Akhund: Startup execution slows significantly once teams exceed 16 people
Immad Akhund · How Mercury Hit $500M ARR—then raised $300M from Sequoia at $3.5B. | Immad Akhund, CEO & Founder ... · PMF Show · Jul 21, 2025 · at 37:05
Immad Akhund, founder and CEO of Mercury, reflects on management overhead and execution speed at different team sizes.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, you know, everyone's kind of aligned.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Immad Akhund
Akhund: Great founders succeed regardless of any investor input
“If you're a good company with a good founder, you're probably gonna raise money from someone else, if not me and you'll probably be successful regardless of any investor input.”
Akhund: Startups with known feature roadmaps should build before acquiring users
“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…”
Akhund: 2018 Was the First Year BaaS Made Seed Fintech Launches Viable
“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”
Akhund: Building a fintech with money movement is 3x harder than software
“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…”