Akhund: Using Haskell gives Mercury a competitive advantage in hiring strong engineers
Immad Akhund · 20VC: Mercury Founder Immad Akhund on Why Angel Investing Makes Founders Better Operators, The Right Way For Founders To Discuss and Present Competition To Investors & How To Think About Your Initial Wedge Into The Market and How It Expands Over Time · Sep 20, 2019 · at 12:05
Immad Akhund is the founder and CEO of Mercury. He explains how adopting an uncommon programming language like Haskell attracts top engineering talent seeking specific language roles.
0:00 / 0:15exact quote · 15.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We use Haskell and there's not an interesting programming language with a lot of good engineers that are interested in the programming language with, you know, surprisingly a lack of companies that use it. So we end up, you know, having that kind of edge or niche where you get really talented people applying is really useful.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Immad Akhund
Akhund: If you get a massive valuation, raise big but don't spend
“I think the mistake is to not raise enough money. Like every now and then someone gets like a, you know, like a million dollar valuation, they raised like fifty million. I think that's a mistake. Like you want to raise enough money at that high valuation. And …”
Akhund: I passed on Scale AI because the founders were too young
“I saw scale AI and I was like, okay, you know, like good idea, but these people are so young. I think they were like 19 and 20 at the time or something. I was like, yeah, this is like, I was like, I think I could run this company better if I was doing it and I…”
Akhund: AI labor-replacement software margins will collapse under market competition
“So yeah, the sell that like VCs get and entrepreneurs are making is, oh, we're replacing your labor costs. Therefore, we should charge a third of that. But the reality is, once you have a competitive market dynamic, like, the actual margins are going to compre…”
Akhund: Avoiding AI Investments as the Sector Is Overhyped and Overvalued
“And, you know, I've ended up especially recently avoiding AI. I think AI is overhyped and overvalued.”
Akhund: Mercury raised Series B at irrational 120x multiple, would do again
“You know, we did our series B at a 120 X, which was not rational. This is 20, 21, but we did it and I would do it again.”
Akhund: At current seed valuations, investors must hunt for decacorns, not unicorns
“What we're really doing as seed investors is unicorn hunting, or I would say even, like, at these current evaluations, like, you're hunting for decacorns, and that doesn't, yeah, even if you're great at picking and you have a great network, et cetera you're no…”