Building The Future Of Financial Services

An interview with Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO at Mercury. 📡

Author

Bill Kerr
April 10, 2025

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Having a nice little working from the woods week this week in the great little Airbnb in Tandil, Argentina.

Tandil is about four hours outside of Buenos Aires, and is a super nice town famous for its cheeses and cured meats. I am staying here. An old homestead that the family have turned into a boutique hotel with an Airbnb out the hack. It’s amazing. I am just loving being out of the city and surrounded by greenery if I am honest.

Nothing more to add for today. Thanks for being here and I hope you enjoy the post today.

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Immad Akhund, Co-Founder and CEO at Mercury

Immad Akhund is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mercury, the company more than 200,000 ambitious companies trust for banking and credit cards*. Launched in 2019, Mercury has raised $467M from a16z, Coatue, CRV, and others. He is a former part-time partner at Y Combinator and is an active angel investor, with more than 300 investments in startups including Rippling, AirTable, Rappi, Jasper, Deel, and Substack.

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.

The man behind Mercury.

Tell us about the problem you are trying to solve? Why this?

Mercury offers banking and credit cards specifically for other businesses, particularly tech-enabled businesses, startups, and e-commerce companies. I've started and run various startups since 2006. At my previous companies, I consistently struggled with the banks we were forced to use. Signing up was difficult, the products were hard to use, and I couldn't access any advanced features, like APIs.

Speed without compromise.

This all led me to the idea in 2013 that someone needed to fix this. Initially, I thought someone else would address the issue, but by 2017, no one had. That's when I incorporated Mercury, and the rest, as they say, is history.

💡 Fun fact: Both of my companies—my startup Athyna—and this very newsletter, do our banking with Mercury.

What was the most difficult when going from zero to one?

Having experience with numerous companies prior to Mercury, I felt confident about developing and launching the product, as well as navigating the distribution channels. However, the biggest challenge was launching a banking product itself. In 2017, such ventures were uncommon in the US. Establishing a banking partnership proved particularly difficult, as these partnerships were often custom-made and challenging to access. Convincing potential partners of the viability of a startup-led banking solution was another hurdle. Overall, navigating these complexities—finding partners, communicating effectively, and integrating systems—was the most time-consuming aspect, extending our initial launch to a year and a half. We even encountered a failed integration attempt, we had to secure a new partner and integrate again. This process undoubtedly presented the steepest learning curve.

What is your main day to day job as CEO at Mercury?

The role has undoubtedly evolved over time. When we first started, securing a banking sponsor dominated my focus. I interacted with roughly 60 banks, learning how to effectively communicate with them, lawyers, and various stakeholders involved in acquiring a bank sponsor. Subsequently, as I was one of the few front-end engineers, I actively participated in product development given my engineering background.

After we had a bigger-than-anticipated launch, my role shifted towards extensive customer support and building foundational customer service and other teams. Right now, my focus has transitioned to a ‘chief problem solver’ approach. With a competent executive team managing key functions, I identify and address critical issues or areas for improvement across the organization.

What does your team look like? Who are your direct reports?

Mercury has three co-founders. Max Tagher, our Chief Technology Officer, leads the engineering team, comprising the majority of our workforce; roughly 160 out of 600 employees. Jason Zhang, the Chief Operating Officer, oversees product development and design, with the additional responsibility of leading the people team, which includes human resources and recruiting.

Team Mercury.

My role encompasses everything else, acting as a catch-all for various functions. These include the GTM (go-to-market) team responsible for revenue and marketing, the G&A (general & administrative) team managing finance, legal, and similar functions, as well as customer support, compliance, and risk teams. While each of these functions has dedicated executives with expertise, my primary role lies in facilitating collaboration and ensuring smooth operation across all departments.

Explain your philosophy around leadership? How do you think about it?

Building a strong company culture is multifaceted. Firstly, establishing clear cultural principles is crucial. In our leadership approach, we emphasize transparency. Alongside transparency, empowering employees with significant responsibility and trust is vital. While this approach doesn't always guarantee success, it fosters individual growth and ownership. I view my role as hiring exceptional individuals and setting high standards, not micromanaging specific tasks.

Also, authentic leadership is key. I strive to be genuine and transparent, avoiding any pretence. People appreciate and respond well to authenticity—they can easily detect insincerity. Therefore, I prioritize being genuine, direct, and setting high expectations while fostering a supportive environment.

What is your North Star metric inside of your company and why?

I have a particular perspective on metrics. In my view, anything other than net revenue can be categorized as a vanity metric. Some might argue these are lagging indicators and irrelevant to startups. However, I believe startups often mislead themselves by focusing on vanity metrics like user count as a key performance indicator (KPI). Ultimately, if net revenue isn't your primary KPI, you're likely not optimizing for the most critical factor—a sustainable business model. Net revenue is the core metric we prioritize, with external costs being a key expense we constantly monitor.

How do you set goals?

For small startups, I recommend avoiding overly complex frameworks. In the pre-product stage, prioritize focusing on achievable monthly goals—no more than three—to avoid getting overwhelmed. However, as your company grows beyond this initial stage, establishing a goal-setting framework becomes essential. While I find aspects of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) less than ideal, parts of it can be valuable.

Most companies utilize a variation of OKRs, typically involving biannual planning sessions. Company goals are established, followed by departmental and potentially sub-departmental goals. This framework has proven effective for us, but we remain adaptable and make adjustments every six months to address identified shortcomings.

It's important to remember that various approaches to OKRs exist. Our company translates broad goals into three key objectives. We avoid excessive layers of translation, such as separate vision, goal, and objective statements. Each objective at the company level is then linked to specific key results. While not all teams directly create their own objectives, some departmental goals, like those of the SysAdmin or DevOps teams, naturally align with broader company objectives without needing a complete cascade.

How do you build culture?

Building a strong company culture is like building anything else: it requires a multi-step process. First, define and communicate your culture. This means getting clear on your core values and making sure everyone understands and buys into them. At Mercury, for example, we value transparency and empowerment. I believe in sharing information openly, and I want our employees to feel like they own their work.

Second, hire for it. When you're bringing new people on board, make sure they're a good fit for your culture. Ideally, you want to find people who embody your values. This might mean asking questions during interviews that get at things like humility or being product-minded. We even do product interviews for some roles to assess how candidates think about and approach product development.

Mercury value

What is means

Think actively

Lead with curiosity. Question, experiment, and find better ways to do things.

Be super helpful

Go above and beyond to solve problems, and do it as a team.

Act with humility

Treat everyone with respect and leave your ego at the door.

Appreciate quality

Pursue and recognize excellence to build something that lasts.

Focus on the outcome

Get the right results by taking extreme ownership of the process.

Seek wisdom

Be transparent. Find connections in the universe's knowledge. Use this information sensibly.

Third, leaders need to live the culture. It's not enough to just say what your values are—you have to act them out. As CEO, I try to be a role model by being authentic, direct, and setting high expectations while also creating a supportive environment.

Finally, reinforce your culture through everyday interactions. Small things can make a big difference. We have a Slack channel called #Grateful where people can express appreciation for each other's work. It's a simple thing, but it helps create a positive and collaborative atmosphere, which reflects our values of being helpful and working together.

This is just my perspective, of course, but I hope it gives you some ideas for building a strong company culture of your own.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire All-Star talent?

I'm a big believer in having internal recruiters. We actually had our first internal recruiter when we were like 13 or 14 people. Obviously, that doesn't work if you're too small and you're not hiring enough people. I think you need to be hiring at least two per month for it to be a good investment. I think to do well in recruitment, you need to have someone that's continuously sourcing and is really good at selling the company and can run that pipeline very efficiently. And I find it very hard to do that without having an internal recruiter. So I think that’s the key.

Step two is referrals. Everyone knows great people that they've worked with. And most people want to work with those people again. For example, six of the first eight people that worked at Mercury were all people I'd worked with before. I like referrals from people within Mercury. That's a real key source as well.

Can you detail your process? What does it look like?

We have a recruiter who does the first interview which is telling them about the role, getting them excited about it, and doing a kind of culture-fit assessment. Then the hiring manager does another phone interview—it's just a little bit for role-specific fit. And assuming those two parts go well, we have in-house interviews. We will normally do a role-specific exercise, or we have a generic exercise we make everyone do if there's a role-specific exercise.

I really like role-specific exercises. If you can get an engineer to go code something or a designer to go wireframe something, I think you can learn a lot. And then beyond that, there's three or four one-on-one interviews that are mostly specific to the role, some of them do the cultural stuff, like I talked about the product interview. Then for managers, we do a people management interview.

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

We're remote-first. We do have three offices in SF, New York and Portland, and we encourage people to go in if they’re close but it's very optional. So I don't know what that's called, remote-first with some offices? At the end of the day, getting the best talent is the most important thing. And I think if I had to force everyone to come to San Francisco, I would just not get the best people. So that's the biggest factor for me.

There are pros and cons to all of these things. And you have to know, if you do choose remote, you have to kind of mitigate it with some other things. For example, even though we are remote, we have three to four off-sites every year, where we all get together and brainstorm, and work on problems that are hard to do in a remote world.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

Number one, I get good sleep. I've never been into compromising on sleep. Number two, I try to do things that are fun. I mean as a CEO you often just have to do things that are necessary but not fun. Which is fine. I don't think you can ignore that but I try to make some space to do things that actually like give me energy. For me, I love talking to customers.

I try to make space for doing those things even if there's other things that I need to get done that are not like as exciting or interesting to me. So I think those two are probably like my biggest tips for staying on top of things energy-wise.

Is there anything I should have asked you?

Something that’s kind of unique to us is everyone at Mercury gets a callsign within their first few weeks of joining the company. Think names like Sundance, Charlie Tuna, Alpine Bird, that sort of thing. Your callsign is associated with a custom emoji on Slack and is a way co-workers can refer to one another. So when someone does great work or announces good news, for example, people can celebrate or acknowledge it by reacting with your callsign emoji. They're fun. It has an interesting way of making people feel connected.

I think it's a nice part of the culture. Sometimes people lose that kind of stuff as they scale. They begin to turn corporate. I think keeping things unique and quirky is nice.

And that's it! You can follow Immad on X and LinkedIn. To learn more about Mercury, check out the website here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

If you haven’t checked out Sam Altman on the Varun Mayya podcast yet, I highly recommend giving it a listen. There’s been a ton of debate lately around AI art and its implications, and this episode really dives deep on the subject. Sama talks about how OpenAI is navigating these waters, plus there are some really insightful discussions on the future of jobs in AI. Definite signal given all the noise out there.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Paddle—a merchant of record, managing payments, tax and compliance needs—we use their ProfitWell tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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That’s it from me. See you next week, Doc 🫡 

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