Mercury

“It, like, pulls analytics for me across YouTube and, like, my Mercury banking account. It can update Google documents for me. It can build a website for me.”

“Ever since I set up all these apps, like Mercury, MCP, and all this kind of crap on my open call, like, I don't actually open those apps much anymore, you know.”

“He actually bought a bank for, I think, sixty million dollars of his own money, and then he started this and he basically uses it as a the underlying bank under Mercury, under Ramp, under Brex, under all these companies, and so he and I think they're doing, th…”

“You go back to the space race across Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, do you know how, what our average launch cadence was between missions? It was between three and four months.”

“There was some stuff from Mercury that like, 70% of startups are, you know, choosing quad as their model of choice.”

“Mercury never stole an existing customer from Silicon Valley Bank until the weekend that Silicon Valley Bank failed.”

“Like, I was the first investor in Mercury the, you know, SMB bank, and like, until SVB failed, I don't think they never stole a customer from SVB.”

“Robinhood, Mercury, many of these companies are generating very significant percentages of their revenue and profits today from deposit flows as rates have gone up.”

“This is like a meta lesson, which, you know, really took a while to truly learn, but it's quite an important lesson for me, which is you can't take other people's lessons and make them your own. So, you know, like what's the cool thing nowadays, like founder m…”

“If you're like always like, if we measure it, we'll optimize and we only do the measurable things like, you know, like doing like an extra bit that like creates like a magical experience for customers. That's like very hard to measure a metric against in my op…”

“So, you know, for example, for Mercury, we look for humble people that are helpful, that are curious, that are customer centric and product minded. I think all of those traits actually work pretty well together, but it's almost completely in contrast to some o…”

“We have a product interview that we do for almost everyone, even non-product people get the product interview.”

“We have a cultural attribute of wanting people who are curious. And the thing that we do to test that is we give people basically an hour to prepare a presentation on any subject they want. We're just like, hey, pick something non-work related that you find re…”

“The way I describe product market fit now, which to be fair, I think works in like consumer, prosumer and SMB and maybe doesn't work in enterprise sales. But you know, it's like you wake up in the morning and you have more users and you don't know where they c…”

“Mercury was product market fit from the day we launched. Like we just grew by like. 30, 40% a month for the first year.”

“Mercury took a year and a half before we launched. And I really think it was, yeah, maybe it could have launched a little earlier if everything had gone right, but it was minimum of one year to build this product end to end.”

“Even if you take Mercury, like I was just so annoyed using the business banks that I used as entrepreneur. And like a lot of the things I did afterwards were like, you know, time analysis and this kind of post ad hoc justification to like get myself comfortabl…”

“So I think it's like, especially at the start, like to spend all your time doing the thing that like you're the least capable of doing and the least capable of proving to the world that you can do.”

“Most of the ones that went with the charter model Either failed to get a charter, or even when they got the charter like there's a company called Varo that was like a Chime competitor, and Chime went with the sponsor bank model, and Varo went with the bank cha…”

“I think it's very hard when you abstractly talk to someone and you're like, would you use this thing? It's very hard to like reliably believe their feedback. At least that's what I've found. And maybe there's like ideas where it's like, you know, some people a…”

“If in my opinion, at least, and I think this actually bared out that if any of these things were missing, people would not adopt it. And I didn't think there was any point in launching with one of these things missing because the only thing we'd learned is we …”

“We actually built the whole thing and we had one sponsor bank lined up, but they kept like They were supposed to build some extra features for us, like give us wires and things like that. And every month they'd be like, yeah, it's coming. It's coming. And it's…”

“Four days after launch, someone like signed up, never spoke to us and transferred a million dollars into a Mercury bank account.”

“Even today, our sales team is only Does about five percent of our accounts.”

“And COVID initially was like, seemed like a disaster. We lost 60% of our revenue. Obviously no one was starting new businesses in March, 20 20.”

“And then literally that was March and then April. We, like, doubled. Like, it was insane. April and May, 2020 was this, like, insane growth spurt, because, you know, e-commerce kind of blew up, bank branches were shut down, so people had to go to a digital exp…”

“Literally even our VCs were saying like, Hey, look at how well Brex is doing. Like, why don't you go build a credit card instead? Like at day zero, before we'd even launched.”

“We were actually like bigger than SVB at that point in terms of number of customers, because SVB was really focused on like venture-backed startups, whereas we had like a broader set of SMBs”

“We had Like, 8000 customers sign up in like a week or two.”

“We've been successful in training the first commercial scale diffusion language models. We call this model Mercury.”

“Probably 18 was like the first year where there was like a few of these services that you could actually get live with and you didn't have to go, because before then what used to happen is you'd have to go find a bank”

“I would say to do a fintech company in general, especially one that has like any sort of payments like money movement it's probably three times harder than a software company. Like a software company, you can probably launch at three months, a payment slash ba…”

“If we hadn't launched in 2019 and built up like a little bit of a lead, it would have been probably like an overly competitive space by 2020, 20, 21.”

“The Deliverables or the items that I had before, you know, I did a fundraise was, you know, I had some, I worked with a designer and I had, like, some rough initial designs of, like, what it might look like, and I had, like, three, either sponsor banks or bass…”

“Whether you work with lawyers or other fintech entrepreneurs, like you can normally get to the partnership people at these places. So getting like an actual like test term sheet, not that hard.”

“I went to this conference, Money, 2020, which is, like, the biggest FinTech conference and I basically got the full list of attendance, and I, you know, scrapes and stuff, and I found, like, the 60 people who were going that had that were, like, from a bank, a…”

“We met on the Tuesday, they gave me a turn shoot on the Tuesday. So it was done. But I mean, they moved quickly and I appreciated that and like they really you know, who knows whether I would have got any other VC, but like they really did believe in, in the m…”

“They were, and I would say they still are focused on kind of underbanked consumers, like people who don't have bank accounts, and they're well, they're like, yeah subprime kind of consumers.”

“Yeah, I think the, there was one company that tried a little bit called Seed that was doing kind of SMB banking, but at that point that kind of faltered but yeah, nothing at scale for sure.”

“I've also found that if you don't build a thing up front, it's often actually hard to build it after you launch. This is, like, pretty contrarian, but just when you have users and, like, Yeah. You have to worry about things breaking and like fixing bugs and et…”

“I've also found that more than, probably around, like, the number 16 things slow down quite a bit. Like, you need, with, like, eight people in a room, like, you don't really need management. It's like, everyone knows what everyone's doing. Everyone's doing, yo…”

“And we grew kind of 30 to 40% a month for the first 12 months.”

“We had 60 investors in our seed round. So I, you know, I deliberately, you know, we had recent Horowitz as a lead, and then as soon as they kind of committed, which is relatively early, I deliberately went and like Hunted people that had like a large portfolio…”

“I kind of wanted to do it for Mercury as well. It didn't work out”

“SVB was not in-person at the time, but it took three, three weeks of, like, doing online forms and waiting”

“Nowadays about 75% of our customers are within, with Probably their first bank account within six months of incorporating.”

“The two, two main ways is, number one, people use our debit card or credit card, and we make money on the interchange, so every time you swipe, there's a fee, and as the issuer, you get, like, a pretty big chunk of the fee and then number two, we, you know, if…”

“When COVID happened like, it's, like, March, 2020, interest rates go to zero which, you know, from our perspective, like, that was, like, At that point, like, 60% of our revenue went to zero, basically.”

“April, 2019 is when we launched and we were at a million dollars in annualized revenue in September, 2019.”

“We wrote down kind of our cultural attributes and what we really cared about in terms of Mercury culture, like basically a few months in when there was only four people”

“If we were at 20 people and then we tried to write the culture, then like, it's hard to have a cohesive culture when you haven't tried to build a cohesive culture.”

“Brex is like 10, 11. And Mercury's at three and a half, with 500 in revenue”

“I don't think Mercury's bank relationships are worth anything, Harry. I think they're worth zero.”

“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.”

“Yeah, I finally closed on my first institutional fund. We raised twenty six million dollars. I'm partnering with kind of a friend of mine. Actually he invested in Mercury seven years ago. His name's Yash Doshi. He was at EQ two ventures, EQT ventures.”

“Andreessen Horowitz was our seed investor. So they invested like basically on a deck for Mercury”

“I pitched more than 20 funds as part of the CBC. Sequoia did the most work. Right. So like they did the most diligence with customers. They did the most work in the data room.”

“Sonia is, is our kind of partner at Sequoia, and she said, actually, like, You know, she had conviction in that first meeting. She said, 95% she was in after, like, that initial meeting”

“When I raised a hundred twenty million, I was like, I don't know how I'm going to spend a hundred twenty million. Like we had like a 40 person company”

“Even after Andreessen had come in with a lead check, it was so hard to get any fintech fund to invest alongside them because all fintech funds saw was like all the problems. They were like, this doesn't work for this reason and that reason. And I was like, I r…”