#149 - The Craziness of r/WallStreetBets, an $100k Bet, and Startup Ideas with Mercury Banks Founder

**Shaan Puri** (0:25)
You're talking about the Riverside thing, how they were, you know, I don't know if they were listening or weren't, but I have this fear with any startup product, because I know that, I don't know if we're just like, we were just morally bankrupt, but whenever we would build a new product, the main, you get the excitement, you get it out there, but you want to see how are people liking it, how are they using it, is it working, is it not working?
One way to do that is to have like some god mode version of your product where you can kind of like see, oh, they're, you know, let's say you're doing Slack. Maybe if you were doing Slack, I bet you somebody at Slack could see, oh, this organization signed up.
They created a bunch of channels. Oh, that's interesting. They created a channel for like Music Room. And so because I know that we did it, I bet that every fucking startup kind of does this where they look into the customer stuff in order to get feedback, right? Good intention.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
Yeah, but it's still weird. Do you keep one of those slider things on your computer?

**Shaan Puri** (1:14)
No. Dude, I have a Facebook portal. Like, you know, I've basically given Zuck, you know, root access to my kitchen.

**Immad Akhund** (1:20)
Well, it's funny with Mercury, we see all of this transactional data.

**Shaan Puri** (1:23)
Says the guy who owns a bank on the call.

**Immad Akhund** (1:26)
But we try to avoid it and have good ethics around it. But you know, when a big wire comes in, you can't not notice it, right? Right.
We need to make sure everything works successfully with it and all compliance checks are done.

**Sam Parr** (1:39)
I was talking to someone who was 500 or 1,000 employee at Stripe, so not early, but kind of early, but late enough that you would think they would have rules. And he said that any employee could log in and see anyone's transactions.

**Shaan Puri** (1:53)
There's been a bunch of things. I remember at Uber, there was a story where people could basically just stalk their ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend, their whereabouts, because it's like, oh, they're requesting a ride here at 9 p.m. Why did they do that? And there was a story that broke. I don't know all the details, but it was like the journalists who were writing kind of like hit pieces on Uber. They were kind of like, we know what you're doing.

**Sam Parr** (2:16)
It was a Pando Daily.

**Shaan Puri** (2:17)
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Pando. That's right.

**Immad Akhund** (2:19)
There's completely legitimate reasons to do it. They need to like go debug someone's problem or like save this, some other issue. So then like having like layers of restrictions around that, it is tricky.

**Shaan Puri** (2:30)
We had it, I remember, for one day. So we built this little video messaging app, like a video walkie talkie app. So it's kind of like a, not like Snapchat. It's not meant to be super private necessarily, but like it wasn't self-destructing or anything like that.
But these were video messages from like one friend to another. And the day we launched, I remember like one of the engineers just had his like debugging terminal open.
And the way his debugging terminal was working was like, it would just refresh every three seconds. And like the latest message would just show basically right there. And he just wanted to see, like he was just checking, is there audio and video being transmitted?
But I saw it and I was like, dude, these are like people's video messages. Like we can't just have this, we can't just be wiretapping, you know, every user of the platform. So I made them delete it. But for like five minutes, we looked at it and we were like, oh, that's cool. We had all these users in France using it. And they were like, these, you know, these children, like in high school in France were using our product. And I didn't understand anything that they were saying, but I remember feeling so dirty, so evil in that moment for being able to even see it.

**Immad Akhund** (3:27)
In my previous company, we ran like a social network for like mobile gamers. And we had like this TM feature in it. It was a little bit of a cesspool.
Like we looked at it once and we were like, whoa, these messages are like kinda out of control. I want to tell you what the contents were like. It wasn't always savory stuff. And then we were like, you should never look at this stuff again.