A $5 Billion Fintech company CEO on the framework behind every product decision

0:00 How has your ambition changed over time, especially as capabilities like AI became more prominent? I think it's actually important as an entrepreneur to have this ambition, but you also have to kind of temper that with like really be quite systematic about it. How do you react when you find a blind spot that you have? >> Being a CEO and company building is like a journey of selfdiscovery. So, you need to understand like what your strengths and weaknesses are and like build a business around those.

0:22 >> What do you think about one-on- ones as companies scale? >> So, firstly, small company probably still essential. I think when you're at the point where you're CEO and you're mostly managing execs, I have not found one-on-one super useful. Do you imagine that like AI might be your next customer at Mercury? Hey everybody, I'm Paul Klein, founder of Browserbase, and I'm here on Navigators, our series with AI leaders navigating the uncertain future of AI. I'm here with Ahmad, co-founder of Mercury. So Mercury is a business that I use both personally and in my business and I think the idea of building a new bank that's interconnected and tech first has just been so exciting for me being an entrepreneur. How did you start Mercury and did you really imagine that it was going to go as far as it did when you first started the company?

1:09 >> Yeah. so this is my fourth business and obviously every one of those businesses I always pitched those entrepreneurs and all I mean those VCs and I was like this going to be huge etc. And I really did believe that. But so I was always excited about Mercury and I really you know came at this from like a personal pain point. This is my fourth business. I struggled as an entrepreneur with banks, right? They would never innovate. There'd be lots of fees. you know I always wanted an API so that you know in my previous business we would like make a bunch of payouts and receive a bunch of money. It was kind of a marketplace. and it was just super annoying. Like there's no API. We had we had people literally logging in every day to like receive payments and make payments for something that should have been automated. so so I had this idea initially and I thought someone else would do it because I was like obviously someone should build a better better bank for entrepreneurs. and obviously I have no idea how to do it so someone else would do it. and then you know I had this kind of you know list of ideas right and I was still doing my previous startup and then u you know four years later I sold that company. I was free again. and this was still on my list.

2:17 So I was like okay well I have no idea how this would have happened but let me go think about it and see if I could figure it out. And you know I got as I investigated it I got more and more convinced that it was a a huge idea right like if you think about every other category like basically of everything right like whether it's cars or TV or whatever we have tech companies kind of disrupting and owning those categories. but banking which is actually mostly a digital product at this point is still owned by these kind of huge incumbents right u like the top five banks are worth like two and a half trillion now or something like that.

2:52 so huge huge category clearly going to be disrupted and then you know this is one of the rare categories where Europe was much further ahead. So even in 2017 neo banks were much more established in Europe. So, I thought it would happen to her and you know I'm I'm obviously fortunate that like we started at the time we did the timing was right and and the product really kind of resonated with entrepreneurs like yourself. >> Yeah. And the ambition has always expanded over time. It seems like starting with focusing entrepreneurs but now like my first joint account with my wife is on Mercury. How has your ambition changed over time especially as capabilities like AI became more prominent? It seems like you've gotten more ambitious, but how has that kind of resulted in the business or product decisions that you've made and is there a cap on that ambition or is it is Mercury going to take over the world at some point?

3:40 >> Yeah, I mean I definitely have like boundless ambition, right? Like I think as a I think it's actually important as an entrepreneur to have boundless ambition. Like that's what I get excited by. I get excited about new things, but you also have to kind of temper that with like you don't want to be doing everything. You don't want to be distracted and the core is the core and you have to kind of really be quite systematic about it. So most of the things we end up kind of expanding in and launching in are things that our customers are asking us for. So you know Mercury personal was by far the biggest request. We would literally like post something completely random on the internet about some feature launches and people would be like, "Oh man, I really want this for personal, right? and I really wanted it for myself because a lot of the reasons Mercury exists, right? It's like I want to collaborate with people with, you know, banking and financial software that's also true on a personal level, right? Like you want to join account, you want your kids to have an account, you might want to have a virtual card for your nanny or something like that. So all of these things that like seem like power user business features are actually like quite relevant to like personal banking as well. So so yeah listening to customers is by far the best way to do product development. like I have a lot of ideas and every now and then we're like let's go do Emma's idea and and sometimes I'm right but often if we just go and do the thing that like actually the customers want rather than the things we think we should do it works out better. so that's definitely a big driver but there's also like you know there is like a systematic vision that like we've tried to build towards. So you know we started with early stage startups but we all were going to always going to expand to kind of a broader set of businesses and now we I think startups is less than 25% of our our customer base. and then we always wanted to build more financial software on top of the bank account.

5:21 Like we were like, you know, it's what you sign up to first. It's where your money is, but why do you then have to go sign up to something else for bill pay and something else for invoicing? It just never made sense. And the only reason it made sense is because banks just don't innovate on the software side. so you know, if you think about kind of a software first, tech first bank, like what does that mean? AI is obviously the most recent kind of innovation and I would say yeah I don't like jumping on hype trains right like a a year and a bit ago we were kind of we looked at AI like we were excited about it we were obviously using as an engineering team but in terms of like userf facing features I was like you know do people really trust this I don't want to like make up you know the hallucinations around and like all tool use was like still pretty new so it was only actually towards the end of last year where we were like okay actually you know we had even before the end of last year we had some simpler features like we did categorization and receipt matching and all that kind of stuff but in terms of having a an agent built into Mercury I would say it was only towards the end of last year we were like okay actually yeah the primitives exist we the models are good enough and we felt it was like the right point so u I guess it's been like twoish months ago we launched Mercury command but that's very much like v1 like we yeah you know we I think a yeah I kind of imagine like everything I get as a you know we have a whatever 15% finance team right everything I get from a finance team as a scaled up company why can't like a entrepreneur with a five person company also get that from and I think a lot of it can be done with agents over time >> yeah it's interesting because the role of an entrepreneur is to manage so much of my financial systems that's the important job and often you don't hire a finance person right away as a founder so it's very necessary there and all individuals have to manage their own finances. We're all the CFO of our life.

7:14 So that's another burden that I have. And and then there's this idea like if in this AI world we're having agents operate on our behalf, they'll probably have to transact. Like they might need to have a bank account at some point. Do you imagine that like AI might be your next customer at Mercury? Will AI be opening bank accounts or at least operating from mine and sending and receiving money or you doing this idea of agentic commerce? How does that go into your broader product strategy within Mercury if AI is the next customer?

7:40 >> Yeah, so we've been also thinking about that. We actually just literally yesterday launched kind of agentic cards. So, you know, again, this was like behavior that was already happening on Mercury. People would create a virtual card and give it to their claw co-work or whatever and say like, "Hey, go book me something or whatever." so I think this like this this behavior is emerging where, you know, I'm often doing a search, right? What was I searching for the other day? Like I was like, "Oh yeah, what are theater shows happening in in San Francisco?" I was like, "This is ridiculous. Like why can't I just take buy, right? Like I just want the thing like I picked every I picked all the steps towards it, but I can't close the transaction." So I think it's going to come I think this is like behavior people want. but there's also yeah the whole next part of it like what are the controls? What's you know what with fintech it's not just about like you did the thing. It's also like you know what's the chargeback? How do we deal with fraud? How do we how do we actually like enable this without like you know it's not just the user experience that you have to enable you also have to enable the back end of it.

8:40 >> There's all the other stuff you have to think about that's super long tail. >> So so we've been thinking a lot about it. So there's a couple of ways we've approached it so far. So within command the AI can never make a right decision. it can only set you up. So the way it works right now is like there's kind of the AI which is like read only and like command kind of pings that and then if the AI suggests a right so it's like hey at this point like I want to send a wire it will then prompt the user and say okay you know do you want to do this action and the user clicks and that goes to a separate server which is like the kind of a normal kind of right server.

9:14 so that's kind of how we're thinking about it and you know we've talked to other people and that's like that's probably the only real like compliant approach to it right now. I don't think this is forever. I think some people will trust the AI to fully transact and they don't want to click the button, you know, they want to do it with permissions or like unsafe permissions or whatever the it is. but yeah, right now it's like the user has to like click to transact. So that's how we're thinking about it. It's like AI is more in the setup and and the user clicks the final approval. But yeah, that would be pretty good from my perspective. like when I want to book that theater ticket, I'm fine with clicking like yes, I'm ready to spend the $50. but AI can do the rest of it for me. and I'm kind of I kind of think about AI in the future as like an employee, right? But it's like a very low trust employee.

10:03 Like it's like if you hired someone that you've you've never met, right? like yes, like maybe they're smart and you want them to do things and you'll like build up trust with them over time, but you probably still want to click on the approve and you still want to have like the right controls in place. so, but I do think like it's we will get more and more confidence in those employees, right? Like right now it's kind of like a junior employee that you don't necessarally trust and like over time as you get more confidence, yeah, maybe yeah, maybe right now every transaction has to be approved, but yeah, in the future like a $50 transaction, maybe you don't care about that. Maybe that's like autodone. but at 10,0001 you still have to click on the approval thing which is like similar to how you deal with employees as well.

10:41 >> And I imagine that building in this sector because there's so much like regulation and compliance and probably like legacy systems you have to integrate with. How has it been building Mercury in terms of like technology you've had to build? You know you have this really really high product bar. Does the technology bar also have to be equally high if not higher internally? And how did you build that culture of being able to make something that is arguably one of the most like antiquitated systems in the United States into something that's like really really seamless and smooth?

11:09 >> Yeah, I mean I'd say like doing a fintech is you know my all my previous companies were software companies and I always like describe fintex as like at least three times harder, right? because you have this you do all the bit that you would do in a software company like you still need the login system you still need like a nice UI app and all all of that kind of stuff but then you have this like integration in the back end with like some really legacy like funky systems where like you know if you want to do a wire like that's still SFTP under the hood right it's like these are like they work but they are not like easy systems to integrate AC is like that too so there's this kind of integration and then the third part is kind of the fraud, compliance, risk part, which you know, I'm saying 3x harder, but you know, maybe that's 5x harder, especially if like the cost of building the software is getting cheaper, right? Like AI is making easier to build software, so everything else is maybe maybe the hard bit. but you know, I've always viewed it and like maybe I'm like a bit of of a sadist or something, but like I've always said like everything that's hard is the reason we exist, right? Like if it was easy, we wouldn't need to exist.

12:16 Like if it was Yeah. if anyone could do it banks would do it themselves, right? Like there would be there wouldn't be a reason for us to exist. But the the hard bit and like actually navigating the hard bit which is like you know how do we make sure we are like compliant and we have like all of these KYC questions and AML questions like all these things that we have to do in onboarding how do we do that while at the end people think like wow this was an amazing onboarding experience right which is like one of the things that people love about mercury is like that's actually quite hard but if we can solve that we've like that's the real like magic of it right so and we're going through this bank charter process right now we applied and we have conditional approval and like it's hard like it's not it's not like a a thing that like a normal software entrepreneur would be like wow I'm really excited to like do all this work to like become like bank ready and but yeah if we do this and we do it in a in a way that actually still lets us be an innovative high growth company that builds amazing products right that would be that would be like pretty difficult but if we can achieve that that would be actually relatively unique in the banking system u so that's kind of you know all of these hard things going to get me excited like I don't want to do easy things in life.

13:25 >> Yeah. As a founder, it seems like our job is to try and chew glass as much as possible. >> So customers you have to go look and find the glassy. You have to have an appetite for glass in the companies that we're building. but I have to imagine for you not building a fintech before starting this company, did you have any doubts? Did you have concerns about how you were going to learn all these things or was it just brick by brick we'll build this thing and solve each problem one after the other? I mean, I don't know if you feel this as a CEO, but you know, everything is always different.

13:55 Like I'm like I it's very rare for me to go like, "Wow, I know everything about this job and I'm doing like I I don't need to learn anything." And I I think like learning new things is like maybe every CEO, but one of my superpowers is like I and I really like it. Like I like learning things. Like I feel like if I'm not learning, I feel like I don't know, it's just boring. So like learning new things gets me excited. So I deliberately like all four of my companies have been in a completely different space and I just I I wanted to do I I was like this is you know I guess I was like 37 or something but I was like you know this is might not be another company after this like I'm going to do this thing and I do it hard and I want it to be like really hard.

14:38 but yeah I did have the luxury of picking something particularly hard because I sold my previous company so you know I had like some money in the bank. I wasn't like I could think a little bit more long term. in my previous companies was a it was a little more short-term thinking. I was like, "Oh, you know, how do I sell this thing and like make some money?" I was whereas this one I was like, you know, I'm fine to do this for 10 years and never see liquidity and like try to solve this like hard difficult problem.

15:00 >> Yeah. The reason I love to hear about the doubts that people have. It's like there's always uncertainties about a market and a lot of our job as entrepreneurs is to find out like where is this market going to be and and how did it work out? and it seems >> the one thing that's like relevant to AI here which I find really interesting is like I remember when I started in 2017 I was like wow like you know I don't know anything about fintech and like surely every lots of people know lots of things about fintech and then there was definitely like a you know this kind of trough of despair where I was like 3 months in and like I talk to someone and they'd be like you know there's a lot of acronyms in fintech right they'd be like a BSA you know AML like all these things that I'd be like every time I'd be like okay what did they say like let me look that up. And afterwards I was like I don't you know I really don't know the space. but then like 6 months into it I realized that you know I spent this like six months like going hard at trying to understand it. And I think I like counted it once. did like 90 meetings with different people with like lawyers and fintech entrepreneurs and VCs and banks and like all this stuff and I was really like trying to suck information and like every meeting was like okay how do I do this and like what's next and then I realized after like six months I was talking to people and I knew more than them at least what with for what I was trying to do because I just talked to so many people and I you know and then after I maybe not there but after time I realized that you know within a year or too of like intense learning. I was at the edge of knowledge because actually like not that many people knew how to build neo banks in the US. and I think this is true for AI as well.

16:33 Like if you look at AI, you're like, "Wow, it's like there's so many people that know how to build like agents and all this stuff." But actually like there's just not that many years of knowledge, right? Like I think if you started now and you spent like 6 months and the only thing you were doing was like learning how to build agents and like how to do harnesses and evals and all this stuff you would be at the edge of like what's knowable in the space.

16:54 and then stuff keeps changing so like you could kind of keep a breast with it. So I think people often think like it's too late or like they you know the learning barrier is too high. but like if you're really willing to do it and like you're willing to like spend that time you can catch up with the frontier. and be at the frontier in membership. >> Yeah, it's about like finding this specialty that you can learn more about than anybody else and just going absolutely to the deep end beyond any reasonable person would spend time reading about Neoank, right? Like you have to have that motivation which often is a companized force behind it to go chase the frontier edge of some sort of knowledge and hopefully some resources too. But I'm curious how you think about the founders that you invest in because you're a bit of a prolific angel investor, invested in many, many companies. How do you apply all these learnings that you've had with Mercury to the founders that you're backing and investing in? And what are some of the traits that you look for?

17:50 >> you know, I just try to be helpful to founders. Like that's partly why I invest. It's kind of fun to try to give back. everyone has a unique journey like that they're building a company, they themselves are unique, the space is unique. So, you know, I think one of the things that people fail at when they give advice is when they give like very absolute advice. you really have to understand someone's situation very deeply. and so yeah, I try to like give people broader advice than like go like you should do this. It's much more like okay, you know, what do you think?

18:20 And you have to be really thoughtful about like giving advice because I think it's I've received plenty of advice that's been wrong. so I often worry about doing that to other people. and you know, in terms of what I look for, you know, I really want to get excited about what they're building. I think, you know, it's cool to go like, oh, what if this existed in 10 years, like what would the world be like? and if I get excited about it, I feel like I can be more helpful with someone.

18:49 So, that's one of my main criteria, like how excited, how exciting is this, how how cool would it be if this existed, how big would it be? and then I would really want like entrepreneurs that easy to talk to that like, you know, not coachable, but like, you know, it's like a sometimes you just have some entrepreneurs that like just super high ego and, you know, they're like, I need a decision like in the next 20 minutes and I'm like, you know, I don't have time for that. Like you can I mean, if that works for them, good for them. But it's just like from my perspective, I want to feel like if they want to text me and it's like 7 p.m. and they're like going through something, I want to jump on a call with them and just just have a chat kind of thing and be helpful.

19:25 >> Yeah. I feel like investing in startups for me it's like the most expensive substack I've ever subscribed to because I get the monthly investor update and I think the first of the month mine goes out as well I send them I think you send or used to send them as well. >> the investor update is so important for me in the type of founder it is because like how much intentionality you bring to this thing. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking on, you know, April 2025. And I remember that month and that moment and whatever challenge it was that day. we were talking about a tweet that we saw earlier today about, you know, sending investor updates or not. companies go through hard times, right? It's important to continue to talk to investors and build those relationships because investors don't just want to hear about the good times, they also want to hear about the bad times.

20:10 I'd love to hear how you've leaned on investors during hard times in Mercury and like how those relationships may have helped you as you built this company. >> Well, I'll talk about the investor update first because I did find this to be very annoying. This person was like, "Never send investor updates." >> should founders send investor updates? >> Yeah, I think it's I think one thing that people don't always get is like, you know, if everything is great, you just don't need to do a lot of things like, you know, you have like really strong product market, you're growing fast, market's huge, whatever, right?

20:37 everything is great and then you can do whatever like don't talk to the investors ever even treat them badly what you know I wouldn't do that but I'm just saying like advice doesn't matter that much because like things are good so why would you know what's the downside you but the problem is like things aren't always good and sometimes like you know you're going to struggle you're going to need an extra 10 million or whatever because like you know COVID happens or something happens that's outside your control and at that point like have you built a good relationship with investors And that are they going to be like there or are they going to go like hey I haven't heard from this you know I invested in this company and this has happened to me lots of times like I don't hear from it for 3 years like zero. like they didn't reach out. No investor updates nothing.

21:20 And they're like oh you know we're struggling we're raising an extra 500k and I'm like I don't know anything about you at this point. Like I've literally forgotten your pitch. You ever talked to me at all? and and yeah, I'm not very like my propensity at that point to go like yes, you know, let me support you in this like situation is not very high. Same with like if the company fails like sometimes like an investing company, I never hear from them. They fail. I'm like, okay, you know, whatever. But then the entrepreneur comes back to me, it's like, hey, I'm raising for a new company. I'm like, well, I I had no idea what happened in your previous company.

21:49 Like, you know, maybe they tried their hardest, but like at least my knowledge of fit is I invested and they quietly did nothing and then failed. so I just really feel like you know if you want to build any sort of relationship you have to have investor updates and I do think the other part which you talked about is like the investor updates also for you and the team. It's like how do you like think about your business? I nowadays we don't do investor updates but we do these board talks which like I think are fairly similar function for me which is like how do I think about my business? How do I think about the plan?

22:20 How do I present that to the to myself and then the team and then the investors last? Like I think of the investors as like the third le the third least the third most useful reader for that doc. It's mostly for you and for the team in my opinion. So I'm really into investor updates. in terms of working with investors, we talked about this just before the show, but I really think it's important to think about investors as like partners. Like these are really smart people. They know the industry well. or they know at least the VC ecosystem and like the other startups and all this stuff well. and they're a third party perspective and they like have skin in the game. they know your business because you're keeping them updated. so like that's like a really good perspective, right? Like actually I don't have that perspective from anyone else. Like my my team is kind of biased, right? Like we we're in the trenches together and if I go speak to some random investor or random friend of mine or random entrepreneur, they just don't have that context or skin in the game.

23:17 so I think there's a really valuable perspective to be had here and I think like how do you basically use their perspective? I think that's and like often they'll push me because like you know they'll go like hey you know like I remember a few years ago one of our investors was like you know we were like mostly just banking at that point and we talked about this multi-product strategy and all that stuff but we hadn't really done it and we' kept doing it as like oh you know there's a couple of engineers working on this and he was like you know what's the future here like you know are you going to be a multi-product company or or is this like you know is this it and yeah I was like oh like you know I'm not doing it right. I'm I'm giving it lip service but I'm not really working on it and it you know it really changed our strategy and yeah it was it was good on him because he was like delivering a message that wasn't necessarily comfortable like you don't want you know it's always easy to just go like oh yeah this is fine and like we were growing fine like there was nothing wrong with the business. but he really pushed us to go like okay you know what's how do you become like a multi-product company that like you've been talking about. so yeah I think but you have to like give investors enough context and like trust them to like actually push you in the right ways. so yeah I found them like it's not like they're valuable all the time right like sometimes you have that board meeting and you're like okay you know my plan is fine I didn't really learn that much from it but like once a year you'll get something whether it's like that kind of push or like some intro or something like that that can like really change change the trajectory of your company. There's always an art to receiving that feedback from an investor or a partner or an employee. how do you react when you find a blind spot that you have?

24:56 >> You might be have been focusing on something, you realize, oh crap, this thing's over here. How do you handle that mentally as you're building this company? and like how do you incorporate truth seeeking into the way that you're building this whole company? I think it's a lot of like being a CEO and company building is like a journey of self discovery. and I feel like if you haven't gone through that it's going to sound a little tright >> and I it's hard to like I think I think part of it is like understanding yourself. It's like you know what am I actually good at? What am I bad at? And then you know all those things you're bad at aren't things that you necessarily need to fix either. Like I think when you first start as an entrepreneur, I don't know if you've gone through this, but like I'm I'm like, "Oh, you know, I'm bad at X." Like I'm not a great manager for example.

25:46 and then my first response is I need to fix this. And I did I did need to fix it to some extent like I you know I read the books and I talked to people and I went to courses and all of that kind of stuff. but the end of it I was like okay you know actually I just don't like doing some of it right like I don't like doing one-on- ones and like you know you can you do need to get better but also you need to understand like what your strengths and weaknesses are and like build a business around those. so I'm trying to remember what your question was. How do you handle these when you find a blind spot? Like it seems like what you're saying is like you don't always fix it. Like there's parts of it where like yeah I have a bad I am a bad manager. It's okay. Like it's I guess it's okay to have some areas that you >> I think it's worth knowing what you knowing what you don't know like it's it's not acceptable to go like oh it's an unknown unknown and I'm not going to think about it. and I often think like if you have a conversation it makes you uncomfortable like you receive feedback or you you know someone says like why aren't you doing that? I actually think you need to lean into that right like I think as a as an entrepreneur it's a disservice like if you feel uncomfortable about it you're like okay I'm going to ignore it.

26:55 that's not good. Like I think if you're uncomfortable about something, you should lean into it and like go like what, you know, why am I uncomfortable about it? Like you want to get to a position where actually if someone else gave you that feedback, you'd be like, okay, I'm fine with that. You know, and if you if you're not at all comfortable, you're like, yeah, you know, I recognize that and this is what I'm doing because of it and I'm okay with that kind of thing. That's fine. But if it makes you uncomfortable, then like maybe there's like a grain of truth to it, right? So yeah, you lean into it. You try to learn what you can learn and then, you know, there's some things that you'll never learn. And that's also fine. I think it's like, you know, I think I've always thought about there's this idea of like a T-shaped individual. Are you familiar with that?

27:30 >> Yeah, of course. >> But I really like the idea like, you know, you should understand what you're great at. And you know, you I think you should be more defined by the things that you're great at rather than the things that you're bad at because like at the end of the day, like the things that you're bad at, you can build things around, but the greatness is the reason you exist, right? Like the like your greatness is what is going to make your company successful, not your like weaknesses. so I think being too fixated on like, oh, I'm not good at this or whatever or like or like sometimes I find entrepreneurs don't don't do the thing that they're great at, right? Like, yeah, you might be a great product entrepreneur, but like you're just spending all your time like hiring execs or managing people, whatever. And actually, what's the point, right? Like there's other people that are great at that. and you should just focus on your greatness and build scaffolding around your weaknesses.

28:16 >> I want to pick off one point that you made or a little note. What do you think about one-on- ones as companies scale? It sounds like you're not a big fan of one-on- ones. >> so firstly, small company, you know, you're managing IC's, whatever, one-on- ones are, I think, probably still essential. And maybe there's a way to structure them where it's very functional. I think when you're at the point where you're CEO and you're mostly managing execs, I have not found one-on-one super useful. you know, frankly, like those people know more than me about their spaces. I know more about like company strategy and c you know customers and product and like where we're going etc. But in a one-on-one setting like I just have never found it useful. I found it like draining and like you know u I'm not I just don't know why I was doing them. I was doing them because like I guess everyone else did them. Actually I heard a Jensen Hang speak at one of these events and he was like he has 60 direct reports doesn't do any one ones. And I was like oh yeah why if he doesn't do it why should why am I still doing this?

29:14 So, I don't know if I have the best structure for it right now. I I instead took like all my execs and I was like, "Okay, you know, we're going to talk about GTM. I'm going to have my marketing exec, sales exec, revenue exec, and growth person there. we're going to talk about product. I'm going to have my engineering leaders, product leaders, and design leaders there. and then we just talk about real stuff, right? We talk about like we to get together and we're like, "Okay, why am we growing faster? Like, when are we launching this?" And like, you know, how should we think about that? I just find them way more productive meetings than like one-on- ones. actually has meant that my breadth of people I can manage has grown. because one-on- ones were like kind of the limiting factor to some extent. so now I have like I mean right now it's a little extreme. I have like 15 or 16 direct reports. but I can manage a lot more people without it. there's definitely some things you lose and you know I'm still I kind of was like okay you know this is a little too extreme. So I I now have a quarterly check-in cuz I'm like I can't like never talk to these people.

30:13 >> It's like the investor pay thing. You're not hearing from the employees for a long time. >> I mean I was but it's not like oneonone and I've said to them like you can reach out to it's not like I will not talk to them oneonone. It's just like they if they have a subject let's talk about it. but it's not but yeah I still have this quarterly checkin thing. So it's not zeros one ones. but yeah I'm still like figuring out like what's the right model but I'm really think this is much better. So I mean it goes back to like being a CEO and learning all the time. Like you have to actually like every part of what I do I feel like over time has to change. I like what you said there about finding the limiting factor to my scaling ability of like managing team like oh this one I'll just take that away. there's this idea of like raptoring where you like there's a the first version of the raptor engine on this SpaceX rocket was very complex and they made it more simple and beautiful and like took away pieces and you know there's this idea like scaling companies just continually find the bottleneck and remove it. How have you taken that approach to like removing the limiting factor for Mercury as it's grown and and what are some like the like primitives you use to think about product and company strategy to find those bottlenecks?

31:17 >> Yeah, I mean there's definitely I think actually going this is going to be a little bit spicy here probably like going on vacation is great because you you learn a lot about like bottlenecks when you go on vacation. You're like, you know, what came to a complete pause because I wasn't there, right? Like, and they're like, okay, you know, did it really need to come to a complete pause? And like, yeah, sometimes it's people like people are not like, you know, not owning problems, not scaling, etc. actually went on a we have a company thing where like after 5 years you get like a six week sbatical. so I went on six week and it was definitely like illuminating.

31:51 not that I do that all the time, but yeah, I I actually genuinely think like understanding it's hard when you're in the game and you're like, you know, doing your meetings and all this stuff to like really understand like what is the bottlenecks that you are yourself like holding the company back cuz you know I I I kind of think about like the CEO's job is to be an accelerant or a problem solver, but if you're like things are waiting on you, I think you're not doing a good job in my opinion. Other people obviously run companies differently but that's my take on running companies like I should not be blocking things I should be speeding things up or I should be solving things but I shouldn't be the reason that things aren't moving forward. so I've actually even since we were you know we started off with like eight person team and even then I tried to construct it so I was never the bottleneck I was just like acceler but if you have that mindset you can kind of construct processes around that mindset.

32:42 like we have a channel called pre-shipped which you know was like I was like oh I kind of want to see the designs before like engineering starts working on them or like I want to see the kind of develop product spec before people start working on it. but I was like I don't want to be like the blocker on that like I don't want to be like you have to come to a meeting and show me your design before the next thing can happen. So we have this like asynchronous channel. People post things. Yeah. Sometimes I'm like I don't like this or why are we doing this? But a lot of the times it's just like okay cool. This is like kind of cool. It's nice to see that we're making progress on this. U so you have to kind of construct processes. I like you know the things that you construct when you're five person company are going to be different for we're 1,300 person company. So you know you kind of have to be less and less bottlenecking the bigger you are because like there's there's just so much stuff happening in my career. if I was like involved in a ton of it, like I would be slowing everything down.

33:34 >> And do you think like AI has enabled you to do more as a CEO within your company? Are you using AI in the day-to-day? And if so, how? >> this is a funny thing about like being the CEO of a scale order company that like I have a chief of staff, I have an EA, I have like VPs that like, you know, own these big problems. So actually for like the bigger more impactful things like I have like pretty smart humans that like I can go to and say like hey I need I need this like go figure out kind of thing. so I end up using AI a lot in like I guess the smaller spaces right it's like yeah it's going to sound boring but like you know taking notes on everything like granola and all that and having good search and I the teams are all using AI so like that obviously feeds to me and like I get information from it. the other place I find it really useful is actually like I think aloud with AI like I feel like sometimes you like I don't love AI written docs but I I do find it useful to go like here's some unstructured thoughts I have like you know try to present it to me and then go like oh actually I don't like this. So actually like thinking aloud is like quite a useful function for me.

34:40 especially if I'm preparing for something I'm like okay you know let me talk this out with something. and that's yeah that's a I think everyone has like the way they they learn and do things and like that's been a really good function for me. and yeah, otherwise it's just, you know. >> Yeah. But I think like having better context is what you're talking about helps you make better decisions. Like you're not going to delegate your decision-m to AI, but it sounds like you're getting being more present in meetings because you have somebody else taking notes for you. You're being able to get more data to help make a bigger decision if you want to search and check out other industries. and in the end you have someone you can practice these hard conversations with when there's inevitable hard moments. So I think it's pretty high leverage use of AI. I'd actually probably be pretty concerning to say, yeah, you know, it does everything for me, right? Like that might be a >> actually one thing that has been like pretty useful for is actually regulation and compliance type stuff, right? Like it's, you know, sometimes people come come to me and I'm like, okay, you know, it's nice to have like a second like in a thing that I'm not a specialist, it's nice to have a second opinion that I'm like, okay, you know, does this actually sound right? and obviously it's one of those things where you can't just like think about it from first principles. You can't just be like, "Oh, you know what is the what is the law here?" Like you can't just think it through. But like having something where like I was just literally doing this earlier today. I was like, "Oh, you know what? Like we weren't allowed to do something." I was like, "Oh, what if we did it like this?" I was like, "Oh, maybe that would work." And obviously you I'm still going to go back to compliance or legal or whatever to to double check it, but it's just nice to have like a thoughtful kind of partner to a subject that I'm not an expert in.

36:14 but as a CEO, I still need to like, you know, make decisions around. I want to spend a second on strategy if that's okay because I think the strategy of Mercury it seems pretty straightforward. Let's build a better bank and start with different services and expand. How much of strategy actually changes throughout a company's history especially if it's not pivoting or how much of it is kind of really static at the front with the mission and it's mostly executionbound. You know, you can have like an outer envelope, but like the envelope can be very broad, right?

36:43 Like it's like we are innovating banking and disrupting it and like you know, bank banking is going to be digital and like you know these are like really broad statements, right? you know at let's take like one specific thing like we we launched our banking thing and then two years later we had to kind of decide like do we launch a corporate credit card and at that point like you know banking and corporate credit cards was like a pretty separate space right there was like Rex and others that were like in corporate cars and like we were in banking at this point like maybe you think of it as a merge space but I do at least like we have a corporate credit card but you know initially we decided not to do it. We were like, "Hey, we just want to like really own banking." and you know, this is a separate space. and it seems to have like great startups there. Why compete kind of thing. and in hindsight, I kind of ended up regretting it. and you know, we did it do it eventually, but we did it in 2022 instead of 2020.

37:42 so it took us like two extra years and I think we seeded some ground by not competing there earlier. So I kind of think of it as like this like we actually have this like internal analogy. We call it the cosmic cube which is like the x- axis is like here's every different type of customer we could go after. the y axis is like here's all the products we could build for them and the z axis is like kind of compliance and quality and like infrastructure and all of that. but that space is huge like the cosmic cube is like large and potentially infinite.

38:11 so you kind of have to decide like okay you know if you're expanding to the next like the N plus1 customer type or the N plus1 product like when are you doing that who is that and how will you kind of do it and like and I think it's really important to do like be fairly incremental about it. I think if at any point we go like actually we're going to do all of it. Like if you're like we're going to do every single customer, we're going to build every single product. I I think we will like lose like we will do a bad job of it and you know the bits that we do own we will do we will do a disservice and u so then you have to go like when do you do each step and I've kind of thought about it as like let's not do more than like two new things at a time.

38:51 It's like my rough logic and maybe if we're bigger we can do four new things at a time. and then how much you invest in each one and you know because I'm such a startup person I mostly thought about it as like oh every new thing is like a new startup so you know every good seed stage startup is like a five person team or eight person team initially and then you give it a year and they launch and like do they have product market fit and you know if it's going well and they have strong product market fit then you invest and like it's a 20 person team now and and that's how yeah that's how we started the corporate credit card small team and now there's like more than 30 people working on it.

39:25 is a very probably even more like 50 people but it's a very scaled up kind of product at this point. whereas we have newer things like we just actually acquired a startup for payroll that's obviously kind of smallish right now but you know if it lands well we're going to expand it. so I I kind of like that kind of investment model for like new products. >> Yeah. So, it sounds like the lesson learned is there's probably so much you can do if you set the strategy right and the market's large enough, but doing all of it at once, especially when there's some bets that haven't really landed or matured yet, might be biting off more than you can chew. Yeah.

40:00 >> But actually still having a mission and still expanding because maybe with the card product, you wish it would have started earlier and expanding constantly is important. Like balancing how many bets you can have at once. Do you think there's a number like how many how many new product bets do you think Mercury can sustain at this phase? Is it one at a time? Is it as many as you can hire for? Or >> It also depends on like what phase they're all at, right?

40:23 >> I think it's like a I mean there's two limiting factors, right? It's like leadership and focus. and then like just literally resources. so yeah, how many do we have right now? maybe three or four going that are like super new and then like two or three that are like maybe a year or two old that we're developing and then a few mature ones. something like that. I think I actually like probably talent is the limiting factor more than most other things at least for us like we've been profitable for the last kind of three four years. So it's not like we can't do more stuff. It's more like you know do we have good leaders for it and you know ideally again like I don't want to be the bottleneck to these things and obviously when things are a little more nent you can be like a little bit more of a bottleneck to things right like you're like oh I really thought we'll do like this or like or you'll help hire people whatever it is. but if you have like strong leaders it can make a huge difference. So like hiring the right people you know and we've we've tended for those new things to hire like ex-founders like they tend to be good like zero to one people and and that's worked out pretty well.

41:29 >> Aman I think it's worked out really well. Mercury is an amazing company. I'm very happy to be a customer and I'm really happy you came on the pod today. So thank you so much for joining us. >> Yeah thanks for having me.