Mercury

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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”

“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”

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”