7 Business Ideas from a Unicorn Founder

**Immad Akhund** (0:00)
If you hear about these companies that are going from like to 100 million in like 2 years or 3 years or whatever, like the equation is very simple from a company perspective.

**Shaan Puri** (0:17)
What's up? We got my buddy, Immad, here. He's the founder of Mercury, an awesome company that I use and love and is... You've created a billion dollar company, dude. You did it. You did the thing that all of us, when we were living in San Francisco and in our 20s, trying to build these companies, you finally did it. How does that feel?

**Immad Akhund** (0:36)
It's funny you say that. We raised our Series B in 2021, which is actually like four months after we did our last podcast together at My First Million in January 2021 And then we're just announcing our Series C, which is a 3.5 billion valuation with Sequoia leading. But in 2021, when I raised my round, that was at a 1.6 billion valuation. And it was so weirdly anticlimactic. Because it's like I started as an entrepreneur in 2006 So 2021, what is that? Like 15 years. So I've been working towards this objective of like building a unicorn company, right? Like that's, as you say, like I moved out when I was like 22 And like that's all it was about for me for a long time. It was like getting this like really successful company.
And then you hit this objective like becoming a unicorn and like nothing changes. So I have this like, I have this helmet behind me because that's like this is from Joe Montana. He was, he's an investor and he's a footballer. So he sent me the helmet and that's literally the only thing I got when I became a unicorn. I mean, obviously I had a successful company, but I keep it there to show like, you know, like these objectives don't really matter. It's like you have to enjoy the journey because you hit the objective and then you're like, okay, now what?

**Shaan Puri** (1:53)
Dude, Joe Montana should make that his thing. He's just, he should send a helmet to every founder who becomes a unicorn.

**Immad Akhund** (1:59)
I mean, at least he sends it to the ones he funds because it says like billion dollar club on it. It's kind of cool. All right.

**Shaan Puri** (2:05)
I told you, I said, love to brainstorm with you ideas. I thought you would come with a bunch of fintech ideas because you're the bank guy, but you game with a bunch of, you sent me a list of bullet points, none of which sound like fintech. So I'm excited. Give me some of these ideas, things that you think founders today could be going and doing, or if you weren't doing Mercury, that you would be interested in doing.

**Immad Akhund** (2:26)
Yeah. So I had three trends that I think are interesting. Trend number one is space and space tech. There's a few reasons I like the trend. Number one, I'm just a sci-fi nerd, I love space. So I think it's really exciting as a space, and it's finally hit this point where there's all of these enablement factors. So number one, just a few years ago, getting anything to space was like 100 million Endeavor. We're talking about literally $100 million to get something in space that works, because there was no SpaceX, and all of the space satellite stuff was these hardened radiation proof satellites. Now, the other week, SpaceX did eight flights or something in one week. It's insane.
So there's this repeatable channel to get things in space. It's much, much cheaper, and it's getting cheaper every month, basically. And nowadays, people have these microsat platforms where it's basically a computer in space. It's not going to cost you a million dollars to get just to build the satellite. You can do it for $100,000 or something. So this is a huge enablement thing, and I've invested in a bunch of companies. I did this company called Albedo that's doing very low Earth orbit pictures of things. So you can get like 10-centimeter kind of resolution pictures from space. Yeah, everyone's kind of excited by AI, which I'm also excited about that. But that's a heavily, you know, everyone's doing it.

**Shaan Puri** (3:50)
Super competitive, yeah.

**Immad Akhund** (3:51)
Whereas I think actually space is still like super open. There's not that many people kind of attempting things in space. So the crazy idea I sent to you, which I don't love this idea in terms of like, we need to come up with, like, why we should do this. But I think a nuclear power plant in space would be really cool.