qualities you’re looking for. Step two is designing an interview process to filter for those traits.
Mercury has developed an unconventional hiring practice to identify one trait in particular: curiosity. During interviews, candidates may give a 45-minute presentation on any non-work related topic of their choice. Akhund has found this to be a very strong signal — even though it’s totally unrelated to the primary subject matter of the interview. “I can usually tell within 10 minutes that this person is super passionate about kayaking or gardening, or whatever it may be,” he says. “The topics are often mundane, everyday things, but curious people just have this weird level of detailed attention to random things.”
Crisis lesson: Be a leveling function
In March 2023, after a few years of healthy growth for Mercury, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed — and wreaked havoc on the startup ecosystem. Anxious customers came to Akhund asking if their money was safe with Mercury.
He says the whole episode taught him the importance of keeping an even keel, both to the public and for the Mercury team. “As an entrepreneur in general, things can be either amazing or awful,” he says. “You have to find a path to re-level, and you have to project that out to the whole company.”
Feeling uncertain is totally expected — you just have to find your way to having a plan. “During that time, even if I didn’t have a plan, I had a plan to make a plan. So I’d say, ‘We don’t know what’s happening, but here are the five things we’ll do to figure it out,’” he says. “But at the time I was definitely thinking, ‘Oh my God, the world is falling apart.’ You just have to wake up and be optimistic for your company.”
But he also understood that the action needed to match the words. So he galvanized the whole company to build a product called Mercury Vault, which offers access to expanded FDIC insurance* on deposits through its partner banks’ sweep networks — in that same weekend.
They built the project over a rollercoaster of a weekend, and Akhund had a lot of fun in the process. “We started working on it that Saturday, and we shipped it on Monday,” he says. “Suddenly, our whole 300-person company is working on the same thing.”
The CEO is a leveling function. When things are amazing, you have to resist getting stuck in a state of euphoria and keep executing. And when things are awful, you have to be optimistic.
*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Checking and savings accounts are provided through our bank partners Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC. Deposit insurance covers the failure of an insured bank. Checking and savings account deposits may be held by sweep network banks. Certain conditions must be satisfied for pass-through insurance to apply. Learn more here.