Mercury CEO Immad Akhund explains the personal heuristic he uses during founder intro calls to evaluate angel investments.
Insight
Akhund: AI coding tools struggle on large, interconnected codebases
“Engineering productivity. I haven't seen as much of a boost as I would like to see. I think it's really good for making an app from scratch. When you have a huge code base with, that's all interlinked, it's just not as good. And we also built in like a weird p…”
Opinion
Akhund: US banking is surprisingly uncompetitive compared to B2B SaaS
“I think actually this is surprisingly uncompetitive space for how big the opportunity is. Like banking in the US makes two trillion dollars. Like this is an insanely huge market. And I don't think it's like as competitive as like fricking B to B SaaS, right? L…”
Insight
Akhund: Venture debt is dangerous for pre-revenue startups seeking runway
“I think the cases where I don't love it is, you know, you're some AI company that's not making any money today, and you want to, like, go extend your extend your kind of fundraise and runway by, like, 20% or something. I think in those situations, like, when y…”
Opinion
Akhund: Slapping chatbot interfaces onto software is bad product design
“I'm not a fan of just, like, shove a chatbot in front of it as an interface. Like, I think it's easier to, like, have structured data and be able to do things.”
Assertion Partly supported
Akhund: Mercury raises $300M round led by Sequoia Capital
“We just announcing our CVC Sequoia is leading the round with Park and Marathon coming in as new investors, and all of our previous kind of VCs are participating, so it's a three hundred million round with a combination of primary and secondary.”
Insight
Akhund: Late-Stage Mega-Rounds Still Require Pitching a 100x Vision
“It's like a surprisingly similar process to an earlier round, right? I did this in about four weeks and you know, at least as a founder you really still like pitching the big vision, like how can this be, you know, another hundred X, right?”