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By now, if you don’t know who Nathan Fielder is, you probably never will. If you are a little weird and into bespoke, creative content, then you probably know he’s an absolute wizard. From his insane Nathan For You series to the more recent The Rehearsal, he’s just great. And now, he’s back to take on Elizabeth Holmes.

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INTERVIEW 🎙️

Ryan Wiggins, VP of Product at Mercury

Ryan Wiggins is the VP of Product at Mercury, the San Francisco fintech that provides banking, cards, and financial software to more than 300k companies. He spent close to a decade at Facebook, moving from client services into ads and product growth, before joining WhatsApp, where he led the team that grew WhatsApp Business from zero to 100 million users. He joined Mercury as Head of Growth in early 2021, built out its analytics function, and was running growth when the 2023 banking turmoil pushed a wave of startups to move their deposits. Since then, Mercury has raised a $300M Series C led by Sequoia at a $3.5B valuation and a $200M Series D led by TCV that lifted it to $5.2B, and in April 2026 it won conditional approval from the OCC to stand up its own national bank, Mercury Bank, N.A. He now leads Experiences, the software team behind everything a Mercury customer sees and touches.

What makes Ryan worth reading is that he has taken the consumer-scale product playbook from Facebook and WhatsApp and pointed it at the least glamorous corner of tech, business banking. He argues that the marketing tricks people obsess over rarely move the needle, and that Mercury grows because the product itself is good enough to spread by word of mouth. But the sharper thread in this conversation is how he actually runs his team in the AI era. He keeps his calendar under two hours of meetings a day, treats his job like an air-traffic controller, and starts each morning with an AI-generated brief pulled from what he calls Mercury's ‘context layer,’ a shared, Wikipedia-style repository the whole company plugs into. For anyone trying to work out what a product org looks like when the tools change faster than the plans, Ryan has already rebuilt his around it.

What did your experience scaling WhatsApp from zero to 100M users teach you?

I was at Facebook for about ten years, and for the last four of those I was at WhatsApp, leading the growth team. When I was there, we launched the business app. WhatsApp had only ever been a consumer app, but once you get to a billion-plus users, you end up with a lot of business users too. The playbook at the time was fairly standard. Build a business identity, ship a new app, and scale it up. One of the things I've learned in growth is that a lot of people launch something, go market it, and just expect it to grow. That is not what I've found reality to be. What actually matters is the product experience itself, how people discover something like a business app, and how they come across businesses while using the consumer app they already have.

Back then, we found that one of the things that mattered most was the switchover experience. People signing up already had a WhatsApp account, so moving them across cleanly was everything. If you lose any chats in that process, you are never going to use the new app. We were jammed for a couple of months trying to grow it, and it was really hard. But when we fixed that one thing, growth took off. That's a core lesson in everything I've learned about growth, and it's generally what we're doing here at Mercury. For a business, the customer experience is what counts, and the details are where it lives. The marketing message and the upsell get the clicks and the highlights, but the core experience, and making sure it works all the way through, is the most impactful work you can do.

Where did most of the growth come from in your WhatsApp experience?

I joined the team four years after the acquisition. The founders were on their way out the door, and it was a scaled-up company with 1.5B users. While I was there, it grew to over three billion, so it basically doubled. I think about WhatsApp as reaching a certain percentage of a market, tipping it, and then winning it outright. That was already true in over a hundred countries when I joined. So the question becomes where you try to grow next. In markets like India, it is about making sure the new people joining keep choosing your product, which is the standard ‘have a good product’ thing. The harder work is in the markets you are not winning yet, the ones on the bubble, and places like the U.S., where you are pushing to accelerate.

This comes back to a growth philosophy. A lot of people love the marketing, the billboard, the promotions. But I've found three levers behind any growth effort. First is the product. Does it work and meet a core need? Does it keep people around once they start using it? Second is marketing. Are you getting people aware of it? And then there’s partnerships, and all the other products, experiences, and services people use. For WhatsApp, it was a great story of using all three. The part most people don't tell is that when WhatsApp was growing, it was zero-rated. It cost nothing to use WhatsApp against a data pack. So it was the core product, plus the partnerships, plus the marketing. That's growth 101, and WhatsApp was a great learning bed for it.

What does Mercury get right that banks in general miss?

I've worked with a lot of entrepreneurs over fifteen years, and I grew up around this too. My dad was an entrepreneur who helped start a bank when I was a kid, so I grew up around people and businesses using banking. The truth is that banks don't adopt the latest technology and interfaces, and that's the difference in what Mercury is doing. It's banking that feels and looks like modern software, designed properly end to end. That means the reliability and trustworthiness you need, the functionality to operate in the U.S. as a fintech and a banking product, and the software and convenience people actually want. The main reason people choose Mercury is our mobile and online app, where you can do all your transfers and get set up fast. In the 30 minutes it would take you to drive to a bank branch, you can apply, get approved, and actually start depositing into your account.

Then it's really about what you build on top of that. The nice thing about software is the capabilities that unlock when you can develop on it and scale up. That core online bank account, with a great experience and an awesome UX, can be scaffolded up into payments, cards, user management, recipient management, and invoicing. Over the years, we've really built out our product capabilities, and as a result we're able to support a large number of businesses. Over 300k customers deposit on Mercury, and we're growing faster than ever before. That's because ambitious businesses in the U.S. are using technology to build what they're building, and they're looking for technology that meets them.

When I go to my legacy bank account and can't pull more than 90 days of data, or can't get access because I'm a new employee at an existing company, that just breaks the experience of doing business. We're in the business of empowering people and building technology for them. So the starting point is a product philosophy; then the features follow because that philosophy matches the core customers we serve: ambitious people building a business in the U.S. today.

If you look at any of the top banks in the U.S., these are enormous businesses that spend an enormous amount on R&D. Then why is my software experience so bad? Why can't I get the data about my spend? It's genuinely hard, and it seems misaligned with my incentives as a consumer. That pain we felt is what drives us at Mercury. Running a business is great. Doing the banking sucks, but it doesn’t have to.

What did leading product and growth look like in the early days, and how has it evolved?

I lead a software team we call ‘Experiences’, which thinks about the customer-facing side of how people discover and use Mercury every day, and how we're expanding it to grow with our customer audience. We're built on top of a really reliable banking and risk platform. I should probably mention up front that there are many disclosures here. We are not an official bank yet. We're in the process of applying, and there's a bunch of nuance to that, but we get to offer banking through our partners.

About five years ago, I joined as Head of Growth. Mercury had just raised a Series B, and it was a much smaller product, maybe one-tenth the size in terms of the number of depositors. We had a core product that was working for startups in Silicon Valley, but it wasn't broad, and we hadn't figured out how to scale beyond that. I approached it the way I approached growth at Facebook and WhatsApp. I went really deep to understand the problem and figure out its shape. We had a product our customers loved, but it was hard to know what it was and why it was different, hard to access, and hard to use for everything you needed it to do.

So we set out to place a bunch of bets and see what worked, and double down. Some of what really worked was leaning into the core things that made Mercury great. We built a demo of the product so people could see it and play around with it today. It's shocking to me how many people signed up off that, and how large some of those customers were. One person saw the demo, signed up, and deposited $50M into Mercury without talking to anyone. Our sales leader was beside himself.

We've really leaned into product-led growth, which means you can see the entire product and play with it. We've also found interesting things you wouldn't expect a bank to do, but maybe you would from someone out of Facebook or WhatsApp, like virality and customer referrals. If you're an employer with employees in the U.S., you can give them free personal banking. We think about all these connections between a business, a founder, and the people they work with, and how we can make Mercury a great experience for all of them.

So the growth journey has been about deeply understanding our customers, building a product that helps them understand Mercury and use it better, and then distributing it across all our channels. We think about our GTM tools, partnerships, marketing, and sales as products. We really try to think about the quality of all those edges so the brand shows up throughout. Growth today is multi-channel, multi-audience, and multi-business-line, and we think it's infinitely expanding. But it still comes back to the core product, to ambitious people, and to banking that's as good as software.

Do you have any particular frameworks for running growth experiments?

I come from an environment at Facebook that was experimental to the max. In the 2010s, few decisions were made without experimental data. Then I went to WhatsApp, which used no data in its experiments, so I've seen both ends of the spectrum. At Mercury, as an early-stage leader scaling up a company, the question I ask about experimentation is simple. How is it helping you? Does it serve what you need, and does it help you make a decision?

At the scale of Facebook, with a billion users, maybe knowing which shade of blue a button should be does make a difference, and you can squeeze out some gains there. But often, experimentation is about the pragmatic application of the tool. If measuring a 1% change is going to take two months, why not just ship something that tries to move it by 10% instead? There are also different levels of experimentation. You can launch something and watch how it goes, run an A/B test, do all sorts of stratified sampling, and go really far into the science. But ultimately, what we're doing is the art of building product, getting people to use it, and understanding the mechanics and levers behind it.

I don't know if I've ever found one A/B test that was the breakout win that automatically worked, but I've learned a lot from the process of experimenting. That's really how I think about its value. It shapes how you think and the tools you pull from. Once you know how to do it well and can run an A/B test with statistical significance, you start to think about the other tools for the different jobs you have when you're building.

Any big bets that haven't played out over your experience?

A million. My hit rate is maybe thirty to forty percent, and I actually think our real failure is that sometimes we don't swing enough. Most growth teams fail because they try for a 100% hit rate. But if you're not failing, you're not swinging hard enough. So when we're winning all the time, I actually find that worrying. We need to go back and take some losses, because that's what tells me we're discovering things.

Some of these things are about when the payoff comes and how big you should go. Are you making the right-size bet at the right time? One that took a while to pay off, and that we probably would have killed but let run anyway, was the Mercury API. It had been around for a while and was kind of standing up.

Doing a great job of growth is having opinions, going out and placing bets, and then being intellectually honest about it. There wasn't any other reason to invest in the API for the past three years until we saw this. So I got lucky on that one, but that's the kind of dynamic I think about here.

What does a typical week look like for you?

One thing I've really thought about in this AI world is that Mercury is a remote-first company doing creative work. We're ultimately building a product that shapes how the people who build companies do their own jobs. So I keep coming back to a few intersecting things: where the technology is going, my own job and the tasks that change every day, and this creative product we're building.

The way I do it is with minimal meetings. I try to keep it under two hours a day, with a lot of empty, unscheduled time and very clear priorities. I manage a large team, so I spend my time communicating those priorities, but I make sure I've got room in any given week to explore, dabble, and respond to whatever's working today. I think this is where things are heading. We're increasingly going to be operating in an improv world. Instead of making long-term plans, you're updating all the time, every day, every week.

A typical week for me starts with a long walk on the beach here in Los Angeles, and a great, very relaxed morning. Then I come in and do some deep work. I think a lot about the system of how Mercury runs, how we're making it better, and how we're extending the products. Then I think about the team building it and how we're supporting them. And I try to get out of the way. That's a lot of the job, really. You won't see intense product reviews happening every day at Mercury. You'll see people working in small groups, creatively exploring, solving today's problems, and getting unblocked so they can keep going.

How do you manage your team, schedule, and cadences to maintain that?

There are a couple of things, but ultimately my job is like an air-traffic controller. I try to point people in the right direction, let them lead what they need to lead, and then get out of the way. If my time is filled up giving people directions or unblocking them, I'm actually not being effective as a leader. I'm being the source of chaos. The less I'm involved, and the more I've set things up, the better. There are intense stretches, of course, where it's more than two hours a day on average, but that's roughly what the last couple of months have looked like, and what the next two probably will too.

The way I use technology and AI has really changed things. Six months ago, you might have seen me operating more like the traditional grind-it-out, put-in-the-hours kind of leader.

At the start of the week, I try to set a clear intent, check on how it's going, debug along the way, and then wrap up the week. I've also thought a lot about orchestration. I use Claude Code quite heavily, and I've connected it to all my tools, so I've built a bunch of automations and workflows around it. Ultimately, I'm thinking more about an orchestration system, because that's my real leverage as a manager. How do I get it all running, and how do I create the next set of things and move the team toward where we need to go? If I'm not investing in that, who is?

What does the daily brief pull from, and how does it lay it out for you?

We've increasingly found something really valuable, and I think it's where companies are going. I'd call it ‘the Mercury context layer.’ It's how we, as a company, convey what matters most, so you can plug into it and go about your day.

If you think about hiring a new person, some of what they get is constant information that never changes, like the company policies, the company vision, the overall things. But then there are other pace layers. There's the strategy, there are the goals, and then there are the things moving really fast, like the day-to-day: what code is being shipped, what Linear ticket is being updated, what messages have come through on Slack. All of that is business context, which is ultimately why everyone is there and what everyone is doing. So much of running a company up to now has meant managing that context through in-person, synchronous time. I think it's increasingly moving to asynchronous, into having the right information plugged into the right tools.

My daily brief is one small piece of a broader context layer we're building at Mercury. I plug into that core layer with whatever tools I'm using at my workstation. I use Claude Code, while other people use Claude Desktop, or ChatGPT, or Codex. They all work with it, because the models are always going to get better. Intelligence is the commodity now. The real difference is the context inside the company. So I have it run as a daily job that pulls the latest of everything I’ve been working on, my goals, what I'm trying to do, my meetings, and all the changes since I last updated. The brief itself is one to two pages, and reading it gives me a really good sense of what's going on and what to dig into. It's also a data source I can query.

To give you a quick example, as an executive, I'm trying to show up and lead people, and I need feedback on how I'm doing. As a manager, I get a performance review every three to six months. So I've started plugging in my notes, transcriptions, and past reviews, and asking the brief for feedback. Now it talks to me about the things I'm working on as a manager. It's kind of corny, but I sometimes jump straight to solutions with my reports, because I'm just excitable. So it'll say, 'Hey, you've got a meeting with this person; they've got a big idea, so let them share it.' It's such a small thing, but it helps me so much. It's personalized coaching, and it's the first time I've really felt like that exists.

Does the context layer go out to the entire team, or have you built it personally in your Claude Code?

The best way to think about it is like Wikipedia. There's a public repository everyone plugs into, one they can pull from as part of whatever workflow they're running, and push back to as well. That's the model. We're not in a perfect place, and it's always a work in progress, but I think this is increasingly where the world is going.

Back in the 80s, companies went from paper back offices to database back offices. So the question now is, do you migrate, or do you just become the new database company? We think the new companies are going to be the database companies, and they'll operate differently and move much faster because of it. We're seeing that at Mercury, and I think it's a pretty interesting dimension of all this.

What are the biggest levers Mercury pulls for growth today?

They are ultimately building a great product and making sure people discover it, love it, and have a great experience with it. We found early on that word of mouth was what mattered, and basically every time we tried to accelerate growth outside of that, it just drove more word of mouth. So once that core loop is working, organic growth becomes the engine. That's the best place you can be in a business, where you pour in one new customer and more than one comes out the other side.

What are your biggest bets for the future?

This is really just a totally different era of building in America. As both a business owner and a consumer, I'm looking for technology that keeps pace with all the other tools updating in my life. Think about the last platform shift, and what changed when we got apps, GPS, and mobile devices. Whole new categories were created. I think we sit right at that intersection.

So I'm betting big on conversational interfaces, and on bringing our finances into them. That's why Mercury is leaning so heavily into our API, MCP, and CLI, and into Command, our new operating system that you can run your Mercury account from. We believe the builders of today, of the next twelve months, and of the next ten years are the people who'll pull these tools into their workflows.

It's a totally different kind of business. It's not a startup raising in San Francisco. It's a tech-enabled baker in Arizona doing something completely different. It's a video and music producer in Nashville operating at a scale they never could before, because they have the technology. And how true is that for all the other technology in our lives? I think it's going to happen for finance too, and it's kind of a shame it hasn't yet. That's what we're betting on. It's not even really a bet. It's a strong conviction. We're just going to build this future, because we know it, we hear it, and we see it.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

I try to stick to about two hours of meetings a day. I believe what we're doing, building technology, is creative work, and creative work takes processing, consideration, debate, and real deep thinking. Living in a city of art, I try to really think about how people make it. What actually goes into it? How do you put your soul into something, and how do you draw on your inspirations and the things you take from the world and build them into a product? To me, the best products reflect people caring deeply.

So I've tried to build a life in Los Angeles that I love, where I care deeply about what I'm working on and feel inspired enough to think about the next things to build for users.

Extra reading

• The new economics of starting up in 2026 - August, 2026

• Creating a Second Brain with Claude Code - April, 2026

• The security playbook for today’s operators - April, 2026

• The future of banking* - May, 2026

And that’s it! You can also follow Ryan on LinkedIn and check out Mercury on their website to keep up with what they’re building.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Mochary Method—an executive coaching firm that specializes in helping growing startups.

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

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