Imad Akhund
CEO & Co-Founder, Mercury · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveinvestor@immad ↗LinkedIn ↗mercury.com ↗
Immad Akhund is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a fintech company providing banking and financial software for startups. A repeat entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Heyzap, served as a part-time partner at Y Combinator, and has angel-invested in hundreds of startups.
27statements → 9claims → 1claims resolved → 3.85/5average certainty → 1.89/5average debate potential →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 8 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
9 assertions · 2 opinions · 10 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 8 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Imad argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything Imad Akhund said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Akhund: Sponsor bank model proved far better for fintech valuations than charters
“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…”
Akhund: Startup iteration cannot succeed without societal-level macro tailwinds
“If you start in an idea with like, You know, if there isn't like a societal level trend that's pushing your kind of space forward, which, you know, I think was true in FinTech in 2017, or it's true in AI now, like it's very hard to iterate around it.”
Akhund: Early founders should tackle their biggest weaknesses and hardest risks first
“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.”
Akhund: Early customer feedback is unreliable because users cannot imagine better banking
“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…”
Akhund: Business banking MVPs fail if missing core operational features
“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 …”
Akhund: VCs urged Mercury at day zero to copy Brex credit card
“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.”
Akhund: Mercury Had More Total Customers Than SVB at Collapse
“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”
Akhund: Founders cannot copy-paste frameworks like Founder Mode or MVP
“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…”
Akhund: Driving every company initiative strictly by metrics is dangerous
“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…”
Akhund: Mercury rejects goal-driven candidates who show ego or unhelpfulness
“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…”
Mercury conducts product interviews for nearly all candidates, including non-product roles
“We have a product interview that we do for almost everyone, even non-product people get the product interview.”
Akhund: Company culture inevitably reflects founder personality over written values
“That's why I think it's really comes from the Founders personalities. It's very hard to live something you're not... If you are who you are. And like, that is the culture of the company. Even if you write down a different culture from who you are, So unless yo…”
Akhund: True PMF means organic demand pulls product without hard selling
“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…”
Akhund: Strong founders can manufacture weak product-market fit from any idea
“If you're actually a strong founder, you can sell anything, right? So you'll get weak product market fit almost out of any idea. And that's the problem.”
Akhund: Mercury took a year and a half of building before launch
“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.”
Akhund: Mercury's initial TAM analysis was post-hoc justification for personal intuition
“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…”
Akhund: Most incumbent banks don't build their own apps or websites
“And it's pretty obvious that kind of incumbent banks are not ready for that trend. Like they, you know, most of them don't build their own apps. They don't build their own website. They, you know, it's a, It's kind of a secondary thought. They still think of t…”
Akhund: Mercury's sales team only handles about 5% of accounts
“Even today, our sales team is only Does about five percent of our accounts.”
Akhund: Mercury lost 60% of revenue in March 2020
“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.”
Akhund: Mercury doubled in April 2020 amid branch shutdowns
“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…”
Akhund: Mercury Gained 8,000 Customers Within Two Weeks of SVB Collapse
“We had Like, 8000 customers sign up in like a week or two.”
Akhund: A CEO's Key Role Is Serving as an Emotional Leveling Function
“I think the most important thing as a CEO, especially, is to be, like, a leveling function. Actually, like, there's various parts to this, right? As an entrepreneur in general, like, yeah, either shit is amazing or shit is, like, awful, right? Like, it's, like…”
Mercury evaluates candidate curiosity via a one-hour non-work presentation exercise
“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…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury) | Aug 6, 2025 | 49m |