Letters to a Young Founder: Immad Akhund of Mercury
The unicorn fintech CEO on shipping with intent, unconventional products, and growing as a leader.
“Mario is incredibly thoughtful and diligent in the craft of writing about technology. One of the real ones!” — Nikhil, a paying member
Friends,
I am skeptical when someone declares that a company has “taste.” What do we mean by this?
Too often, the answer seems to be that the startup in question liberally uses multicolored gradients or has its homepage in “dark mode.” Taste, in these cases, is just a stand-in for “fashionable” or “on-trend” rather than an embodiment of deep thought and deep craft.
True taste is less performative. It is a product doing exactly what you want it to do with minimal friction. It is a feeling of working with a system, rather than against it. It is intuitive but legible, familiar but anticipatory. Design legend Dieter Rams described his philosophy as “Less but better.” This is my favorite encapsulation of what taste means and what it feels like.
Mercury is a company with undeniable taste. Use it once, and you are likely to rhapsodize about it. The fact that what you use it for is sending wires, paying bills, and checking your balance makes this power all the more impressive. How do you make searching for a transaction or transferring funds between accounts joyful?
For this reason, I’ve been excited to have Mercury as the presenting sponsor for this year’s “Letters” series. (You might have seen them on our correspondences with Kirsten Green and Marc Lore.) And it’s why I was excited to invite Mercury CEO and founder Immad Akhund to participate in a special edition of “Letters to a Young Founder” himself. As you’ll see, I used the opportunity to ask Immad about the company’s approach to product design and how they maintain quality at scale. I also dug into some of the surprising launches Mercury has made since we wrote about them two years ago, and how he’s had to scale as a CEO.
Immad shared a detailed and thoughtful response, outlining how he implemented a “year of launches,” why he keeps an eye out for “product debt,” and the rationale behind launching a consumer offering. I enjoyed learning from him, and I hope you will as well.
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Brought to you by Mercury
It’s a classic story: You start a company to become a founder, make your big idea happen, and escape the tedium of the regular workday. But you didn’t count on having to do the work of a whole team, spend your day on tedious financial tasks, and keep pushing big-picture work to tomorrow.
Enter Mercury, banking* that does more than hold your money, so you can get more done in the day. Mercury provides tools, calculators, and templates, like their free balance sheet template, so you can get a clear picture of your company’s finances without building it from scratch. Quickly populate the sheet with your numbers in a few clicks, and you’re on your way to making better big-picture decisions for the road ahead.
*Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.
Mario’s letter
Subject: Two years later
From: Mario Gabriele
To: Immad Akhund
Date: Friday, June 13 2025 at 5:34 PM BST
Hi Immad,
It’s great to be back in touch! The last time we talked was probably back in early 2023, in researching our case study on Mercury. You’d just gone through the intensity of the SVB fallout, weathering what sounded like the most intense week in the company’s history. Since we spoke, I’ve enjoyed following Mercury’s continued success as both a tech analyst and a (very happy) user.
A great deal seems to have changed over the intervening 2+ years. You’ve scaled headcount from 450 to ~950, launched entire new product lines like Mercury Personal, and recently announced a $300 million Series C led by Sequoia. As the company has evolved, you’ve seemingly succeeded in maintaining the same absurdly high bar in terms of product design and usability. I am sincere when I say that I think there must be just a handful of companies on the planet that put the same level of design care into their products – let alone within the finance space.
I’d love to explore this period of Mercury's life with you. What have been the biggest changes you’ve had to make over the past ~2 years? What has challenged you most as a leader? How have you had to adjust your processes or culture?
I’ve often heard from scaling CEOs that it can be difficult to maintain alignment as the business scales. Not because new hires don’t adhere to the company’s philosophy, but simply because it’s tricky to rapidly build context in a new environment. What behaviours are prioritized? What norms does the team adhere to? From the businesses I’ve studied, the solution seems to be for the CEO to aggressively overcommunicate, repeating the company’s values and priorities day after day, week after week. What have you done to protect Mercury’s vision and culture as the business has grown? Are there any new rituals you’ve implemented that you’ve found especially useful? I’d be curious to understand whether you’ve tried to hold onto the spirit of an early-stage startup as the organization has scaled.
I’d also be interested in knowing how you’ve sought to maintain high standards. As mentioned, much of Mercury’s magic seems to come from caring much more than other financial providers. You pay attention to the most granular of behaviours, the tiny sources of friction, and then work to sand them away. I would expect that, as your product grows, that level of attention is constantly threatened. It’s presumably harder to maintain across an expanding product suite, and, usually, it’s hard for companies to attract missionaries as they grow. How do you set the bar for the team and especially newcomers? How have you tried to keep raising the bar when it comes to talent?
Lastly, I’d be really interested to learn about the push into personal accounts you made starting a year ago. There’s been a great deal of mimesis in B2B fintech – one startup builds a popular new feature and the rest of the market rushes to adopt it. It’s seemingly very important to maintain feature parity across business use cases. However, there have been few, if any, recent examples of a B2B player pushing into consumer. (You see it happen the other way more often – Revolut launching Revolut Business, for example.) Why did Mercury Personal make sense for Mercury compared to the rest of the market? How did you reason through that decision? And what has the impact of it been for the business and your positioning?
Thank you for making the time to correspond with me and excited to hear your thoughts.
Best,
Mario
Immad’s Response
Subject: Two years later
From: Immad Akhund
To: Mario Gabriele
Date: Thursday, July 3 2025 at 1:06 PM PST
Hi Mario,
Great to hear from you. Mercury really has transformed significantly since we last spoke in 2023. I enjoyed looking back at our evolution through reading your letter. As we’ve grown, maintaining “the same absurdly high bar” for product quality that you so kindly mentioned has taken a lot of considered work and attention to detail at all levels of the company. We have a lot of ground to cover.
On the last two years
Two major evolutions defined this period for us.
First, we significantly upgraded our risk and compliance operations. This was an acknowledgment of the maturity and scale we’d reached, and in the era of post-SVB, we thought it was ever more critical to double — or triple — down. We brought on Steve Pearlman as Chief Compliance Officer and roughly tripled our compliance team, updating our processes across customer-facing and internal operations along the way.
Second, we had what we called “the year of launches” in 2024 to fulfill our vision of reimagining banking. Now, that compliance team I mentioned earlier would want me to clarify that Mercury is a fintech, not a bank, and I will: Mercury builds intuitive software on top of banking infrastructure provided by partner banks. This has allowed us to design and iterate elegant products quite quickly, as evidenced here.
About eighteen months ago, toward the end of 2023, we set ambitious product goals to make Mercury a true hub for managing business finances and the workflows required as businesses scale. Throughout 2024 we launched Invoicing, Bill Pay, employee reimbursements, and we built out our spend management controls.
When we started this work, Mercury was essentially an excellent place to manage your money and get a credit card. (The Mercury IO card is a Mastercard issued by Mercury’s partner bank.) In contrast, Mercury today is so much more. It’s one powerful product that allows entrepreneurs to do just about anything they want with their money.
This was a lot of work, and to maintain that high bar for quality, we had to be strategic about not overloading our existing teams by pulling them away from our core product. So, to move the various efforts forward, we created small, dedicated product teams that worked like mini seed-stage startups within Mercury. While embedded on one of these new product teams, team members were not also working on our core, existing product — we wanted to make space for the new without distracting from or neglecting the core. We also wanted these teams to be able to move fast and make fairly independent decisions, so long as they were anchored by our overall vision and our strong opinions about what the Mercury product experience should be like.
This approach is how we built Mercury Personal. (Personal allows customers to open personal, not just business, accounts through our partner bank, Choice. I’ll share more on that later.) We recruited a lead with deep subject matter expertise in the retail banking space and assembled a small team deputized with building, designing, and testing the Personal product. And, as you know, we launched Personal!
In my opinion, this general approach has worked well.
Of course, even times of great forward motion aren’t without challenges. For me, probably the hardest part of building startups is when you have to do something that is necessary in some way but conflicts with a core element of your philosophy or values. For example, as we further matured our compliance program, we had to offboard customers from about nine countries. The customers hadn’t done anything wrong, but our risk standards had changed. We exist to support entrepreneurs, so when we have to do something that doesn’t directly make their lives easier, I find it painful.
Maintaining high standards as we scale
To your questions about maintaining Mercury’s product quality, it comes down to layers of intentionality: hiring people who genuinely care, helping them understand the bar, and creating processes to reinforce our standards and enable them to get things “right.”
Let’s start with people. They’re the foundation. We specifically look for team members, especially designers, product managers, and engineers, who care deeply about craft. If you don’t have people who fundamentally care, you start out at a disadvantage. But when you do, quality is often their default output.
There’s also the bit upfront before you hire someone — what are the standards, what exercises do you make them do, how do you ensure you’re getting someone really good? During our interview process, beyond just learning about someone’s skills and experience, we try to get a window into how they think and what level of passion they approach various subjects and problems with.
Then there’s the onboarding and training process. We're always tweaking this, but we talk about product philosophy and show new hires high-craft features we create and why we care about that, like past work we’re proud of that we feel captures our spirit and ethos. During onboarding, we even ship out these culture books about the art of banking that our team made. People are often surprised but intrigued that we’re associating banking and art and doing this kind of thinking. These are the kinds of signals that set expectations.
From a top-down perspective at Mercury, one of my co-founders, Jason Zhang, and I stay deeply involved in product decisions. He’s become our main product and design executive, and we both care intensely about the details. But maintaining quality at scale means scaling that care. We like structured checkpoints. We run weekly two-hour executive product workshops where teams present their work. We have a #pre-shipped channel in our Slack workspace where people can share things with executives to review before launch. You can say you care about quality all you want, but if you don't actually review work, engage around it, and push people when needed, standards can easily degrade over time.
Then you have ongoing rituals — the design crits, the exec check-ins, all that stuff, where you continuously set the bar for quality. Each team also has its own ongoing training to reinforce these standards.
There’s also what I think of as “product debt,” similar to technical debt, that has to be managed. There might be pressure to ship something you know is a bit subpar because you’re up against a deadline — while I don’t think this should ever be your norm, there are times when you might decide that’s the best path forward in the short term. But if you accumulate too much of this, it becomes hard to recover. So you have to make time to pay it down. For example, we recently spent six months combining our separate Send Money and Bill Pay flows. This is an example of a redundancy that occurred as we expanded the product suite. The average user might not have noticed, but we did; it wasn’t an optimal experience, and it forced us to maintain two very similar things. Finally fixing it made a significant impact and was a good use of time.
The various hats of a founder
In terms of the standards I set for myself as a CEO, I see my role evolving through three distinct phases, each requiring fundamentally different skills and mindsets.
First, there’s pre-product-market fit: This is the company’s early days when you’re mostly an individual contributor focused on building alongside your team. At Mercury, I was primarily engineering during this phase — frankly, there really wasn't much else to do besides executing on the core product and talking to investors.
Then, once you have some customers and have found some footing, you enter the early scaling phase: At this point, you're not doing so much of that IC work yourself. You’re focused on keeping everyone working toward the vision. You’re managing a growing team, but they're mostly people you've promoted internally rather than seasoned executives. You remain deeply involved in the details of hiring, managing, and directing their work. When last we talked, this phase was in the fairly recent past.
Finally, you enter the true executive leadership phase: At this point, your team is of the scale where you're primarily managing experienced executives. This is where I've been for about two and a half years, and it requires a completely different approach than the earlier phases. You give them significant problems and substantial autonomy to figure out how to solve those problems. But you have to become excellent at hiring executive talent — a topic worthy of its own conversation, some time.
This last phase marks a move away from the prototypical figure of the founder as a scrappy (sort of) individual contributor. I think of what you have to do here as a CEO as “selective deep involvement.” Whatever represents the main problem or opportunity for Mercury gets my intense focus, while other areas run through competent executives. The key is identifying what most needs attention from the founder versus what can be effectively delegated.
Sometimes I miss engineering like I used to do. Sometimes I miss the tangible satisfaction of shipping code, but the highest-leverage thing I can do now is very different. And that’s the job of a CEO — to do the highest-leverage thing possible for whatever stage your company is in.
A personal decision
You mentioned that it's fairly unconventional for B2B companies to enter consumer markets — and I know you’re right. Initially, the idea of personal accounts on Mercury generated skepticism internally. Many within Mercury and several investors questioned why we'd pursue it at all. I think it’s easy to default to a mentality of “this won't work” — but when you have strong conviction and can test cheaply, that’s a good opportunity to execute. So I pushed for it, based on several strategic rationales:
First, I genuinely wanted it myself. I certainly don’t think I know everything or that we should just make everything I personally want, but this came from the same intuition that drove Mercury's original creation. When founders with solid product instincts want something badly, it’s worth seeing if there’s broader market demand — there frequently is.
Second, it was our customers’ top feature request. Once people had experienced Mercury for their business finances, they wanted it for their personal finances, too. I think building what people actively ask for beats trying to imagine unmet needs.
Third, the addressable market is huge. Consumer banking also represents a larger TAM opportunity than business banking, which makes the case compelling.
Fourth, the product complexity was manageable. We launched with essentially a six-person team because Mercury Personal shares core infrastructure with business accounts. If anything, personal finances involve less complexity than business operations!
The results were remarkable, better than I’d expected, actually. Metrics exceeded expectations across the board — demand, engagement, and deposits per customer were roughly 3x projections. Within six months, virtually everyone who’d been skeptical changed their mind. (If there’s a holdout, they haven’t let me know.)
From a strategic perspective, Mercury Personal created option value for a potentially massive additional market while leveraging existing infrastructure and team capabilities. For lack of a better word, the synergy between the business and personal side has been substantial. Many Mercury Personal users convert to users on the business side, and features developed for one side often benefit the other. For example, our mobile app improvements driven by expectations of Mercury Personal users have enhanced the business experience. Document OCR functionality that seemed purely business-oriented actually works well for personal financial management, too. And so on.
Overall, this experience reinforced an important lesson: sometimes you need to trust founder intuition over conventional wisdom, especially for low-cost experiments. Don’t let your ego, or your naysayers, get in the way.
A shared vision
The next challenge happens around keeping your team invested and aligned. To achieve this takes moments of reset.
Every six months, we step back from the day-to-day operations to get everyone thinking on what’s working and what’s not. We also get our teams, execs, and leaders together every few months to get on the same page, connect as people, spend time together in the same place, and build trust. These moments help us make sure we’re percolating a shared plan and vision through all levels and corners of the company, and that everyone has a chance to really think about how their department, team, and role will help us realize that vision.
Moreover, when we set our annual plans, we don’t just map out what we’re going to build or iterate on, we lean into the “big why” behind those decisions and how those decisions set us up for the future we want. For example, Jason’s vision doc this year talked about Mercury’s purpose: helping ambitious people use money to build great things. We want to help our team see beyond their task at hand and connect it to how it contributes to that larger vision.
You can’t do these resets or big vision moments too often. No one wants you going through your lofty vision doc every week, but a couple times a year, you need to reestablish: this is the plan, this is why we’re here, this is what we’re doing, this is how it’s changed, this is why we’re going to do it.
Finally,
As I’ve reflected on Mercury's journey and my own, there’s one more thing I might share with you: We’ve found it high-leverage to build on existing usage patterns rather than creating entirely new behaviors. We’re currently very engaged with customers in ecommerce and professional services — not because we hypothesized they’d like Mercury, but because they were segments where we already see strong organic adoption. Rather than imagining completely new use cases, we're investing in workflows that customers already create or demonstrate through their existing Mercury usage.
It’s been a remarkable experience to scale Mercury and the products we offer to meet the needs of our customers as they grow, too. Constantly building for them keeps the entrepreneurial spirit alive in our team and all the work we do.
Thanks for the thoughtful questions, Mario.
Best, Immad
Disclosures
Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Personal banking services provided through Choice Financial Group; Member FDIC. Business banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.
The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard®.