The Ledger
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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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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'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: 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.”
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: 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: 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…”
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 grew 30% to 40% monthly during its first year
“Mercury was product market fit from the day we launched. Like we just grew by like. 30, 40% a month for the first year.”
Akhund: A customer deposited $1M into Mercury via self-service four days post-launch
“Four days after launch, someone like signed up, never spoke to us and transferred a million dollars into a Mercury bank account.”
Akhund: Mercury scrapped initial sponsor bank partner, delaying launch six months
“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…”
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…”