How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square)

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/319b775fb6dcc481

The CO of the company you work at.
Now Mercury tweeted uh a few years ago.
Where he basically was
Very proud of not having any product managers. Clearly you have product managers today.
You're product manager at Mercury.
What was the sign to Umaud and the leadership team that it was time to hire product managers? The bottlenecks started popping up to take things from like soup to nuts on
Every single project. It requires design and edge then to take on a lot more responsibility, which means somebody's doing the PM duties, even if you don't have a PM. What is it that you think people most miss about the value that a PM brings to your org? There's just so many different flavors of what a product manager is. We use this idea of like a pioneer, a town settler, and a city planner. So the pioneer
Is a PM that's really good at zero to one. Settler PM is in that growth stage of maturity of a product. You're in a town, there might be
bank, there might be a post office, but nothing more than that. And then a city planner is a PM that's really good at mature products. They have the city. Let's talk about the final big topic, going multiproduct. The organizational structure is really important. One thing we learned was having
new product areas, new seedlings being too close within the like true org structure to the core banking or payments for mature products made it hard for that new product to even grow.

Today my guest is Rohimi Pandi.
Rohini is currently a product leader at Mercury, where she leads the product expansion team.
Which incubates and scales new product lines within Mercury.
Previous, she spent over seven years at Square, also known as Block.
Leading product work on square payments, invoicing, and the BitKey hardware Bitcoin wallet.
She's also the co-founder of the startup bootcamp Transparent Collective.
And a very active angel investor.
In our conversation, we talk about why founders are often so resistant to hiring product managers.
and Mercury's journey on deciding to hire their first PM and then scale their product management team.
Also we get into what attracts great product managers to join your company.
She makes an argument for why it's important to invest in quality and user experience versus just working on things that move metrics and how that could differentiate your business.
We also do a deep dive into how she successfully launched a half dozen new product lines at Mercury just this past year.
Which is extremely rare and very hard to do.
And also something that every single startup hopes to do and tries to do and often fails.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.
With that, I bring you Rohini
Pandy.
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Rohini, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, Lenny. I'm excited to be here.
I'm very excited to have you here.
I wanna start with this
Tweet that
The CO of the company you work at.
Now Mercury.
Tweeted uh a few years ago.
Where he basically was
Very proud of n not having any product managers.
Of this idea that
Engineers are gonna do the PM work, designers basically everyone's doing PM duties.
And
Clearly you have product managers today.
You're a product manager at Mercury.
And
The reason I want to chat about this and spend some time here is a lot of founders, there's a kind of this meme of like, we don't need product managers, who needs PMs, what a waste. They slow everything down, they disempower people on the team.
And then eventually they realize, Oh, okay, I see.
See the value of PMs.
So I wanna spend some time on this topic. How does that sound broadly?
Perfect. Let's go into it.

uh engineers slash employees that Mercury have by the time they ended up
hiring the first PM.
Prior to two years ago there were no PMs at the company. And I think at that time
There was probably close to four hundred employees across Mercury.
Um, I'd say at least half of them were some in some level of like the R and D role. So engineering, pro uh design, those types of
Like core.
Rolls.
Wow. So two hundred engineers, four hundred employees. That's pretty far. Okay, great. So this is gonna be really helpful really good.
Okay. And then how many PMs are there now, roughly? Now we have about thirty PMs across the company and I think it's
You know, split between
junior and more experienced PMs, but it's about half more than half our
senior PMs with uh
With managers baked in there somewhere.
Okay, and then where do you fit in the timeline of no product managers to
The PM team is built.
So yeah, so two years ago, no PMs at Mercury or no one with that official title. Um
There are still people doing the P M
duties and having those responsibilities. And then I joined about a year ago. So I think they were in their
You know, what was the first set of learnings from that first year of having PMs and then me joining in kind of
Doing some a bit of revamping of the the product discipline internally.
Okay.
Cool. So there's a few threads that are gonna be really interesting here.
One is clearly Mercury has done well and has
thrived without PMs for a long time. So I think there's like that thing. And then there's also just like
uh what how they built this team to to be successful. So I wanna start with that first kind of
uh thread of just
A lot of founders start off feeling, I don't need product managers, who needs them, we're gonna have everyone's gonna do PMW. Yeah, yeah, so annoying, just slow their down. What what do they even do all day? Bottleneck, yep. Yeah, exactly.
But I think it's rare to actually
work out really well. A lot of companies just become chaotic with FPMs.
And I think
Mercury.
did something right in order to be successful with outpums for a long time.
So
Here's the question, just what do you think?
Mercury
had in place or needed in
to have in place to be successful or for as long as they
were without product managers.
Think?
The
crux of it comes down to the founders.
And the founders are your original PMs, right? In
And like I think I whenever I talk to any
small seed stage company who's asking.
When should I hire a PM?
Like absolutely not. Until you cannot do the job anymore, you yourself should be the PM.
the co founders, the founders, they need to be that. And I think this was true even at Square. I guess I got lucky with some of my past experiences being at places that took product seriously, or they kind of the

product does and the intentionality of of making product decisions, it doesn't matter that there wasn't like a PM
title necessarily at the company, but
You need to be as close to the customers as you possibly can. You need to be as close to the solution that's getting built. And in that early days, in those early days, the founder needs to be that PM. They need to take on those duties. I think
What was kind of you talked about like what was the magic
Um
piece of it. I I do think it's hiring amazing engineers, hiring amazing designers, because you're pro as you scale,
Those are the
That
people the disciplines that you really need to to build um your solution in the software product world.
And so
Having those types of folks that have that product obsession, have that product mind already there.
makes me excited to join companies that hated PMs or had a negative reaction to this idea of a PM because they already
do the product role. They already have that like implicitly as part of the way that they operate.
They have these autonomous teams that are able to make local decisions in their product surface areas. And so they know kind of
They have this intuition.
And they're already close to the customer. They're already close to how to build it. And I think that's what made
Mercury successful at the start of not having any PMs.
I think
early Square Days, it was the same exact story.
Following this thread, what was
What was the sign to Ama and the leadership team that it was time to hire product managers?
There's one element that's scale.
It's just there's so much going on and
A single PM.
Single like CEO couldn't handle that kind of scale.
Um, we have three co founders, but even at some point that scale becomes too broad for three PMs to handle.
And
Uh, I think there was like
one the the bottlenecks started popping up, so
It is
If every decision kind of depends on
Please.
co founders to make every single call.
Things just slow down to or even halt until they're available again.
Um the other piece was complexity. We were starting to not only scale, but just grow in complexity.
And when you think of like FinTech.
You have a lot that you need to work. You have a lot of partnerships, cross functional collaboration you need to do.
We need to work with
Compliance, we need to work with legal, we need to work with risk, we need to do all of these checks before a product even gets launched. And so to take things from like soup to nuts on
Every single project that's kinda going out the door.
It requires design and eng then to take on a lot more responsibility, which means the somebody's doing the PM duties, even if you don't have a PM, but then that means they're not doing their engineering or design.
uh responsibilities. And so uh for
For I think for Mercury, that kind of started breaking way before the
two hundred uh four hundred employee marker that probably broke under the hundred.
marker. And so what they had was
generalist. They hired quote unquote like these uh business lead titles.
And those business leads started doing those cross functional collaboration meetings, making sure everything was kind of like the I's were dotted, T's were crossed, have project management.
pieces of the PM duties.
And they
started becoming like the product managers, so to speak, within the company. And then they officially changed titles about two years ago, I think. So a bunch of those business leads became PMs.
The problem with that became
They weren't PMs, they didn't have experience in the PM role.
And so uh
Kind of the core, maybe the basics of
What product management?
Uh
Needed.
in internally remiss like
Strategic planning was an
Exactly right. Uh or roadmapping was really hard for some of these folks. Prioritization.
Doing any sort of goal settings.
doing deep customer research wasn't necessarily part of like
What they've been trained for or
Had gotten.
experience with. And so
they kinda struggled with a bit of that. And I think
In hindsight.
We should probably done the official transition to the PM role a lot sooner.
But
Yeah, hence it's always twenty twenty. This is so interesting. So one I feels like
The team was like, No product managers and then they're just like okay, you guys do
Do this thing that's like quite sort of product management, but n we're not gonna call you product managers. You're something else.
Yeah. And then eventually it's like Oh I see. There there's people that are very good at all these things that we need
help with and maybe we should just
Yes.
Admit that and that's okay, we need PMs.
I think so. Uh and it's it's
One, it's good to just have that like um
recognition of okay, here's what
these folks are really good at. And when you hire a really good PM
They can make that um
the vol the product velocity, the quality just
Tenex better.
Yeah, that's what I always say. A lot of people are like oh PMs suck, I don't they make everything worse on our teams and I'm like, You just haven't worked with a great PM. Yes. Because great PMs make your life easier, you exactly have more joy, you can do the thing you want to do more. Yes.
Yes, a hundred percent.
Okay.
Let's talk through the journey of building the product team at Mercury. So it went from zero, we don't need PMs
The two hundred engineers
Potentially you could argue it's a hundred'cause they had sort of PMs that were sort of doing the PM job.
to the PM team now. So a lot of founders are
Trying to figure out.
What does the beginning of my product team look like? Who do I hire? What does that look like? And how does it scale over time?
And you were
In that
Journey.
Can you just talk through the journey of
Mercury building out their product team and any lessons along the way for folks that are trying to do this today.
I think the the first step for us was just defining what the discipline is and like
what the expectations of a product manager are internally.
When I started a lot of the questions that came from the PM groups are like, Am I doing this right?
What should I be doing?
How should I be doing it?
And so step one was almost just putting that on paper and making sure we were all
aligned from like leadership down to an individual PM on what
those expectations of the role were.
So
One of the first things that um we put together was a career ladder.
It was just literally a matrix of
the role at different levels and expectations.
Um
And we kind of put in what
What was really important to us. So we have a career ladder for Mercury overall, just for everybody at Mercury that hits some of our core values.
And that
was kinda set the foundation of it.
Like humility, low ego, those types of things are really important to us. But then what was it that
added on um in order to be a PM at Mercury and what were those expectations. So we kind of
took a step back and we said, All right, what we want is for Mercury PMs to strive towards like
Building a product, building products that
Our customers just genuinely love.
And that was really important to us. So that was one vector of the the career matrix.
And then the other was like
It needs to have the work that you do needs to have a positive it positive impact on the business. In whatever way
that is, it doesn't have to be a revenue goal or anything like that, but it needs to be some sort s outcome based
Um
Impact.
And then there's also work around like
Can you
build a long term vision. Can you communicate that? Can you
Again, we're in a regulated space. Can you work with cross functional
uh leaders.
And so we started building out these
necessarily like skills across the different roles.
Putting that on paper.
And that led to
Okay, we know what
our current PMs need to be able to do.
As we bring in new PMs, we need to update our hiring process and interview process to fit these same sort of criteria that we're looking for. So like
What skills do we wanna
figure out w where's the signal in the interview process to say that these are the skills that we really value at Mercury and this person has them.
So we test for things like
Product sense, customer and quality obsession is really uh important to us.
analytical skills, uh strategic or like system wide thinking skills are really important to us. We we pretty much
took what we had in that career ladder and applied it to the interview process.
Um
One thing that I would love to have in the future is
Are you written?
uh element of our interview process. We ha we don't have that yet, but I really do think
quality in writing demonstrates this ability to go in in depth with something and to really put your thoughts on paper. And so
There's something in there that I really want to try to do uh in the next few months or course and just experiment with, but we'll see how that goes. Yeah.
But aside from that, I think we're we're getting to a really good place with some of our
Uh
hiring an interview process to get the right folks in the door.
That's actually really interesting. I've never heard of a PM interview process with a essay component and it makes so much sense'cause so much rating. It's something about like being able to edit, being able to put thoughtful content in there and have like a two pager that
Gets everyone.
aligned on what you're trying to communicate. It's a really important skill, especially at the senior levels, especially at a scaling growing company.
Yeah.
So what I love about what you talked about is something that basically every company has to reinvent from scratch. What is a product manager? What are the responsibilities? What is the career path?
What does success look like? What does interviewing look like?
What helped you develop this? I imagine you borrowed a bunch from block and places you worked.
Is there anything else for folks that are trying to do this themselves versus just copying exactly what you did?
The help you develop these things.
I think it was a mix of yes, taking
work that others had already done. One of my old professors used to say, Well stolen is half done.
And I think that's very true. And so Well stolen as half time. That's right.
Well it has to be well stolen. And then you're only halfway done once you get to that point. But it it does help. Um
And I think like taking some of those cues from block, but then also just talking to product senior product leads across companies and saying what what do you guys test for? How do you do this? What
What are some key learnings that you've had?
was really helpful. And then we kind of went and
You know, worked with our exec team.
What were the values that you really think are important? There's some skill sets that are just like
table stakes for PM to have. But then there's superpowers that
you wanna flex into at different companies or different roles. And so really just kind of
Baking that in the
You wanna
Wanna stay a little weird, you wanna stay your personality as part of this process.
A a good example is we still go through we have this Mercury presentation in our interviews.
And it's
The prompt is very, very generic. It's like just talk about something that you're interested in, um, and talk in depth to a to a panel about it.
And what we're really testing for there is
Attention to detail, the craft and care, the
Uh
desire to go deep into a specific area.
And
And show your passion.
For that area.
Uh one of the
PMs we talked about his presentation um internally a lot was he went through
Uh I think it was like an Airbus or a Boeing plane.
And all the deep and truly just from like
Soup to nuts. What was the um reason for this like
For this type of
plane structure all the way to like what kind of bolts do they use for this plane and why are those important. And just going into Yeah. I like how that how that turned out to be very
President and uh important. I know. We had a lot of questions after. Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, but yeah, it was it's just something that kinda shows off your personality, shows that you care about some like a
topic in depth and uh you're able to go into the details of something like that.
So to kind of reflect what you shared of here's what
To build the product org.
to start hiring PMs you need to have in place a career ladder.
with basically the skills that you're
looking for
from the PMs so that it's clear what you're looking for. There's values of the PM org.
I imagine there's like a job description is just described the responsibilities of the role.
And then the interview process.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Something I I should have highlighted that you spoke about earlier that I think is a really important
Lesson of
w a sign that it's time to hire PMs is essentially what you highlighted as bottlenecks.
Your team is starting to get bottlenecked more and more.
Just coming back to that real quick, do you do you have a sense of just like w like it sounds like there was already bottlenecks, things are not going amazing all the time and
Okay, what like where does it flip to like, okay, shit, we really need PMs. Now do you have any insight there of just like here's like okay, now's the time.
versus like wait a little longer.
The one piece of advice I always have is like
Don't hire PMs too early. It's not worth it. There's not a need for it and
I think
when founders are asking themselves that way too early, it feels like they're giving over the reins to somebody else to handle
Everything from like
customer conversations, the product development.
Um the
the personality of what this company needs to be. And so you want to be as close to it as possible. But I think you do start bringing PMs in when
One work just isn't getting done without you. Like you are that bottleneck as a founder.
Or when people other than you are doing kind of the core PM work at scale. So design and eng are starting to do more of that and not doing some of the core stuff that they need to be doing.
Um
And similarly, I guess
uh when you're when you can't scale yourself uh in like the decision making or wearing multiple hats or you know doing the cross functional collaboration with folks.
Getting things from start to finish.
That's another sign that you probably need to just hire some PMs or project managers in in that space.
And then truly when it's like
Okay, you need a product person here is when you start moving into adjacent surface areas or different product areas with different
kind of
target segments of customers because now you have to learn what that customer is, uh what they need.
And what you should be building for them.
I love that you mentioned that. We're gonna spend a bunch of time on that. I know that's what you spent a lot of time on Mercury and
I actually have a post on what is a sign you need to product managers now.
And you touched on all the points that I made in this post, which is
Bottlenecks.
Uh or you wanna go deep on a specific subject.
And
Hire someone to take it.
Snapchat actually is a good example of that, where they brought in their first PM when they wanted to go deep on ads.
And they brought in someone just like her. That's your thing.
Yes.
Okay, cool. We'll link to that in the show notes. Also, uh something I'll link in the show notes that will be very helpful to people. I have the career ladders of
Something like twenty to thirty companies.
the attributes they look for and links to their actual
Uh.
Ladders. And so for folks that are developing this, we'll give you a Yes. I think I even I saw that. I probably referenced it at some point and just went into my subconscious. So as a final question along this topic of building out PMs, hiring PMs for the first time.
For someone that's still like, I don't know, I don't really want product managers out of my company and they're just so annoying.
w what is it that you think people most miss about the value that a PM brings to your org?
That may be a sign. Okay, I see. Maybe we do need this.
Alright, so I think there's like different kinds of PMs and different flavors of PMs. One thing that I
I really I feel like um sometimes gets
Lost in
When we talk about
Oh, I've met one PM and they
Kind of didn't
Do what I wanted them to do or they didn't
work in the way that I wanted them to work. So therefore all PMs suck. There's a problem with that because there's just so many different
flavors of what a product manager is, and it depends on the company, depends on the industry, it depends on the role within a company.
Uh and so
A framework that I really like using to determine
Okay, what kind of PM do you need? And then
Higher for that.
is something that I learned at Square. We use this idea of like
A pioneer, a town settler, and a city planner.
And the idea is like, okay, so the pioneer is a PM that's really good at zero to one.
They can
Create something from
Nothing, you know, you're pioneering into this uncharted territory. There's nothing there for you. There's not any sort of infrastructure. You're building it from scratch. You're kind of taking natural resources and seeing how you can reapply them into building what you need in order to survive and then hopefully grow.
the town settler PM is in that growth stage of of maturity of a product.
They're really working on like
Again, to use the same metaphor, I guess.
You're you're in a town, there might be
A bank, there might be a post office, there might be a school, and there might be some like
Gravel roads.
But nothing more than that. And so you have some level of infrastructure, but what you're trying to do
It's
further grow the the town that you're building out.
and put in some foundational elements, but also try to do some experiments. Maybe things don't work out exactly the way you want, but then you also want to build for the future.
And then a city planner is a PM that's really good at mature products, really good at driving efficiencies at scale. They have the city.
They everything that they do touches
hundreds, thousands, millions of customers immediately.
And so the type of PM that you need for something like that is gonna be very different than a zero to one PM.
And so when you when people, uh especially founders say, I don't want to PM, I think it's because they're thinking of a mature a city planner.
When they could find an
Uh former
an entrepreneur, a former founder, a good pioneer to build out the next set of products, or they really need somebody who's great at growth and like starting to put some of the process in.
But not build it to the point of the
you know, I'm a big mature enterprise company anymore.
I love this metaphor.
And is the advice that as the smaller you are the
earlier on the spectrum you want to be hiring, like more pioneers and a few town settlers as you build your team?
Probably. I think like it just really depends on what you're hiring for. There's
Like even for Mercury, we had our banking.
core banking services.
We're still a mature product in our uh spectrum, right? Like there everything that we do there.
We have to truly not even measure twice, measure three times, cut once, be really sure about what we're doing. And that scale and the ability to have a PM that can think about all of that scale is really important. And so you really want to test out
Have they done it before?
Do they know what they're talking about? And then like in which
case would were you willing to take like riskier bets versus being really conservative about what you're doing and then determine what kind of PM you need for it.
Because
Otherwise, you see res uh you see the resumes, you see what they're what they say they've done, but when you've talked to somebody, when you're interviewing someone, really try to drill into what kind of experience.
They
Are good at?
what they want in their next role, because otherwise the you know, the resume without the receipt is just a piece of paper.
And you wanna get the receipts. What are the what's the work that they've actually done?
Following this thread, I asked a bunch of people that work with you at Mercury and Block.
Uh, what's asked you and one of the questions that I love
Came from the CO of Mercury, Jason Jing.
And
His question was what do you think attract great product managers
And great talent to a company. What makes them
hungry to join your company. Well how do they hire a Rohini?
Basically.
Okay, there's a few answers to this. So let's I mean, maybe
Just starting off, let's take away some of the table stakes. Like let's assume that candidates know that
You know, the company's viable, it's doing well.
Paying market rates.
All of that like
the Canada and the product have good
There's a resonance with that. The culture has good vibe check. So taking away kind of like the the table stakes of
Hiring. Um
I think
There's a couple things from the
company side and then the candidate side.
think it from the company side it really boils down to do you understand
the candidates that are coming through the door, especially when you're hiring for seniority and experience.
You kinda have to take it like a
product manager would think about this problem and say, All right, if this is my customer, what's their
What's their next
What's their goal? What's their jobs to be done kind of an idea. And consider like where this
the PMs would be that you're hiring for on this um
Actually a a mentor of mine had this great
framework. He said that like every career follows a S curve.
If you think about the y axis being
kind of level of ambiguity, x axis being level of scale.
You start off in this S
uh kind of near the origin. And you're usually trying, especially when you're just starting off in the discipline or your career.
You have one project.
Low ambiguity.
And you're just saying, can I do this one thing? Like
Can I fix onboarding?
There's only so many different ways to kind of cut that up and do it.
And you know the goal, it's a defined goal. You're just kind of
driving towards being able to
to make it improv make these improvements or make it better, or make it
better designed, whatever you need to be doing. It's like this one project. And then you kind of
Move around along that S at the bottom.
And you're doing multiple projects with low ambiguity still, but can you handle multiple things and juggle them all at the same time?
At some point you get into this inflection point and you have this one really ambiguous problem set at some point in your career. It's like
Ten X revenue in twelve months.
There's a lot of different ways you could probably do that.
But
Uh there's a lot of uh wrong ways to probably do that. And there's a few right ways, and you've got to figure out which way is up. And there's just so much ambiguity and like um
You just don't know how to
maybe do that immediately, but that's the challenge for that part of your S curve. And then at another scale, it's like
like towards the top of that S, you're pretty much just doing all ambiguous projects or problems at scale.
That's all that hits you. So you think of like a VP of product CPO kind of level.
All it is is strategic questions that you don't know the answers to and have to figure that out across
ten or twelve different um topics.
And so I think
Going back to like how to
attract these types of talent, know where on the S curve they are and what's their next step in that S curve. Because then you can say, all right, the if
I can then give you a fun challenge for what you need next in your career.
I think senior folks want to know.
Is a problem area big enough?
Is it meat enough that where I wake up every day and I get to be working on the scope and uh working to serve these types of customers?
Will it challenge me? Will it make me a better PM? Those are the kind of the considerations that they're making.
And then the second consideration is like who do I get to work with?
So
Uh we actually kinda talked about this in a recent post that we wrote for your newsletter of like the functional
Um types of
organizational structures. And I think
When you have a functional structure within your org, it's really nice'cause then you can say
Oh, I get to work with these types of PMs'cause there's a product lead, there's a product um group.
And
You want to
I play tennis.
You wanna play tennis, you wanna challenge yourself with people that are a little bit better than you and you know, bounce that ball back and forth and it's fun. And the same thing goes for like the functional leads within design and edge, because those are gonna be your peer groups. You wanna make sure that you're working with folks that
Yeah.
uh are excited and uh are fulfilled by doing this kind of work. And so
For me, it honestly comes down to those pieces, understanding that the candidate where they are, and then communicating things uh to them in a way that like
breeds transparency, honesty.
Trust.
Uh overall.
I I tell them when I have conversations with candidates, the good, the bad, the ugly.
Um I wanna be as upfront as possible and like where the challenges are for us right now. And
where the opportunities are.
What I see as like
No, you you don't want to overpromise, but you do want to sell some uh the dream of why you're excited. So that was awesome. There's so much here. So I'm gonna reflect back a few of the things you said. So when you're trying to hire the best
people a few things here that are really helpful is one
This S curve, I drew it as you were talking.
of ambiguity versus scale and it
Almost sounds like there's kinda like
To
Things.
people would want potentially. One is more ambiguity.
Just something really meety and complicated.
Which is like they're accelerating uh up that.
Ask her.
The other is more scope. They're already really good at
They've done a bunch of really complex ambiguous stuff and they just want something bigger and and more impactful.
Yeah, that's a great way to like probably a third dimension on all of that.
And I love that it's not just like a up and to the right, like linear line. It's an S curve where it's like, Okay, now you're on something really complicated and you're just going rocking it off this ambiguity.
Yeah. Y axis.
Exactly. And it's and you can kind of trace back like
our own careers into this idea, or like even engineers and designers, it doesn't have to be a product S curve, but it's it is really interesting to kind of see it from like,
Oh yeah, this is how you get good at the functional skills. This is how you get good at the strategic skills.
What was that project for you, the one that shot you up the S curve on ambiguity?
Uh I think it was probably
Uh at Square.
Uh, I worked one of the first products that I worked on there was uh invoicing.
And
It was one of those projects that was like
It was a Hack Week project that just did really well.
And we got a team on it. There was I think at the time that we I started, it was three engineers, a designer, and myself.
And it was like okay, just go make this work.
And uh a lot of the first sets of work was like
Oh, we just need to make this less hacky.
just make this a real product that uh you know you're not embarrassed to to be serving up to customers that are using square invoices.
And then uh very soon you started kinda seeing the next
levels of work that needed to happen.
And um
For me, that was the first time that I got to really just
Drive this, um
the strategic plan. So like
Screen voices for
Step one was like
Just get it to a place that
Well.
Functional.
It was it was the first rev of this product was almost
People wouldn't use it.
But they would have to spend so much time in order to figure out how to use it. That's honestly where when I knew we had probably market fit, but we just needed to make it better.
And then the next insight was, Oh, the people that are using our Square Mobile app.
No idea that Square Invoices existed, because it only existed on desk, desktop, on dashboard web.
Okay.
Get into mobile. That was the neck like truly an another
st uh step of growth that we just saw.
Uh, and then like it was a huge step function there. And then the next one was
We wanted to
Uh
Draw out people so instead of going after existing square customers.
Uh we want it to be a front door product and that
Drove another step.
Change of
of growth for us because it was like, Oh, when you're looking for invoices, you don't think of Square immediately. You're just looking for invoicing solutions. And so the app store and those types of places were much more interesting for us to
uh go after and do SEO and S E M on.
And
find net new customers. So there were some like really interesting challenges of saying, okay, how do I increase, how do I increase the top of funnel? How do I then also decrease
risk loss at the the loss level, um, and just being able to kind of
play around with all those different levers was
My
Huge ambiguity experience.
Yeah, speaking of levers, that's I was gonna highlight just I love for the way you describe this as a
Such a good example of a great
product manager skill of just breaking the problem down into these step by step steps
uh versus like oh shit, we have to scale this massive business of invoicing. It's just like make it less hacky.
Make it easy to discover.
Bring it bring in new customers.
Uh and so I think that's a really good
Skill to learn as you're
Ramping up this curve of ambiguity. Absolutely.
Yeah.
Awesome. Okay. And then coming back to like the other tip you shared of how to hire amazing people, just to close that thread. It's Yeah.
uh make it clear how awesome the other people at the
company are that you're gonna work with because
Like you said, you're gonna learn the most from playing tennis with
Awesome people. And awesome people want to work with awesome people.
Exactly. And I think the other thing to like
Add on to that is
The candidates are
um testing you as much as you're testing them. And so you're that's why we had to do the interview revamp, because
I would
judge a company based on the interview questions that they would ask me. As a senior lean
I wanna know that they understand what they're even asking me for and they understand how to kind of
change those prompts around for the right type of candidate.
And so a lot of what we did was
revamp things based on just my experience of
The Mercury interview part. I love that.
That's dog fooding it.
Exactly.
Okay. So I wanna talk about quality and I wanna talk about multiproduct, going multiproduct.
Let's start with quality.
So
Uh classically a lot of PMs are just not
uh the person that advocates for high quality
User experience, investing in things that aren't moving metrics.
And I know you're kind of on the opposite of that. You actually have a really interesting approach to
advocating for quality and helping people understand
why it's worth investing in. And in particular, you've worked on
uh in quotes boring boring products, banking, finance stuff, but have made help make them awesome and
Great experiences.
What
Can you share with folks about how to
advocate for investing quality when it's not something you can really measure.
This is something I've I've learned a lot from the Mercury folks uh over the last year. Even the r like OGs back at Square in the early days.
There was a lot with um
You know, on the surface, I think Ahmad even says this, on the surface, it's completely irrational to invest in quality.
Right, like especially for a KPI driven company or KPI driven company or organization.
There's often this like false dichotomy that creeps up that's like you either have to be this quant heavy of
You know, uh
experimentation, like move fast type of company. Or you can be this
design heavy, focus on artistry, but doesn't really drive any customer value. And I feel like those two ends of the spectrum are just
Uh completely
Insane, you need to be somewhere in between.
But and I think like
what I've learned from the the companies that I've most recently been at is
The details done right really matter.

Especially when you're in like a boring industry like FinTech. Meaning like it's just unsexy. There's not a lot of um, you know, it's not like this consumer exciting app.
But you need the
Details to be
Uh
precise, to be intentional, in order to breed that trust and confidence that the customer base needs in order to save its money with you, in order to move its money with you. One of the examples we had recently was we we launched a product called Bill Pay.
And in that you can cut you can upload an invoice. You can just drag and drop your invoice from a vendor.
And we will o O CR it, we'll like read all the details and we'll
pre-populate some fields for you. And as you kind of go through those fields and check that we got everything right.
the right hand screen kind of zooms into the right part of the of the invoice.
And
That little
That little um detail, that little additional like
Hey, we just helped you with this and highlighted where you need it to be. Well
won't move a completion rate, won't move a singular metric really.
But it is the thing that everyone who uses this product, every customer that comes to me like that was
Fantastic. I loved using
A product to pay my bills.
Which is not something you hear every day. And I think one of the Mercury values that I've really uh tried to internalize is like
Haven't
have that intention behind every detail in order to make the product
in order to take that product to that next level of care and and craft.
And when you consider like the compounding effect of all those little intentional incremental improvements.
It
altogether it it starts becoming a mo it becomes this competitive advantage for you. And so
I think there's like
There is an argument a strong argument to really think about quality.
Craftsmanship.
How you're building something that can be evergreen and um
Beautiful.
Confident uh
conference inducing and and trustworthy.
And then
On the other side of it.
Thank you
I just think it's
building great products should be fun and fulfilling for all of us. And so you want to spend
Your life on something that you
that people love and enjoy using. I think that's something that Jason's really taught me. And so like
By doing this, by investing in quality, by thinking about quality, you're also having the second order effect of attracting great talent who want
to be there and be proud of what they're building.
And then it
It also has this effect of like endearing customers to you because they know that you're focusing on what matters and how to make their lives a little bit easier and better and simple. And so it's this circular effect that I do think has
compounding interest rates on it.
There's a couple of things here that I think about as you talk about this.
One is if there's like a PM at some, you know, bank that's like, Oh, great, we're gonna do this. I love it, we're gonna invest in quality, we're gonna make beautiful product.
It's hard to do in reality if the founder is not on board and if it's not kind of core to
The
Principles and values of the company.
And so I think
You almost need that kind of top down.
And the other thought is I feel like
There's kind of like
strategically
We will differentiate
By
blank and one of the blank can be quality. Like linear is a great example, Mercury's a good example.
A lot of competitors in the space.
We believe we can
Mm.
When
by quality and experience.
I don't think that exists in every market, but thoughts on just like that is like if you decide this is our differentiator, then that's a huge opportunity to invest in quality in UX. Yeah, I completely agree with both point. Like one, it has to come it's a cultural value. It has to come from the top. It has to come from the beginning.
And I think the second piece of it is like there's a there was like this trend of
I don't know.
Big
products that became, I think like I don't maybe a decade ago, a lot a big push was
Simplify it. Make it feel like a B to C product. Make it simple. Make it easy to use. And there was this push of just like
I don't know, rounding corners and making the fonts better or something like that. Ma you know, using some white space.
Just like very
simplistic ideas of it.
But now we I think
The the next one
generation of all of these products is not just make it simple.
Make it still powerful.
And make it easy to use. So now you have both concepts coming together. And so quality is truly just this idea of how do you
Build these products that fit within
Uh.
you know, small mobile screen and still have the full power and capacity of like an enterprise level
product line. Um but still easy to use on the go and being able to do
A bunch of banking that wasn't
even close to this level of like ease and customizations in
Two decades ago.
It's something that we really think is
kind of the basis of why quality is
mm embedded into everything that we talk about and do.
It's it's an obsession within the company, quite honestly. Interesting.
Uh so yeah, I think I feel like there's a
big rise and we will just make beautiful, incredible craft high craft products.
Probably because there's so much competition and so much
Uh
So many.
options that that's like one of the few remaining ways to differentiate and stand out, especially in a boarding industry is
Uh like another example of this company that I'm an investor in is called Zip.
with just procurement and there's all these boring ass companies that were just
Or like
billions of dollars and just so ugly.
Yes. And it's like cool, here's how we can compete. We'll build a new experience. Nobody wants to be at the other, like the audience end of this or the user end of this. And so you don't want something that like, oh, it's for procurement. So therefore they don't care.
No, everyone wants to have a nice experience in dealing with the work that they have to do day in and day out. And so I really do love
Unsexy products.
Um that
can just be done right and you know.
And that's a cool opportunity for PMs to just like find a company that
Is struggling.
in a market that's big and just maybe this is how we went, just make it incredible.
versus more features.
And I feel like
I I should write a post about this. What are the ways to differentiate their
Experience there's probably price.
There's maybe features just like we have the most features, like Jira.
There's probably a few others.
Probably the customer segments and uh who you're going after. Yeah, I I love the
Um yeah, I love this thread.
I think we could talk about that for another hour.
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Okay, so let's talk about the final big topic that I know you're passionate about and this is what you work on at Mercury, which is super cool.
Which is going multiproduct.
Going from one.
product that is doing well to layering on additional product.
This is kind of the holy grail for a lot of founders, a lot of teams.
Expanding TAM, finding more ways to generate revenue, expanding into your customers, building new products.
You've done this at Mercury Block is really successful at this.
So uh I wanna learn everything I can from
you about how to do this well. A lot of companies try this and fail and waste a lot of time.
So
Let's just talk through this. What are maybe just like lessons from your experience building?
Products.
uh multiproducts, additional products at a company like Mercury. Maybe just share some of the new products that Mercury has just'cause
to give folks a sense'cause I think Berk people think of Mercury as a bank.
Everyone still does. And so we're in the early days. So yeah, I'm I'll take this opportunity to make sure that we talk about which products first and then I can go through kind of our lessons learned.
But
We shipped a lot this year. There there was just a ton of activity this year, which was really exciting.
Twenty twenty four marked the first foray into consumer for us.
We launched Mercury personal banking in April.
Which has been a wild success and
We have a lot more coming up with personal banking as well.
And then we launched a suite of software that sits on top of our business banking.
Uh like a core offering.
And that
Uh sweet.
allows our customers to do things like, you know, the
Accounts payable work that they need to do as they grow, um, accounts receivable, accounting workflows, those types of things.
And so in the last
Um
Let's say like
six, seven months. We launched what I talked about before was Bill Pay in in May.
We launched invoicing, uh, something near and dear to my heart, in August. Uh we had updated like spend controls and spend management tools and employee reimbursements that launched in October.
And
Each of these one of the
One of my favorite um
learning from all this or the favorite stats is each subsequent launch
That we just described.
less time than the previous from concept to launch.
So we're getting really good at like understanding what that product velocity is, how we build products and then how we
launch and find the right product market fit within these systems.
So
A lot of exciting stuff. We're still in the early days of kind of uh
building out the SaaS model, building out personal banking, but
Lots more to come, so
Excited for kinda where Mercury's set up for in the next few quarters.
Going into some of the the maybe the biggest lessons learned about going lick
From one product to multi product.
Probably s probably like two general categories.
One, or the organizational structure is really important and probably as important as
Just the product decisions.
And the organizational like culture.
Is also important. So
One thing we learned was like having
um new product areas, new seedlings being
too close within the a true org structure to the core
banking or payments for mature products.
made it hard for that new product to even grow because they were always being
pulled in, sucked in, the gravitational force of like an a m more mature product always had
prioritization work, maintenance work, things that were m more impactful to be done. And so their roadmaps would always get trumped by any of that. So it it didn't afford any space uh for seedlings to
to grow.
And um
Yeah, like this idea of like when you have this small little
a fire, you want to give it air in order for it to truly blossom to a flame.
And so
Uh the organizational structure really gives these teams that space. We actually created completely different orgs. This is why my team exists as an expansion org, because it is completely separate from some of the more mature product teams. And when you say separate, like dedicated resources on this project for some number of months, like what's the time frame you give and you
Seedlings.
Thinking of these company like these as small seed stage companies. And every quarter, every uh half year, we look at them as like, do we want to keep investing?
And so
there's no end time for them to ever move back into the mature products until they become
I don't know, series C company, uh, in and of themselves. So we're not we're not really like looking at an end time. We're just saying you have this dedicated team. We will continue.
investing in and providing headcount and whatever you need as as this
product this business line shows um
the path toward success.
And I think that that point is really important. So it's basically every quarter slash two quarters you check in.
How's this going?
Do you agree to here's a milestone that we're looking for in the next quarter, six months? Any do you make it super concrete? Is it pretty
qualitative, how do you think about it. We have goals and we also allow these teams, they're so early that like the learnings are really important. It's just like an angel investment.
There's gonna be pivots. We realise that. We're we're not saying that it's gonna
you know, we're gonna kill it if it doesn't hit X, but we do have uh goals in mind. We have financial projections in mind. And we say if you don't hit that, what's what's the key learning that we've made that we think we can still hit something.
in that g general direction in the next six months.
And what does a seed team look like generally? What's the what are the resources you put into it?
We have I mean it's it's the full cross functional squads of um
And
Design.
Product.
uh data science.
Everyone that you probably need and then we kind of have cross functional uh overlaps with
kind of our core teams across the company. So like
uh sometimes we would we will have like dedicated
uh if we need a dedicated CS or dedicated risk or dedicated ops folks on these teams, but usually it's just
You know.
Leverage the
the central teams that already exist for some of those functions.
And how many engineers do you usually try to put on a seed?
investment. It kinda depends. Um like our personal banking product has a lot more engineers, probably you know a
three X than maybe our invoicing product line. Even at the beginning.
Y uh well, so I think uh seeding that, it just required like we were going after a completely different
market. We're going after a different base and having another banking solution.
While we still had one, we we took a lot of the learnings and efforts that the business banking side did, but we had to rebuild a bunch of that. And so the initial investment just was a different.
uh request. Whereas like an invoicing
We're building the software on top of the banking.
It's just it
requires a different level in order to get to
minimal lovable product. And so
You know, we're we're giving the teams just enough, uh, but we want them to stretch.
And it
I feel like there's also a c connection to how big this opportunity is.
Invoicing versus like becoming the
new personal bank of the world, you know. So it makes sense. Why let's just let's put a few more resources on this one. Right. Absolutely. I I would say I think the PMs on those teams both want world domination. So yeah. Let's not hate on invoicing. Yeah. Okay. I understand.

And so what okay, so specifically they hired you to create this
carve out almost for new product investments. I think that's a really cool lesson, just like
Hire a leader that is
overseeing all of these new seed bets versus just a team off to the side. Yes. I think there's um

culture that needed to be instilled into this organization too, because
We're gonna be a zero to one team and we're gonna have to work in a little bit of a different way. Uh our counterparts on like the core mature products uh will use
monthly development cycles, they'll they'll figure out their roadmap for the month and then just start executing on it.
I
Could not
Find a way in which like I wouldn't know what
was changing in a month. And so we had to move towards like two week sprints and then weekly check-ins with a bunch of our our work just to stay as nimble as possible. We wanted to like be able to learn, iterate, repeat.
And we also have a like a
really heavy handed culture of customer calls, customer research that the PMs
needed to do. Like there's uh just much more kind of like
Touch point, pulse check with
We're going after adjacent areas and so
make sure that, you know, as a team, you know
What your customer needs and why it's important.
Can you share more about this customer call culture?
For folks that maybe wanna
Learn from how you do it.
It's kind of like
I don't know.
Just the heartbeat of how we operate. So it almost feels so natural that I I'm not sure if I can impart any new learnings on it, but it's like
I kind of expect
a customer conversation at least one a week from the team.
That seems like such a low bar to me that I think the teams do close to like
Sometimes when they're really into discover mode are doing twenty, twenty five calls with people. It's wild. Or like even just going through
surveys and understanding what like
qualitative inf uh info that they're getting from the surveys, quantitative info that they're getting from it. I think all of that really counts. We we're
customer obsessed at Mercury. And so you'll even see like Ahmad will talk to folks on Twitter or on X um directly. We'll get pings um from different folks across the company. We'll look at why people
Um
off boarded with us and we get those messages in a Slack channel and it just kinda hits every like
Whenever it happens in real time. And so all of those pieces are customer touch points in my mind. And so it's like
Get on a call with CS, get on a call with RMs.
Drive those calls yourself, but just learn as much as you can from what our customers need and what they're doing.
I'm gonna follow this thread a little bit more because
Uh one, a lot of companies say we're customer obsessed, our teams are customer obsessed. We love custom talk to customers all the time.
But they still build bad stuff.
What do you think they often miss that maybe you're doing that companies you've seen actually that I really are
obsessed and do this well.
That often
is missed when people think they're doing this.
I think there's a little bit of like
What a customer says versus what they want.
gonna be two different things. Ness like
If you I think
There's just so many inputs to all of this, but like if you take just a conversation
People are really nice, especially when they're talking on the phone. They'll be really nice. They'll say nice things about your product.
They'll tell you that they messed up and and the UX is great, you build it the right way and they were doing something wrong. And they try to take some of that pressure off of you and
What you don't want is
to go into a conversation with a bias. You wanna be a researcher, you wanna be like this.
third party non judgmental kind of like
You're br be being brought into the jungle and just watching what's happening. You're an observer. You're being a like a documentarian. It's it's not about
Getting
your biases checked or validated or in unvalidated invalidated, but it's like
Just understand what it is that the customer's trying to do, what context they were trying to do it in.
And get to a truth that seems to like find a pattern or you hear about multiple times. And then
Then validate that truth and see if that still sticks. Like have a prototype.
Do the beta, see if the numbers actually work out in your favor.
I think the other thing is like
The customer obsession needs to also be
anchored back into
Does it?
Work for your business.
Just because a customer wants it, I mean they probably want free products. That doesn't work for what we're gonna be able to serve them with, um and still be a viable business and still survive. And so
Uh
I think
I actually used a lot of when we were doing pricing, I used a lot of uh insights from your podcast with Madvan.
That was a great I mean
If I can
um promo a different podcast episode on on this one. That was great. I think I listened to it twice just to hear it a few times.
And I think there was
An example of like
A water
Um
At a fountain is free.
Oh water at a hotel is like
Five bucks a water on the plane is
uh like it uh the context and the price of what you're offering somebody
changes the value perception of
what they're getting delivered. And so
I think that like customer obsession needs to be just anchored back into
the business and the business needs and like what you can actually offer.
And so it all needs to be triangulated and balanced out. And so it's not just customer obsession for the
a sense of customer obsession, but where does it where does that artistry meet the business?
Awesome. That was a great example. Link to the Modavana episode.
Folks that want to check it out. And then one very tactical question. How do your teams find customers to talk to and organize that? Is there anything operationally that
folks can learn about how you do that. We do have a UXR team, which is great. We have a research team, um and so they can they help us
like make sure that we can schedule it. Honestly, the scheduling Tetris that has to happen is probably the hardest part in a PM schedule. Um and'cause you're going into from meetings to meetings. So it's like
Uh, sometimes we'll just have dedicated research weeks where we just
We know there's a question that we need answered and we need to go through that discovery. And so we'll clear off our calendars and just book customer calls.
When it's like
regular kind of sessions that are happening every week.
Then it's li then we try to leverage um kind of like a central team to help us manage those calendar and meeting invites and getting people booked. Um, we'll also just kind of
Get in the
sidecar of an RM call or a sales call or c uh CS call whenever we can. Anybody who's doing any sort of research or like voice of the customer calls, anything like that.
We're in and we want to hear about it. And then we're also looking and just
kind of responding on
X or on email.
Or
We wanna hear from people, so
Find us any which way you can. Okay, cool. And then uh what does R M stand for, by the way? Oh, sorry, sorry, uh relationship managers or salesman. Okay.
Cool. So like account managers. Yes. Awesome. Okay.
I'm gonna come back to where we were. I've pushed us off track. I'm gonna bring us back on track.
So we're talking about
Things you've learned about building multiple
Products additional products that a company.
Uh the first kind of theme was
The org.
And creating
barriers almost to pulling resources away from these
Seedling teams into your pool.
I think the the other decisions that we had to make that might be helpful to folks was like
What are the next products?
And so
We really looked at like
Okay, we need to we need to find solutions that tie closer to the existing spaces we're in. It need to be like an adjacency that's just just beyond the core. So you're not like
It's not about just building a new feature. You are building a new product line. So what is that that adjacent customer segment that would be
interested in in a deeper
More fuller like
product experience.
A good example is is invoicing.
We de-risked that when we were thinking about okay, what's the next set of products that we could look at. We we looked at a bunch of different um areas and
We're really like
thoughtful around who is our
our target segment or I C P
And then who do we want to serve?
And we saw some like
Some work that was interesting because we had this this concept of this product called uh payment requests, where you could send somebody a URL. They could go to that URL and send the money that they owe you directly to your bank account.
And I had traction. And so that w that was something that we like
used as a kind of competitive advantage because they're like, oh, we can talk to people that were already doing something that was like
invoicing which is a request for payment over the web.
And so um we talked to a bunch of those customers. We also knew that we had a distribution advantage because if we already had people that were using this,
We could probably get more folks that were that were on Mercury already. We didn't have to go find them outside. We didn't have to do a full go to market effort. We could just kind of test out if they had a fuller invoicing solution, would they want to use that?
And so we
We used uh that adjacency to our advantage and our distribution to our advantage and said, Okay, let's let's build out these next products that are kind of in that same
ecosystem or universe uh and see what works and see what sticks.
Well so
Kind of.
Use that.
current UX to drive that it attached to these new products. So
on the opposite side of them, like the
uh accounts payable side.
When you're sending a payment.
We highlight bill pay if you need more complex vendor payments. And so it's a really easy way to just fit into the natural flow of what a customer is doing, anyways.
And say, Hey, do you actually need something more robust?
Sh we have something for you. Try it out.
So the two kind of some attributes you look for is
can't have you de risk that like basically you're already seeing there's a need here.
From kind of a
Baby feature.
Over that product.
And then do you have a distribution advantage, essentially, can you
Find a way to get people in.
Get in front of people in your existing product. Exactly.
That's it.
And then there's probably just like Tam. Is this like a big opportunity? Is this
And then just thinking about what are the biggest opportunities we have. Right. Yeah. We did all of that kind of like pre work as just, you know.
Is it even viable? And then do we have an advantage around that? And I think the the place that we hit are like, Yeah, we already have an advantage. This would be there's a
a little bit less friction in order to get to the escape velocity that we need.
And then
Like right now, I think once you start launch once you've launched
That's one step. That's one like big hurdle.
Then there's um the next hurdle, which is really trying to find that product market fit.
And that's where we're at now. And I think that's a really important lesson of
Don't go from launch to try to like revenue optimize or find that efficiency immediately. I think you what we
What we really want is to give away that the second product, the third product.
For free.
encourage as much usage and engagement and retention to show that there's something there.
And allow customers to feel good about
H
they would use us in their workflows. And then once they get to a place where they're needing more complexity or needing some like areas where they could save time and drive some like just ease of use.
then yes, they'd they'd actually be willing to pay for it.
But it's not like you you put this paywall in and then automatically just
launch a product and say, Now you have to pay us. We want to encourage this idea of like
What worked for a core product?
we were always free to customers. Now we have to go to kind of a paid offering. And so we want to make sure that people feel good about it. We're not overcharging customers that are too small and don't want to pay. And we're really
Focusing on the customers that need that extra
Yeah, the the
heft that comes with these products.
It's interesting'cause if I reflect back to the Modavan pricing episode.
He's actually like, Don't ever discount charge exactly what you want to charge at the beginning,'cause that's actually a test of product market fit.
How do you think about that balance? Yeah, I think I really love this idea of like the um
What he talked about was like know what your product
value is and you have to put a price on it in order to know that. And I think we
Do you see that?
We're
Um
Our target customer for these products is someone at the other end of the complexity scale. It's not everyone that we serve right now with our banking solution. And so we had to be really tight about who that ICP was. And then yes, we do put that price in front of them and say, tell us that it is worth X dollars or Y dollars. And we did a whole like,
willingness to pay process as part of the homework.
For that.
But I think it's there's like this customer journey with these products, especially accounts payable, accounts receivable. You don't need that immediately when you start a business. You do need a bank account immediately. And so you need somewhere to save your money, you need somewhere where you can move money around. But there might be six months, twelve months, eighteen months, until you need something that's more complex to pay your vendors.
or to receive payments and things like that. And so at that point
That's when we want to have the pricing conversation with you and may and say we have this product already available. It works seamlessly. It's beautiful with your bank account. You don't have to do anything more.
Got it. So it's essentially it's just a part of the journey of finding product market fit and figuring out what to build. Exactly. Let's just see if anyone even wants this at all for free.
And then it's okay, here's a yeah, and there's like some basic functionality that we think should still be free. Like our core banking core money movements should always still be free. So when invoicing asks for a different kind of like metadata on top of that money movement.
That should still be free. But when you need anything more complex and you really are offering your services or consulting fees or uh products or goods.
And you do need an invoice solution that like works really well with your accounting, and then you you know, your CPA knows how to track all of that.
And that's a paid product.
Awesome.
Is there anything else along these lines of
building any product, layering on additional products that you think might be helpful to people. I'm also curious if there's any missteps you've had along the way.
Uh, either at Block or Mercury of building something just failed, which I imagine.
Well one one other learning that I've had from like the block and mercury world is like one thing that
Gogel always said, um
And something that he said he learned from Jack actually was
Something that I I feel like is very true with the Mercury co founders as well.
There never
uh hyper focused on the revenue. They're never focused on a number that they're trying to drive. They really want to build
They they keep telling these the teams to
Build the products that people love.
And the revenue will just be a byproduct of that. And so if you can get this one step done, the the second step is almost a
Um
It's
a like you you will get there.
And so I think that's one learning. I think one a few missteps that we have made w were
trying too many things at once. It's it's the classical example of like, oh, we have so many ideas. Let's go build all of these things. And then
There is like an element of you're gonna understaff these new efforts. There's not gonna be enough
Folks to again.
Take that seedling.
Put it into the ground.
Put enrich soil on it, uh water it, take care of it. And so trying too many things, understaffing them.
And then there's just a lot of
A lot of uh
Missed ups uh learnings around pricing, that I think we've we've talked about a bit, but we were there's a lot of internal discussions on like pricing model.
Bundling versus a la carte.
Um
how we would price it, how much work we would do on like understanding that willingness to pay, um, all of those pieces were
Exciting.
Is there a product that you launched that just did not work out, fail in spite of doing all these things, or generally things been
successful in your on your journey of adding new product. I think we're still early. And so I don't want to say that there isn't a failing yet or anything like that, but I do think everything's showing really strong positive signal. But
Yeah, fingers crossed, uh we'll see how things go. And it's always an iterative
Uh
Process.
Awesome. Okay. Last thing I wanna touch on is something that I know s you're passionate about. This kind of outside the core of our conversation, but
Uh, I'd love to spend a little time on it. You started this organization called the Transparent Collective.
Uh former
Guest Io s told me I need to ask you about this. Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah. So tell me what the Transparent Collective is, the impact you've had with it, and what folks
Uh, should know if they want to check it out. Uh gladly. That would be great. Um so Transparent Collective is a five oh one C three.
Nonprofit organization.
Um, we help underrepresented founders get access to resources, connections, uh, whatever they need to build successful tech companies.
Uh, we started this
Gosh, I think it's been about nine years now, eight or nine years ago.
And um it really was born out of
Just this like organic
Um
conversation that happened uh
Mm.
co founder and I uh met up for drinight. We both knew each other from like Michigan.
Back in the day, went to school together.
And we were talking about how um we both kinda went on this entrepreneurial journey and
Trying to raise money in the Midwest was very different than raising money in New York, which is very different than trying to raise money and and sell this dream on the West Coast.
And so
Where we kind of like had to learn a lot of the tribal knowledge that just existed uh on our own. We wanted to create this.
collective uh that transparently shared information with one another in order to where we kind of started step one.
We would have the next generation start at step two and then pay it forward.
And so
We like our programming really focuses on like preparing founders to fundraise.
being able to connect investors to high caliber founders that that we have in our Rolodex, and then also the the entrepreneurs to to the right investors for them.
And then
just ultimately contributing to an ecosystem that can like really
uh allow these types of founders to flourish. So
We host
A bunch of programming, webinars, workshops, that kind of thing, but are I are kind of like um
Spotlight event is we fly founders in from all over the US, uh, once, maybe twice a year to participate in our seed programming.
And so we have like
Two hundred, two hundred and fifty applications that come through. Uh, we bring about eight to ten founders in.
to join us for a week in S F where we pay for everything and we have uh
Sessions for mentoring.
small group workshops. Um, we even do hands on training. Like we'll ask our investor friends to come in and do mock investor meetings and kind of
Get the
Get the butterflies out from for these founders that are coming in from all over. They're not
coastal founders. Um, there are folks that come in from Detroit.
or Baltimore or Atlanta, and they have amazing companies.
And so uh we kind of just
connect the dots and help them uh along the way.
So far, I think we've had
Ninety plus alums across our eleven batches.
And
I think
sixty five percent or seventy percent of them have raised venture funding now because of our programming.
I think we'd have a total of like a hundred and twenty five million in seed, uh
Or early stage fundraising from uh across all of them.
And
I think
We've now done it for so long that about ten percent are already acquired and exited companies too in our in our alumni group.
So cool.
Such a
Such an a thing that obviously should exist.
And I love how well it's going.
For folks that either w and it's a ch it's a five oh one three C, you said? Yes.
So for people that either wanna
donate and support this work or people that want to
apply
How do they do that? What's the best way to learn more? Transparentcollective dot com.
Uh we have both a donate button there and an application button. So yes, we would love to I think we're starting to figure out the next batch and so
great applicants, please come and and drop your uh information. And then we do operate on donations. And so we would love to
Find folks that would be interested in helping us.
uh achieve our mission.
I love that. It feels like in a perfect world there would be no need for this, but we are not in that world.
And I love that this exists to help folks.
Um
Rahini, we've covered so much stuff.
You're awesome.
With that we reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Ready.
All right, here we go. First
question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
I got this book recently called Vectors.
Uh aphorisms and uh aphorisms and uh ten second essays. It is
So much fun to just kinda like
pick out a couple of these like ten second essays at night and just read a couple of these and go to bed. I'm
I'm gonna recommend it to other folks. A friend gave it to me and I'm gonna pay it forward.
Um and then the other I guess the other one that I really just enjoy is
Uh this book called The Inner Game of Tennis.
I've already mentioned that I'm a tennis fan, but like
It talks about the state of flow.
that you need when you're playing in like this idea of relaxed concentration.
I just love that idea of
How do you get into that state of flow in your day to day?
Um
Other books that I think
that I've read recently are have all been fictions, so
Uh
Pachinko cutting for stone.
Song of Achilles.
all great ones that I've read recently when I've had some beach time, so highly recommend.
People love fiction recommendations on this podcast, so I'm glad you threw those out.
Leader Game of Tennis. I know uh I read I think half of it.
And then I some for some reason stopped, but
Uh it's important to note it's like
Tennis is kind of its metaphor and l its lessons from
This coach that t taught people how to be amazing tennis players, which applied to all kinds of
Greatness. Exactly. And I I will say I love stopping a book in the middle sometimes when you just can't finish it. I like I don't know why I waited for someone to give me permission on that, and I think it's a
It's really helped me. Like oh I got through a few
Start some books.
Yeah, I think Naval was one of the few that's like
You don't need to finish books, just stop as soon as you want. Exactly.
And I'm yeah, it's funny that we need permission to show.
'Cause then it makes you feel more comfortable starting a book and trying books. Right.
Right. It's easy. If you haven't heard Naval's advice on this, just like don't worry about finishing a book, don't feel bad. Still counts as reading it, basically.
Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?
You know, I've really I gotta admit Apple TV's got some bangers.
And they don't talk about it. I don't know why they don't market these things better. But like
Um
I am behind on these uh second seasons, but like shrinking or bad sisters.
Slow horses was great.
Several.
Yeah.
Yeah. Slow horse has been coming up. I'm sorry, you you said something else after that. Oh I think severance is coming up in and it's new. Severance. Yeah.
There's some good ones on Apple TV.
Uh Presumed Innocent. Have you seen that? I haven't. So good. Apple TV.
Watch it. It's only six episodes. All right. It'll it'll pull you in immediately. Can't wait.
Yeah. Okay.
Next question, do you have some favorite product?
Or a favorite product you recently discovered that you really like?
I don't think it's a recent discovery, but I still love
The Waymo experience.
As a product? I don't have you've
Yeah, it's mind blowing. And it's mind blowing how quickly it becomes just like
You forget that you're in a self driving car.
I actually asked one of the product leads of Waymo this at a at a happy hour and I was like, you know, is is it kind of like when you
when you kinda remember like this old elevator, there's always an elevator guy still there. Like even when it was all automated and like you were just pressing buttons, but you wanted somebody there to make it feel like
I'm not in death cage.
And I was like, Do you still need a fake driver?
To just make you feel comfortable.
He's like, You'll feel comfortable in less than five minutes.
He's right. I felt comfortable in like thirty seconds.
It's wild.
I love Well, yeah.
Me too. I I love seeing like many Waymo's in a row on the road in the Bay Area.
'Cause it's just like it's coming. The future is coming so fast. And I started seeing it in LA now too.
Yeah.
Can't wait for them. I live north of San Francisco and so I can't wait for them to be able to get on a freeway to pass the bridge.
Oh man. Yeah, I love Waymo. It's so amazing and it's just
It's like you hear about it, but then you actually experience it's a whole other
No other level. It's great.
Uh, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often
Repeat yourself, share with folks find useful. I I write a lot of like quotes down.
And I think there's like, um I don't know, I just I just really like some of
reminding myself of some of these uh kind of quotes. And so I use a bunch like
I think I use a Bruce Lee quote pretty often or
I I used one uh a Jesuits uh line f in one of my um job rec and um
There there's like certain ones that I do repeat, but I actually found this
And I don't I
forgot about it, but I really love it. And so I'm just gonna
I'm gonna read this one out. Please. This is from um
Adam Robinson, I think.
And I he wrote
My three guiding rules of life.
First, whenever possible, connect with others.
Second
With enthusiasm, strive always to create fun and delight for others.
And third
Lean into it.
I lean into each moment and every encounter expecting magic or miracles.
Mm-hmm.
Wow. So I think that's going to be my life model, or at least something that I remind myself about as much as I can moving forward.
I I love that it's includes both.
be like creating moments of happiness and joy for yourself, but also
For other people. It's a nice balance of those two. Makes me think about Scion Bannister was just on Tim Ferriss podcast. I don't know if you heard that one, and there's a lot of this in that. Oh worth listening to.
She's fascinating.
It's great.
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that. Final question.
You're a very active angel investor.
I know that it's hard to pick your favorites, pick your favorite baby, but do you have like a favorite angel investment, one that you're most proud of, or most just
That one's really tough.
What's one that like oh that was a good one. I think okay, what I'll what I'll say is I don't I don't yeah, I really don't want to pick a favorite there. I'm like, gonna get founder text. Um but
I will say I I tend to gravitate towards people that are producty minded and when when I hear some of the the work that they're doing or their pitch, I can't like even if they're not PMs.
I tend to gravitate towards those and I really love their approach to um how they think about
The problems. And so
You know what, maybe I will call out one. Um
Because they just they just got acquired. Um Bobby Madsen, uh he was uh the CEO and co founder of uh or founder of Pay It Off.
Of student loans.
And working on like
Making
Uh
Student loan.
Like
repayment easier for people, finding them ways in which like maybe they didn't have to repay like doing a lot of this, again, unsexy work. Uh and
He when he we talked the first time, he was telling me that
You know, he had a new kid.
He was still up at like three AM reading regulations and like what's happening with the student loan process in the federal government.
I was like, somebody that cares that deeply, that really strives to try to make someone else's life better because they're just finding like
what actually needs to happen, what doesn't need to happen, and it deals with
real money that these folks are kind of coming out with.
um a a real debt they're they're having to deal with. It was
Yeah, it was there was like an emotional tug and I I love when founders have that. I um
The drive, that passion, and the detail orientedness of
Finding a solution.
Here's it. That's uh for folks that wanna raise money and maybe have Rohini as an investor, here's your lesson of what
She looks for it. I love you. They share that.
Uh
Two final questions. Where can folks find you online?
If they wanna learn more, I know Mercury's hiring, so share anything you wanna share there.
And also just how can listeners be useful to you?
I'm on X.
A K Twitter uh Rohini P.
Um, would love to connect with folks there. I'm also on LinkedIn.
Not really on anything else.
So
Probably find one of those. Um
And we are hiring Mercury dot com forward slash jobs if folks are interested or if you know.
Great um people that we should be
Talking to I think
Other than that
listeners can be really helpful to us in continuing to send us product feedback.
Please keep it coming. We really do love it. And we have a lot of Slack channels just focused on those pieces of like, oh, I've heard from this founder, or I'll get a text and I will post in our Slack, um, internal Slack. And so whether you're a business banking account holder, personal banking account holder.
We just want to hear what's going well, what's not, what we can do to improve your lives.
Um
One thing on the personal banking, uh we're gonna be giving away
So so if anybody hasn't tried Mercury personal banking, we wanna
give uh folks that are listening to this podcast the opportunity to skip our wait list and so we'll
We'll send you the link, Lenny, and hopefully can add it to the show notes, but we're giving a small subset of uh skip the wait list opportunities for folks that are interested in trying out a new
New personal bank.
How cool is that? I'm gonna use this link. Maybe it'll be
H did you say how many you're giving away? Uh well, I think we'll have uh twenty five available. Twenty five, okay. There's gonna be twenty four now.
Mm-hmm.

recently they'll be available.
Yes. Awesome. We're definitely going to include that in Shannon. Thank you.
Rahi, thank you so much for joining me.
This was great.
So great.
Bye, everyone.
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