7 Business Ideas from a Unicorn Founder

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/0b337230aac78430

You hear about these companies that are going from like zero to a hundred million in like two years or three years or whatever. Like the equation is very simple from a company perspective.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I'm putting my all in it like my days off. On the road, less travel, never looking at it. What's up? Uh we got my buddy Imad here. He's the founder of Mercury, an awesome company that I use and love and
Is uh
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?
Uh
It's funny you say that, though you know, we raised uh series B in twenty twenty one.
Uh which is actually
Like four months uh
after we did our last podcast together at my first Median in January twenty twenty one.
Uh and then we're just announcing our series C, uh, which is a three point five billion valuation with Sequoia leading.
But in twenty twenty one when I raised my RAM, I was a at a one point six billion valuation.
And it was so weirdly anti climactic. Uh because it's like I'd started as a entrepreneur in two thousand and six.
So twenty twenty one, what is that, like fifteen years. So I've 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 twenty two, and like that's all it was about for me for a long time. It was like getting this like really successful company.
Uh 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.
'Cause that's like l this is from Joe Montana. Uh he was uh he's an investor and he's he's a
Yeah.
footballer. So he sent me the helmet and that's literally the only thing I got when I became a unicorn. I mean obviously I had a successful company, but I keep it there to show like, you know
Like these objectives don't really matter. It's like you have to enjoy the journey because you hit the objective and then you're like, Okay, now what? Dude, Joe Montana should make that his thing. He's just he should send a helmet to every founder who becomes a unicorn at the end. Well, yeah. I mean at least he sends it to the ones he funds because it says like billion dollar club on it.
Uh it's kinda cool. All right. I told you I said uh love to brainstorm with you ideas. I thought you would come with a bunch of fintech ideas 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 fin tech, so I'm excited.
Give me some of these ideas, things that you think
founders today could be going and doing, or if you weren't doing Mercury that you would
Be interested in doing.
Yeah, uh
So I I had three trends that I think are interesting. Uh trend number one is space and space tech.
Uh there's a few reasons I like the trend. Number one
Yeah, I'm
I'm just a sci fi nerd, like I love space. So it I think it's really exciting as a space.
And it's finally hit this point where like there's all of these kinda 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? Uh like it's insane. So you know, you this there's this repeatable kind of channel to get things in space. It's much, much cheaper and it's gonna it's getting cheaper every
Every month basically.
And nowadays people have these kind of micro slot 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 a hundred thousand dollars or something.
So this is like huge enablement thing. And I've invested in a bunch of companies. Uh 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.
Yeah.
Everyone's kinda excited about AI, which I'm also excited about. That but that's a heavily, you know, everyone's doing it. Whereas I think actually space is still like super open. There's not that many people kinda attempting things in space. Uh
So the crazy idea sent to you, which I don't love this idea in th 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.
Uh like potentially we put this thing on the moon
Uh and then we mine
Uh mine water from the moon and
Yeah, one of the cool things about water is if you can split
Uh 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.
Uh.
So having power in space is pretty useful. Uh
And there's lots of interesting things on the moon. Uh
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 sp 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.
surface into space by like spinning around around and flicking it. But you I think on the moon it's much easier. The gravity's lower and there's no air resistance.
Right.
So yeah, if you had a nuclear power plant, you could power there. Uh so I thought that was cool. Let's see what else. Uh
I'll I'll talk about my second uh theme because it ties into space as well. So the second theme is defense tech in general.
Uh obviously we've seen Anderil.
Um
But
Yeah, there's kind of true two trends. Well, actually three trends uh trends in defense tech that I think are interesting. Number one, uh
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.
Uh
And
America's no longer kinda the policeman, right? Like the only way America since the nineteen nineties has
been able to be a policeman as there hasn't been any other
Power to really challenge that.
Right.
So it's not just the US is is needs to rearm, it's all of Europe, uh India, whatever like everyone is like arming. So
So you have like all of these people that are in the market now that weren't?
And then number two, autonomous vehicles uh have changed the game, right? These drones, uh
AI in general can be applied to all of this stuff. And then number three, yeah, you're gonna get a ton of drones. Like it's not just like
Big
billion dollar fighter planes, right? It's gonna be actually like a thousand or million like tiny drones that are like easy to manufacture. So so all of these things kinda make it so
startups can now compete again in a way that like wasn't possible before.
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 head on. Uh
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.
Uh
So that's one aspect. And then the second aspect is like
Uh a lot of these autonomous things kinda favor defense.
So I was reading about this and the Ukraine Russia war is like actually like trench warfare, which is kind of crazy. Like we haven't had it since World War One, but they're literally digging trenches.
And like that's why the lines are like hardly changing because it's like neither of them has a superiority.
Uh, the drones actually make it hard to get ASCP RT because you can have like a tiny drone knock out of like a million dollar plane.
Uh.
So
In that world, like
Yeah. So you've got one side is the autonomous side and the second side is like the kinda how do we build more defensive autonomous things as well. So like, you know, maybe we automatically have these machines that are drink building tr trenches uh
You could have autonomous minds that are like smart and they don't I mean, I guess that sounds like bad to people, but you could have it so like it's a f if it's a civilian, it doesn't blow up. If it's a tank, it does blow up, right? Like you can you can make these like safer
uh minds that move around uh
And then to tie back to the space thing, uh, you know, I think
In the next kind of war.
space warfare will be a big part of it, right? Like if you n if you can knock out
Uh satellite you can like ch you know, uh cut down on
Uh
Yeah. Starlink and all of this kinda uh communication. You can remove the
uh the visual side of things, right? Like these kind of satellites that are viewing things. Uh you can knock knock out GPS, uh
Uh some of that actually happened during the Ukraine war. There was like some yeah.
There's some rumors about like some satellites being knocked out.
But I think that's gonna be a big thing. So
So the counter to that is how do you how do you create defence around satellites, right? How do you
Uh maybe you'll have like stealth equivalent of stealth satellites, right? Like you kinda only move them when like the the sun is kinda h obscuring the the viewprint and uh you m move them to a place and then upscale the upscale them completely so they're not reflective.
Uh
Yeah, I know. Th there's a ton of ideas around like defensive kind of stuff in space as well.
So w 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 m there's it's not gonna be winner take all. There's room for everybody to eat. And a good idea.
What it's
profiles out to is that you make
millions of dollars, maybe tens of million dollars, maybe a hundred a couple of 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 cr 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.
Teal went to Y C and you know, he was asked to give a talk and he went and he drew two circles on the d 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 um now that's hard to do'cause 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 ten people who first hear it.
Say nah no way, right?
And so you uh 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 already gonna 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 um you know, self swimming.
Yeah, just basically uh 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,'cause that's, you know, lives saved when you when you do that.
Um
So you know, you have these inflections, so that's thing number two.
And thing three, I would say is
Um
Scares everybody off.
So like you know, you were saying a AI in general, like you know
Uh if I 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.
Um and same thing in d in defense that
You know
Still the average smart capable team is not
Um
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
Uh obviously like
You know, space and satellites, th 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 would 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?
Um
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'cause I just don't know anything about the space.
Uh yeah, I mean I have like some simple ideas that are maybe good but not great, but like, you know, more achievable. Uh
Uh here's a fun one I thought about last night. I thought it'd be fun to have a billboard in space.
Uh the first time. So so I had this uh 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 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 a satellite. So they were like they were kind of positioning them, so they were all visible.
And there was like twenty in a string in space.
And you could see them naked eye. With a telescope? Oh, just naked eye. No, just naked eye. You just look up and there's like a string and then initially I was like, Are those stars? Are they UFOs? Because they like

Yeah, they're like very bright. Like they're brighter than a star.
Uh but they're like s uh they're like completely in a line and they're moving quite fast because they're in like LEO, right?
Uh
But I was like, Oh yeah, that's kinda sick. Like I you know, you can literally as a human
Like launch this thing that changes like everyone's view from the earth.
Uh. I thought that was like kinda insane. Uh
But yeah, I think
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 like I mean you could probably do the natural eye thing, but like obviously people will complain. Uh but making it so you could view it with a telescope, I think would be actually kinda cool. And then people would like buy that. Uh
So this one's more a good idea. I mean I don't think that's a bit odd idea, but do you remember there was a a whole service around uh buying and naming stars. Do you re do you remember this? This was kinda like a big idea in the nineties, maybe early two thousand. That's like one of the one of the ideas. I haven't I haven't actually read it. No, I don't it's like on my kind of to do to read list, but
We um
Back in the day we had this business called Birthday Alarm and Birthday Alarm was like a
To remind you of when it's your friends and family's birthday and then you 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
um gift of naming a star after someone. You get a certificate, blah, blah, blah. And it was like whatever, thirty bucks
to to buy a star in someone's name.
And that company was doing like twenty million a year, I remember. And it was just like a couple of guys.
And they were just and they approached us to that. We said no, but when we had gotten to know them
I was stunned that they were doing, you know, that much revenue, um, at least at that time. I do think it was a bit of a fad.
But still that was imprisoned very impressive to me.
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 want to be cremated, but if I was cremated, it would be cool to send some ash to space. Uh
I mean like some sort of memorabilia being sent to space, I think is kinda interesting as well. Uh and that would be easier.
Uh
And the more practical ideas, I do think uh 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.
Uh I haven't seen too many companies kinda go after more niche ideas where people are willing to pay, so
Uh
A I S A T T tuto, right? Like imagine
Like actually like
AI is great as e at education because
A like the content is like extremely easy for AI to do. Super structure. Yeah. Yeah.
B it can be completely personalised. C, it's just extremely uh patient, right? Like
I mean when I try to teach my thirteen year old, I'm like
Pulling my hair out after like a few minutes. Uh
So there's a whole class of like, you know, m you take any test and you could probably make an like a AI agent that's like great at that and great at teaching that. So like you could do the bar exam, you could do
I mean the no brainer. Is it somebody doing that? Somebody has to be doing that, right? Because I haven't heard of anyone doing a great job of it. 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 m like many decades ago, right? And they were built in the I mean, I used to buy like
Those giant books with uh, you know, the the practice tests in them from the 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 signal thing when it comes to tutoring. It's basically like
Nothing has shown as measurable of an effect.
As one on one tutoring and 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. I think intuitively it's like feels like when I'm learning something, if I talk to someone like I'm gonna go. If a gun to my head much better, and it was get the best
grade possible on this test, right? If my life depended on it.
Would I choose uh
Just showing up cold? No. Would I 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 g 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.
Um, so I think that's kind of
Uh kind of great because
It's so scoped to, you know, one ch one specific um
test which people are not doing because they voluntarily want to, you know

To get into Z College.
Yeah, you're willing to pay.
Yeah, I I think like the
The good ideas right now in these kinda AI agent whatever things are like these like
kinda more niche 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.
Uh then you can always expand from there as well.
Right, right, right.
I like that.
What are some of the most interesting companies you've invested in recently? So have uh 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.
Yeah, this like what I put uh put as like intelligence as a service company. So I'm I'm an investor in Eleven X, which does kinda AI SDRs, and I'm also an investor in Decagon that does kinda
AI customer support agents.
Uh
Yeah, they just have like these
insane numbers. Uh I don't think they're public, but
Yeah, you hear about these companies that are going from like zero to a hundred million in like, you know, two years or three years or whatever. Like all of these ones that hit where they're like
Yeah.
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, uh, with some sort of like fallback to humans
Uh at half the price. Sure, let's do it, right? So
There's definitely across a bunch of these spaces, uh
When the big ones are like
Yeah.
Sales
Customer support.
Legal.
Uh
Accounting, uh a bunch of these, and I'm an investor in like many of these companies. Uh
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's that has
Sales or
S C S or whatever the CEO of the board is saying, like, hey, how do you make yourself more efficient through AI, right? So
Uh
You 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
It' 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 exclusive enterprise.
Sales growth.
Which is actually very rare. It only happens like in these kind of rare trends.
Would you let's say you weren't doing Mercury right now. You had all your free time and you know everything you know today.
And you wanted to find an AI idea, a winning AI idea.
What would be your process like
Explain to me how Immod finds like kind of comes up with the ideas and vets them and sort of figures out what idea to do versus what idea not to do.
I approach things like both top down and bottom up. So top down
Uh and actually did this as part of like your your podcast prep stuff. I you know, I went to Chat GPT and said, like, hey, tell me every
Every human worker in the US
That like does knowledge work.
Give me a list of all of them and tell me how much.
Labor costs for 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 yeah, whatever. Like all these like knowledge worker type things, like design, coding, et cetera.
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 aren't done.
Uh you know, his
Uh yeah, maybe you want to avoid 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 then you can prove it out, et cetera. Um
So
So that's one kinda top down approach. And then I'd also go bottoms up and I'll go, Okay, you know, what uh 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 I I love the idea of like people making things. So maybe I'd say, Okay, you know, what are things that entrepreneurs struggle with and
You know, one thing that I still don't have a great solution for is like
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 uh
I would love
To have like an AI
twin of Imad that like is like continuously absorbing all the knowledge across like the company and maybe across the internet and telling me stuff. And it's like
I think Imad should really pay attention to this and like or like even like I actually thought it would be kind of fun to make it so like on
on the Slack, like there could be an MR twin and someone could ask a question, say like, Oh, what what would MR think of this idea? Uh
Actually like a funny thing that just came up the other day and I was like, I'm pretty sure my AI turn could answer this. It's like uh someone was like, Oh, uh you know, our boardroom is like kinda small and we just added two people to the board, like, hey, should we do the board meeting?
At a law at our law firm.
And I was like, no fuck no, I'm never gonna do a board meeting at a law firm. Like that sounds awful. I'd rather stuff like sixteen people in a tiny room, uh than do that. So I feel like in my AI twin could have answered that question. Uh
So that would be like my bottoms up approach and I I
Yeah, I do think like you should really work on things like get you really excited. Uh like you know, an AI SDR, like I'm happy for those guys. I personally would not get excited about that. Like I I hate receiving s sales emails and calls. Uh
So I think I think doing things that you would like wake up in the morning and say, like I I'm excited to solve this problem because like these things take it take such a long time, right? Like I've been doing
Mercury now for like eight years. Uh and if I you know, if I was doing something boring, I would like
probably wake up in the morning oh why do I have to do this again? So
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
Yeah, you kind of merge those two kind of concepts together and and
You know, often you do something and you find out actually it's a bad idea as well. So y yeah, 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 ha 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.
Do you um so let's t 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 uh let's do the yeah, let's do the digital twin. I think that's like kind of the most important thing. So you have a uh you know your digital twin CEO who's basically reading all the slacks.
The documents and in Google Drive, the l con he knows everything about the contracts that are all there. He looked at the he has c access to the CRM.
So you can see anything in the in the dashboards, et cetera.
Um
Alright, so now
first few weeks, what are you doing? Is you 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?
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 um 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 kinda depressed after I talked to them because I talked to a hundred and most of them were like, Oh yeah, that sounds kinda 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.
Uh
And at that point, like, you know, it was like a it took us a year and a half to build this, so this was like one year in. So yeah, you're like
You're kinda 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?
Uh.
But you know, I've always like I would really want this, so I just like powered through it and and it turned out, you know
A
If two percent of people want something and the market's big enough, that's like probably big enough for like an early adopter base. Uh but if you think about it, like
You know, talking to a hundred people and having having only two people get excited about something is like actually like kind of like
Uh, tricky and you know, maybe I wouldn't have talked to those two people because like
Yeah, if I talk to fifty people, I might have missed out on it completely.
Uh
So I think it's actually like surprisingly hard to vet an idea against
Humans.
Uh like people just don't know and it's hard to imagine an idea as well.
Uh
So I uh 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 talk to some VCs, just get an idea of like what is the reception like.
Uh, 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
Uh
Yeah.
After
Like last year we launched a bunch of new things. Like we launched
uh invoicing and bill pay and reimbursements and personal banking and some ideas are like
hit a dead end over time, right? Like you kinda do the idea, and then you end up like five years later, you're just like making like small features and just selling it more, et cetera. And then some ideas like turn out to like fork like a thousand ways. And Mercury is one of those things because A, there's just so few people in banking that like a lot of these spaces are unexplored.
And B, banking is like this kind of platform where it has all your money, has all your finance teams, 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 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
Maybe some of the people don't even exist at the company. Maybe these are like the uh you know, maybe you have like a comsperson at the company that's just literally just AI. Uh
Uh I'm just like riffing off this. Uh maybe the maybe O AI twins shows up at the Zoom calls. Uh yeah, maybe it's like becomes your coach and it's like helping you through difficult times, right? Like
I think there is uh 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 co ideas that like uh
Yeah, sounds like a pretty good idea that we didn't rip it on it, but uh you also
With Mercury you uh
It seems like this maybe it's too simple, but like
It seems like you you had been a founder for ten plus years and you were like
I don't personally like have a

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 your the bet was that there's gonna be a lot of other founders that think like me that like what I like.
Um is that fair or is that m oversimplifying it?
No no that's a hundred percent fair. I think generally speaking
I'm a little unusual. I get like s if I have to call someone to do something, I get so annoyed about it. Like I'm I want like press a button, yeah, I I will delay for weeks for sure, but like if I have to do and like that's the way banks
Ah, and you after uh you know, except for Mercury, like you have to call to like get a wire done and like
Yo uh
I don't wanna like I guess they're kind of gone so I can probably bitch about them a little bit. But like First Republic, like if you wanted to send a wire, like yeah, 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 to it's like it was like a multi-week process just to figure out how to send wires. Uh
So I was like, this is what so so you guys started sponsoring me and I was like, All right, cool. I have an idea for the ad read, because I got six Mercury accounts myself. So I was like, uh trust me, I already know you don't need to give me the talking points. I know why I use it.
And I was uh I was like, I know you have all these fancy features, but like
For me as a founder.
Uh 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 uh 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 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 st 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. Cause I used to wire for my e com business.
uh out of Wells Fargo and I would have to every single month, just to pay our suppliers, I'd have to drive to a Wells Fargo bank, make an appointment, which I always forget to do, go inside. They gave me this freaking fucking hour to do it, J 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 fifty 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 at 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.
Wait, wait, wait.
We said this was important.
Yeah, let's just get it up. There's still eight hours left in the day. What are you talking about? Like how long could that possibly take you? Um, 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.
Yeah.
Like once you describe that process, like it it sounds awful. So I think like there's
Uh like people just get used to being abused by the current products, right? Like I I think it's
In some ways like
Because I came from the UK I didn't I didn't ha I had a slightly better expectation of banking. Uh like
the y 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 uh as an immigrant. Uh
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 Walfago to do something basic and like
having this like And like beg them to let me do something with my own money. Exactly. Like convince them. And sometimes they say no. Dude, it that uh 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 um 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, but like Oh yeah
And look at this is the dialogue couple. Oh, perfect, perfect. So I went there last uh like two days ago, whatever.
And in the room was like the CEO of Renaissance technology, right? Like the Renaissance, like the best investors in the world, the CEO of Bridgewater, or like it was basically like the who's who.
In the in the money conversation, there's like a group of ten people.
In the money conversation, the topic of crypto came up.
And somebody who was a a a a dean of a very famous
Sch university.
was basically like arguing um that
You know, crypto, I don't know. I'm I I'm not convinced. And I I just sort of
It was the d 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 uh the abuse that was normalized was
So the dollar, which has a whole
arm the Fed, whose job is to have a two to three percent target inflation. Oh oops, sometimes we go way above that, but we'll try to get back to two to three percent.
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 p purchasing power gets cut in half.
It's a lot worse than that because of like asset appreciation, right? Like people don't think about it but like
Yeah, like
Houses and a lot of other things are like way above inflation. Inflation even measured where it doesn't include your house or your rent. Even that. Even that like gain the the the adjusted infl uh the adjusted EBITDA of inflation, right? Where it's like this
The specific basket, even that's supposed to be three percent. 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 in the dollar system. But it's um
It's a blind spot. People really don't, uh they've accepted that abuse. They're so used to that abuse that that uh it's just taken as as as fine. Uh, you know, it's not even a problem. It's not even like a known problem for them.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the r part of the reason it's not a problem for like richer people is because they get the asset appreciation, right? So like
You know, people aren't sitting on cash. It's yeah, unfortunately a lot of the
abuse actually happens to like poorer businesses uh and like poorer
People where they have to sit in cash because, you know, they don't have the living paycheck to paycheck and like most of their money is not in assets. Uh so I I think that part is like particularly sad. Uh
I I don't necessarily think crypto is the only answer there, right? Like you could buy gold, you could buy stock.
Bitcoin is 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.
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, uh you guys had this crazy situation where Silicon Valley Bank
Goes through this crisis.
Tell me where you were when that happened and then what the next, I don't know, twenty four, forty eight hours, what did that look like and what happened to Mercury during that time'cause it seems like you were the big
You were a big beneficiary of
of that situation in terms of customers coming to you guys or adoption.
Yeah.
I mean to set the scene, right? Like S V B has been around one year longer than I was alive. So it was like started in nineteen eighty three, so I always remember that. Uh
And when
Yeah, when I was working on Mercury, right, like
SPB is part of the C deck, right? It's like, hey, this is the eight hundred pound gorilla, like this is what everyone in the Silicon Valley uses.
Uh at that point they were like worth sixteen billion and I think in peak Covid they were worth forty billion.
Uh, this is a big company, so
Yeah.
Oh, and this started happening.
Yeah, I wasn't
We we had obviously been competing against each other, but yeah, it was like kind of a
Weirdly indirect competition in the sense that like SVB just offers something very different, right? Like this is like the stolid
Uh Silicon Valley Bank that's been around forever.
And then Mercury is upstar fintech, right? Like so uh and like I you know, we used S V B in my previous company and I like those guys, like they were like
Uh.
They were friendly, they like cared about startups. I mean their software wasn't great, but none none of the banks had great software. So
Uh like to be clear, I didn't feel anything bad about them and I and I
And I felt really bad about for the people there and you know, I thought
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. 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?
In the December, like so the most of the uh the bank run happened uh to S V B in March twenty twenty three.
Uh, in December twenty twenty two there was like this article about like the fact that the
m M SPs, the mortgage backed security MBS the mortgage backed securities were like massively underwater. There's even been some VCs that had freaked out and like uh pulled their portfolio companies out. So I had seen some of those rumors in that December twenty twenty two, but again, like
Yeah, the people was
calling some crisis and free, like if you wanna like right now there's someone freaking out about something. So like the default is to ignore that stuff.
Uh
But yeah, I mean on Wednesday uh 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 uh
Uh
And it went from like
Yeah, normally like banking, like people don't want to switch banking services, right? Like this is a uh a lot of the customers that Mercury wins are like a day zero. Like you just start a new business, you don't have a bank account, you need something, and we 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
Did you have like a uh uh like kind of emergency meeting, like hey, here's the game plan, or what how did you how did you organize that to like
Sprint.
We do not say a word of this publicly, we're like we don't want to like jump on the misfortune.
But anyone that comes to Mercury
Let's like support them.
And we did a bunch of things, so we ch we changed the product, so
Uh yeah, we're like, hey, if you're a non S V B uh customer
We can always onboard you next week, right? Right. But if you're coming from S V B, let's make it in a uh let's do it in a half an hour. So so we meet mo you know, we had this cloud connection thing and we put that right at the top and we said above it, S V B customer, connect your S V B and we'll like prioritize you.
Uh.
And like S V B customers were really easy to prioritize because they're like, you know, they tended to have more money, they're already vetted by a a bank, uh, they're not new customers. Uh yeah, it was it we we basically like
What is it?
tried to think of all the ways we could speed up the process for them. And we really focus on the volume of that process. Was it like
Two X, five X, ten X normal. Like what what did you see? So right now Mercury has like two hundred thousand customers. Uh
And we had like
Maybe a hundred thousand back then, but yeah, S V B had a lot of money, but not at like an insane number of customers. So I wanna say they had like
Thirty thousand or forty thousand kind of
Total customers, so
Uh
The volume was big in terms of dollars, but not necessarily in terms of like numbers. It was significant. Um I think what we published is like around eight thousand customers moved over to us, like in a two week time period.
Oh.
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 uh you know.
Uh
Everyone was saying to us, like, Hey, S V B failed, like why won't Mercury fail? And
Uh
You know, I would say to people, like verbally, it's like hey, you know, we
We're not a bank ourselves. We work with partner banks. Uh
And your money is like has extra FDI C insurance. So at that time we had
Uh one million in FDI C insurance.
And then I would say, Okay, you know, after if you have more than a million, put the rest of it in US government, T bill, mutual funds.
Uh 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 MR says like, hey, your money's safe, like that's not very fulfilling, right? Like uh the SPP CEO was also saying your money's safe. So what we did over that free. 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
As we built this product, it was called Mercury Vault.
And it was basically
visualize where your money is. We'd say, Okay, you know, this much of it is in
Uh FDIC in short account up to this much. So if you had
Yeah.
Yeah, and we also actually worked with our partner banks to extend the FTIC insurance. So we went from one million to five million over that week.
So it's yeah, if you had six million in your Mercury checking account, we'd say, Okay, one million if there's no FTIC insured, five million is.
And then
Yeah, we'd help you set up your treasury system so you'd put in Uberment T bills so so we build this product and
That really worked. Uh
Like it's so
So you used product to build trust instead of work.
Yes, uh 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 safe or not. We were like, Okay, let's show you, right? Like you know, you don't have to like
trust like MR's word or like some marketing. You 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.
Uh
Also just felt to people like okay, you know, instead of
I was 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's a fintech. It's not yeah, at that point, like
Yeah, we're like we are not holding your money. The money touches Mercury's bank account and it never does. Like it goes to our partner banks and that they have an FTIC 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 one
There were like the fact that like we spend the weekend building a product for them that like actually answered their biggest question.
Mm-hmm.
Like made people go, like, Oh shit, like Mercury gets it, right? Like I think that was like a really powerful moment for us.
Yeah, that's dope.
You have this. Also 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 uh 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 yeah, it gave you like something really tangible to do. Uh
So actually the whole team like thinks like even I guess two years later, like we yeah, the whole team is like, Hey, we work that whole weekend, we put this product together, like everyone's like still like excited about that moment because like it it like
It did the thing that we were good at doing to solve that problem.
Yeah, 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.
Um
You have these philosophies that you sent over. Uh 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?
I feel like a lot of people um
kind of try entrepreneurship or do things, but they don't go all in on them. And you know, when I s I did my first startup for seven months in the UK and I was like
Yeah, I
It was l really a moment for me where like I was like, Okay, this is what life is about for me.
Uh.
Like I was a 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. Uh
And it was kind of fun. Uh, and then I worked at a job and I hated it. Uh uh 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
Uh and then, you know, one of my friends was like, Hey, let's do this like start up thing and I was like, Okay, you know, let's try it out.
Uh and I 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, had no users.
But just the idea of like working nine AM to like midnight, building something myself and launching it, like I just
I don't know. There's just something about it that like so speaks to like
My call.
So I was like, Okay, if I want to do this
Yeah, what is where can I do this the greatest? And
I would still say San Francisco, but
Uh, at that time it was like hundred percent like I had to be here to do it.
So I was just like, Yeah.
had basically no money. I packed up my stuff. I I did get into Y Combinator with my second startup and moved to San Francisco.
And I just spent Yeah, even in that seven months when I was in London, I was all in. Like I was
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 yeah, you just
If you work really, really hard and you do all the things you'll eventually like build up a network, right? That's how
Actually, like the way I came to San Francisco is I met someone through this like 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. Uh
So
I think like
I just feel like some d a lot of people that do things just kinda 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 kinda like
Forceful like
uh grind, like are you just like all in on things.
Uh that just pays dividends in a way that's like half doing things just d I don't think really does. Uh
And I feel like
Yeah, over time, like going all in on things like
Yeah, another part of my things is like going all in on family. Like
Basically like I
Yeah, I'm married.
Like I met my wife three weeks before I moved to the US.
And then I had a long distance relationship and then I married her and then we had a kid like two years later. Uh, which like I was the one like the start up 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 in on things has just like this like big upside that like half doing things just doesn't. Uh
And I I think the asymmetric side of it is like, yeah.
The worst thing that could happen to me is if I my startup didn't work, I'd have to go and get another job. So like I the basically like I was always like, Okay, you know.
At that point I was getting paid like forty thousand pounds a year or something. So I was like, Okay, you know, I'm I'm losing forty thousand pounds a year in salary, maybe fifty thousand if I get a raise or something.
But the asymmetric bet is like, you know, I could make a million or whatever, but
Yeah, it's also asymmetric life better. It's like I could I could either like my downside was like
Yeah.
I'm gonna have a shitty time and not enjoy my life. And my upside was like I'll have a great life that were I'm extremely motivated and excited about. So
Uh that to me is like extremely asymmetric, like doing things where you're like extremely excited and like having fun. Uh 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.
Uh 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 uh if you find something that is like that, you should go all in on that.
I love what you just said,'cause I wrote go I wrote going all in, right?
As a reminder.
Uh, 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 it to the front of mine, or I needed to to remember in my current context.
And I think that
Um the way you described it actually made it
click for me in a s 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 gonna go to med school as I had planned, took the MCATs, all that, or I was gonna do the startup.
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. Somebody's gonna pay me a hundred twenty thousand dollars. Uh I had to move to Indonesia where the opportunity was.
Um
But it was like this guaranteed salary, blah blah. And I remember
My co-founders, my two buddies, I was like, Yeah, and we told ourselves this stupid story, which is you know, we were 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.
Um, and instead we told ourselves this story that I needed to learn business over there before I could go do business here.
And within two months when I was there.
I was like, this was a mistake. I need to be all in.
And I fli 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'm 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, All right, I'm all in.
And we moved. That was the first thing, because I was like, is this the best place to build this company? And if not, why are we building 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 the all the top restaurant chains have have been launched, or most of them have been launched in in Colorado, like Chipotle and Smash Burger and Quisnos. This is there's like Noodles and Company. There's
Like
eight of the f 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 um
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 that.
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'cause 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.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
All right, the last last philosophy I want to hear from you'cause I I dig these is uh there are no rules. Just construct your work and your life the way you want. What do you what do you mean by that? Why what makes you say that?
You know, I feel like when you're in Silicon Valley, uh everyone's got these like
Yeah, there uh th there's so many people who try to like be
influencers, like V Cs, like you know, everyone's got these ideas. They're like, hey, you know
Like I remember when you know in two thousand eleven when I had my first kid, like it was very unfashionable to have a kid and have an o uh have a startup. Like people were like literally like what are you doing? Like you're gonna fail your start up or whatever.
Uh
But
Actually one of the things that's like a completely contradiction is like the only way you succeed is by doing things that are unusual, right? Because if you're doing the normal things, you how can you succeed? Because like everyone's doing those things. So
So weirdly like
Yeah, if you look at every single success, it's a contradiction because it had to be.
Um
really common thing in Silicon Valley is don't do consumer startups. But actually the bigger startups like Amazon, Facebook, Google, they're consumer startups, right? Like so why we why are we telling everyone not to do consumer startups and like those are the three trillion dollar companies.
Uh
So I find like the
Yeah, 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 kinda have to like just ignore the rules and like just do the thing and be the exception because that's the only way you succeed. But I do think there's like knowledge out there and like
There's a reason people talk about these things and you should understand why it is that you are different and like, yeah, what 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.
That's a
That's a great point. You know, there's that I forgot what the phrase is, but it's like experts know all the rules and masters know when to break them.
Um, so so you know, that's the that 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 does and he'll be like he'll specifically call out
He did this thing that
Yeah.
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 the reason why it works. Yeah, they make up the reason, but it's post post fact. Um it becomes a new rule later. It's like no oh yeah, but if it resolves tension, then it works. It's like okay, cool.
Um, but at the time this sort of breaks the 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 w how I wanna win, how I 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
I'm intentionally choosing to break.
Yeah, I'll give you an example.
Um 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
Um, 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.
Um, 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 said goes, Never.
And everyone's like, Yeah, that makes sense. It could be really messy.
Yeah.
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 want to break.
But that's a good example where you w you want to 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 startup, I'm gonna make sure there's a contract and everyone understands like here's how we work together and like Yeah, I I do think when you break the rule you have to kinda go out of the way to mitigate uh
the potential downsides of like breaking that role? 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 do that. The rule you broke was as a startup founder and SF with all the options to choose, you chose the like highly regulated, highly compliant based
Hard, have to build for a year and a half before you launch.
Yeah, that's not
That's not the the quick and dirty prototype vibecode. Like you can't do that playbook there. So you're like, all right, I'm gonna choose to break that norm.
And go this way,'cause that's what I want. 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 compliance and rules and laws and like all the stuff. And like I wasn't I wasn't doing it blindly.
Yeah.
All right, so Ahmad, where should people find you and who should reach out to you? Who do you
Who do you want to reach out to you?
Uh from things like this. Because when you're out there, you know, you attract
certain people, but I I like to say you want to have your API.
You wanna tell people who should connect with you and and and and on what basis. The easiest way is on X or Twitter, uh as it used to be. Uh I'm just Imov. Uh 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
Uh, pitch me something or whatever. Yeah, reach out and yeah, I'd I try to be like quick and say yes or no if I'm interested or not. Uh
And obviously if you're interested in Mercury
Uh yeah, go to Mercury.com and sign up.
All right. Love it.
Thanks for coming on, dude.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Sean.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back