Insight
Akhund: Startups competing with incumbents must catch up and be 10x better
“We were very deliberately serving a set of people that had alternatives. So and then the bar is just much higher. You have to catch up with everything that exists, and you have to be 10 X better than that.”
Insight
Akhund: Early-stage startups should hire sales ICs before a head of sales
“I mostly think of these things as like, I think it's a mistake when startups go and hire, like the first hire shouldn't be ahead of sales. Like, I think you should just go hire some salespeople and see if there's a repeatable process that you can come up with …”
Insight
Akhund: Building functions zero-to-one should be founder-led
“Yeah, I don't think like taking a function from zero to one is, is something that like, I think actually kind of. Should be founder-led with, like, some, like, IC or player coaches and then once you've, like, built out some of that function, then you can think…”
Insight
Akhund: Differentiating fintech startups through thin pricing margins is a mistake
“I think it's one of the mistakes that fintechs make is they become, like, differentiated through pricing power. Like, they're like, we're going to give away the most margin possible.”
Disclosure
Akhund: Fintech startups cannot secure bank partnerships without significant upfront funding
“Basically with Mercury, I was like, okay, I can't build this without raising money because you can't get a bank partnership without raising significant money. So you know, it was like straight into, I did build some like screens and things like that, but it wa…”
Assertion Contradicted
Akhund: No neobank offered domestic and international wires in 2017
“I felt we needed both domestic and international wires where, you know, now there are other new banks that have done that, but back in 2017, no one had done that.”
Insight
Akhund: Fintech products take longer to build due to compliance and back-end needs
“Everything just takes longer in fintech, right, because you've got you need all the back-end fintech connections, and then you need all the compliance and risk side of things”
Insight
Akhund: Startups should stay under 10 employees before product-market fit
“Pre-product market fit, it's better to be sub 10 people.”
Insight
Akhund: New B2B startups should focus on early-stage customers first
“In the startup space, if you want a new product, you want to initially focus on the earlier startups just because they're the easiest to win.”
Insight
Akhund: Customer feedback before having a live product is ineffective
“I think there's a ton to learn from customers when you put a product in front of them and they use it and you see how they use it and you ask them like, oh, what more you want. It's much harder to learn from customers when you imagine a product and you haven't…”
Disclosure
Akhund: Mercury's international wire transfers failed silently for six weeks post-launch
“For example, for the first six weeks, we thought sending international wires was working, but it wasn't working.”
Insight
Akhund: Zero-to-one ICs rarely make good scale-up team managers
“Yeah, and those people aren't always, you know, the person who's going to be the IC and then figure stuff out is, is not necessarily great at, like, managing a thirty-person team and, you know, and vice versa, right? Like, someone who's, like, doing a 30 or hu…”
Insight
Akhund: Day Zero distribution tactics fail at $10M ARR
“The other problem with any of these distribution mats is like, you know, what you can do at day zero is not going to work when you have ten million ARR anyway.”
Insight
Akhund: A large TAM gives startups room to maneuver
“The thing that you can predetermine is like going after something that's got a big enough time, right? Like if it's a, if the time is big enough and obviously business banking is a huge time that gives you a lot more room for the maneuver, right? Like you can …”
Insight
Akhund: Technical founders succeed at sales by treating it as a numbers game
“I think the thing that I would tell that person and I tell other founders is, like, I think it's better to Think about sales as like a numbers game. It's like, how many people do you talk to? How good's your conversion rate? And you know, that's the, that equa…”
Disclosure
Akhund: Mercury spent 1.5 years building its initial feature set before launching
“It took us a year and a half to launch because we were quite Stubbin about hitting all of those features, which were not all trivial to get.”
Disclosure
Akhund: Mercury raised $6 million upfront prior to launch
“We actually raised six million upfront”
Disclosure
Akhund had invested in roughly 90 startups prior to Mercury's beta
“I'd invested in, I guess by that point about 90 startups and, you know, Just by the fact that done done fairly recently, I only started investing in 2060, 16.”
