Immad Akhund: The Art of Irrational Effort

Immad Akhund (0:00)

I was a kid at some point, and my dad, he had a garage in Pakistan. And whenever he'd come to London, he'd have to take some menial job. And he was just like, I can't work for people. When I had to work for people, I was like, yeah, he's right, I can't work for people. Banks exist and make money lending, like 80, 90% of the revenue most banks make. So these are really like mid-market enterprise sales companies selling loans as a main product. So if you put it in that context, the rest of why banks are kind of make a lot more sense. I've launched a lot of products over time, really thought we'd launch this thing and no one would care. Six months before launch, I was like, let me go talk to 100 companies. Two of them are really like, yeah, like let's go kind of thing. But I think the interesting thing I learned there is like, actually if 2% of people are like, fuck yeah, that's actually a lot of people if the market's big enough. Like I think just being annoyed about the world is like quite a useful attribute as a CEO. You're just like, why does it have to be like this? You know, when I first started Mercury, I was like, I really thought maybe there's a law that makes it you can only see transactions that are like within the last 90 days. Have you noticed that in your bank, you click back, back, back and like after 90 days, you can't, I hate calling service providers. I've always thought of Mercury as like the thing you come to if you don't want to talk to people, because it's like so easy to use.

Jackson Dahl (1:05)

Gen Z proof product.

Immad Akhund (1:06)

You don't want to talk on the phone. Or like at least engineer proof. But like that's part of the reason like demo to Mercury was exciting to me. I was like, why are we talking to people telling them about the product? They could just try it out. I think about this a lot actually, like why do companies get bad over time? Very few companies have stopped that march of degradation. And I think this is one of those things, like you throw a lot of products out there and you don't really maintain them over time, they don't work well together and like decay. But it's really important for me to think about like, how do I build a company that gets better over time ideally, not worse over time.

Jackson Dahl (1:35)

And this company in some level is like a bet on new entrepreneurship.

Immad Akhund (1:38)

The earlier you are, the more likely you are to use this. So if you play that out, right, for the next 10 years of companies, like hopefully half of them are using Mercury, and that would be like a really powerful position to be in. Yeah, the future is defined by those companies, not the existing companies.

Jackson Dahl (1:50)

Welcome to Dialectic, episode 57, with Immad Akhund. Immad is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, which is a banking platform that people actually love. Technically, Mercury isn't yet a bank, although it is in the process of becoming one in the United States, and historically has worked with partner banks to build a platform that first and foremost serves startups for their banking needs, and has actually created a product that is easy and wonderful to use. I had been hearing amazing things about Mercury for many years and became a user myself when Dialectic became a business. That is where most of Mercury's customers come from. They are entrepreneurs. It is clear that Immad and the team put a deep level of care into the product, to the business, to the culture, and the company here at Mercury. And that was clearly running through this conversation as well as his deep love for entrepreneurship itself. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend. That is the most helpful way to grow the show. And you can learn more at dialectic.fm slash imad-akhund, where there will be a transcript and links to everything mentioned in the episode. Before we get into things, I would like to thank Notion Dialectics, presenting partner. As AI and agent capabilities become even more incredible, and it feels like there's new impressive things launching every single week, having a shared place where you and your team have all of your context, all of your memory, all of your skills, all of the ways that you might work with AI has never been more useful. Notion is that place. It is in some sense a Switzerland for all of the ways that you and your team use AI to do great work. You can now store skills directly. You can direct all of your agents from within Notion, whether they be custom workers and agents that you build with Notion or other agents. You can tag Claude, work with Grokbot, use OpenAI or Google models, use open weight models. But Notion is the central hub. It is the command center where you, your team, and your agents can all work and critically have shared context and memory across all of them that doesn't change when you start using a new tool. Of course, this is where all of you and your teams, other information, databases, documents live anyway, and so it makes Notion a great place to direct everything you're doing with AI.