Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Akhund: Early founders should tackle their biggest weaknesses and hardest risks first

Imad Akhund · Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury) · Aug 6, 2025 · at 35:23

Imad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, explains why he focused on regulatory compliance and bank partnerships rather than coding when starting Mercury.

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“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.”

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More from Imad Akhund

Opinion
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…”
Imad Akhund Aug 6, 2025 ▶ 39:08 Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
Insight
Akhund: Startup iteration cannot succeed without societal-level macro tailwinds
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Imad Akhund Aug 6, 2025 ▶ 14:35 Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
Insight
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…”
Imad Akhund Aug 6, 2025 ▶ 40:45 Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
Insight
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 …”
Imad Akhund Aug 6, 2025 ▶ 42:24 Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
Disclosure
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.”
Imad Akhund Aug 6, 2025 ▶ 54:06 Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
Assertion Supported
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”
Imad Akhund Aug 6, 2025 ▶ 57:13 Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
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