Building a $5b company without 996

**Immad Akhund** (0:00)
Nine, nine is 12 hours. The extra two hours, was that really 20% more productive? I will be shocked if it was 20% more productive. If you have five employees and you hire six employees, that's 20% more productive. You're probably a little less creative if you're not doing anything else in your life. I have my best ideas when I'm on a flight or driving somewhere. Sometimes these decisions or these ideas are actually worth 10x more than an extra few hours of work. I started as an entrepreneur and I loved it, but I just wanted to survive. We got to a billion-dollar valuation in 2021 At that point, which is like, I would say I really got into the bonus levels of this game. Whereas I was like, I don't even know what my next goal is. I've tried to make it so that the pressure kind of goes down as success goes up, which is I think actually relatively rare. If you're more successful, why are you more stressed about it?

**Nakul Mandan** (0:47)
Immad Akhund has built one of the most loved fintechs of this generation. Mercury serves 300,000 customers and is at a $650 million annualized run rate.
One in three US startups banks with them. The company has been profitable for four straight years. And as of last month, they have conditional approval to become Mercury Bank. But what's interesting is that Immad has accomplished all of this on his own terms. He's anti-996. He's still remote first at a time when Silicon Valley has bounced back to fully in person. He hires for trades most growth stage companies don't even look for. He said it's dangerous when everything has to be driven by metrics. And he said openly that he's optimized early on to be a founder for life and not for a sprint. Today, we talked to Immad about how he runs Mercury, the operating philosophy that got him here, and whether that philosophy holds up as Mercury becomes a bank, an AI-shaped company, and a business serving companies well beyond the tech ecosystem. Nakul Up.
Immad, welcome to the show.

**Immad Akhund** (1:55)
Thanks for having me.

**Nakul Mandan** (1:56)
So, I want to start with something you've said that actually cuts through a lot of the culture theater in Silicon Valley. You've said that the culture is about the founder's personality, not about some values doc, not about some rituals, the founder's personality externalized. I was wondering as I was preparing for this, that works for 10 people, 100 people company, maybe even stretch it to a 500 people company, but at the scale at which Mercury is today, a thousand plus people, does it still work?

**Immad Akhund** (2:24)
Oh yeah, 100 percent. I think I often talk to people who talk about culture, but I think they don't know what it means. I think it's ill-defined word and I'm an engineer, so I hate ill-defined words. I really struggled with it for a long time. I was like, is it like having beers in the fridge? That's what it was. Or is it like what programming language you choose, etc. So I think there are like probably some people mean culture and they mean something else. I think the easiest way to define culture that is very definitive and like means something and you can measure it and all that is like, what are the personalities of the people you hire? What are the personalities that you encourage? What are the types of traits you encourage kind of thing? You kind of have to decide that very early on because what happened in my previous companies, I didn't really understand that. So we had a bunch of those people that kind of ended up dominating the culture because they were the loudest voice in the room and we didn't really have like a counterculture to like fix that. So it was fine, but it wasn't like the type of company I wanted to build with Mercury. So we sat down and I think there was only four people. And we're like, what are the personalities that we really cared about? And for us, it was kind of product minded, humble, helpful people that were kind of curious. And at that time, we didn't like meetings, so we were like, no process, gobble things kind of people.
And so we wrote that down and we tried to measure against it. We had interviews, every engineer, everyone we did product interviews with. And we would try to test people for like, OK, are they high ego? So there's a bunch of things that followed from that. And we have a bunch of things within the company that encouraged that behavior. We pick one thing, like we have a channel called Grateful. And people at the company, like, every day there's multiple posts where people are like, oh, I'm really grateful to X and Y because they helped launch this project or whatever it is. A lot of that behavior is organic, I didn't make that channel, it just came across.