One of the most intriguing things about entrepreneurs is examining how they become risk-tolerant versus risk-averse. After many conversations with founders building companies in different spaces, early childhood experiences seem to be the primary cause of these thinking patterns. Growing up, Immad would spend weeks saving up for a Diet Coke, which he said was a huge treat for him. He didn’t feel he needed much to survive, so it wasn’t a big transition for him to eat budget-friendly meals ($13/week on chicken and rice was his go-to) while building his third startup. It was all he spent money on for six or so months. Spending his life being bored and drained at an uninteresting corporate job felt like a much bigger risk than spending his life building something interesting, even knowing the high failure rate of startups.

IMMAD CAUGHT HIS FIRST GLIMPSE INTO STARTUP LIFE WHILE READING TECHCRUNCH. HE AND HIS FIRST CO-FOUNDER WERE ENGINEERS, SO THEY KNEW THEY COULD BUILD PRODUCTS NON-TECHNICAL FOUNDERS WERE BUILDING WITHOUT SPENDING ON A DEVELOPER FOR THEIR MVP.

They could do it all themselves, so why not try? Reading stories of founders raising money inspired them to start a company. In the beginning, when there is no one around to tell you what to do or how to get users, there is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns. But Immad said that unlike some who may be uncomfortable with uncertainty, he really enjoyed that aspect of starting. It meant that there was an opportunity to innovate instead of being bound by some predetermined structure.

Even though that first startup was, in his words, “a complete fail,” it showed him the kind of life that he wanted to have. What made it a failure at that time? “Oh, just everything was bad about it. Like the idea was bad. We had no funding. We had no real way of getting users. We had no way of making money. Apart from the fact that I weirdly, weirdly enjoyed it, every single part of that startup was like an instant failure.” Instead of quitting, he dove headfirst into London’s startup ecosystem, which was a young scene at the time.

Describing himself as a shy extrovert, Immad recounted how he tried to be at every event he heard about. Eventually, he began to meet young, hungry people who were trying to build things like him. Some were even succeeding, which showed him that if he stuck with it, he could too. For that first startup, they raised no capital, instead using £12,000 saved up from his previous job to get started. They didn’t pay for a design and focused on ensuring it was functional. Today, even for founders with mediocre programming skills, throwing a prototype together is easier thanks to no-code or AI pair-programming tools.

The first startup lasted about seven months, and they never properly pitched an investor. He recalled not knowing what a pitch deck was until his second startup, when he went through Y Combinator. Accelerator programs can be beneficial for a first-time or early-stage founder and teach startup fundamentals fairly quickly. Immad said he doesn’t remember the exact pitches they developed for each startup, but he summarized their goals.

“So my first company was like a Yelp for London. This is 2006, so Yelp wasn't a big deal back then, especially in London. My second company was an easy way to log into lots of websites. So you click on it, and you could choose Facebook or Google, and it would make it so you, as a developer, wouldn't have to integrate all of these kinds of login systems. And my third company actually had four full pivots… maybe I'll give you the first one and the one that we sold. The first idea was a Flash games distribution hub in 2009, which obviously Flash games are pretty dead now. We would optimize between 12 different ad networks and maximize how much money you made as an app developer. And that was the thing that we ended up selling in 2016.”

While in the YC program, Immad was surrounded by groundbreaking companies, although they may not have seemed like the most brilliant ideas then. “I was very fortunate that I did Y Combinator twice, for my second and third startups. So in my first YC batch, we had Dropbox. And then in my second YC batch, we had Airbnb. So I used to joke to PG, Paul Graham, that the benefit of having me in a batch is that he gets a $10 billion company from someone else in the batch.” He reflected on hearing the Airbnb idea for the first time and thinking no one would use it. Clearly, anyone who thought the same ended up being wrong. This begs the question: what does it actually take to be successful?

The founders of Airbnb were unbelievably persistent, curious, and, as Immad said, “not sitting around waiting for success to come up.” He was inspired by these people and saw how successful that persistence led them to become years later. They believed in their idea more than anyone, and were willing to stick with it no matter what anyone else thought. Immad’s drive to start Mercury came from the fact that building a startup in 2006 sucked. “Getting an office was bad. Getting payroll was really bad. There was no Stripe. The thing before Stripe, I did that. It was really bad. It was very hard to process cards and payments. We used to use Skype for all of our communication. There was no Slack. There wasn't even Gmail, right? I think this was like Hotmail when I first started.”

He continued to read TechCrunch and Hacker News, and that would inspire new ideas. Every time he used a new tool as an entrepreneur, certain business processes became noticeably more efficient. He was close to the Gusto founders, who had created a B2B payroll solution, and this alerted him to the fact that banking was someone no one had improved yet. There is power in building a product that every single business needs. “It seemed impossible, I would say. I had some inklings of how one would go about building a banking service, but it's easy to build a software service, but it's very hard to go, okay, now I'm gonna build a bank account. Like, how do you even do that? So I didn't really try to work on it at all because I was working on my previous company. But when I sold it, at that point, I was like, this is the best idea I have. Let's go kind of research it and figure out how to build it.”

Mercury is technically a software solution for their partner banks, and they’ve worked to create an intuitive platform to handle money, from setting up the account to navigating all of the features. “It's very hard to just get a bank account at a normal incumbent bank. Most of the big ones, you have to go walk into a bank branch physically and go give them paperwork. They have no idea what startups are. And you might get a bank account and then you walk away and then half of the features don't work because they don't switch on wires by default. So you have to walk back into the bank branch to go get these features working. I think, you know, personally for me, I never want to go speak to a bank manager. I just want to click a few buttons.”

Using Mercury makes setting up a bank account possible on the same day. There are no monthly fees, no minimums, and free wires. Issuing virtual debit and credit cards is a seamless process, and users can assign different employees specific access rights. Their team has worked a lot on the user management side to make it possible to set limits on spending within a certain timeframe or put approval processes in place. You can also search through all past transactions instead of being limited to 90 days. The company also supports early-stage founders through its program, Mercury Raise, which helps connect startups at seed and Series A stages with investors and each other. This gives them a community that they can rely on while they build. For those looking to check out the product, demo.mercury.com allows prospective users to try the full product without signing up. They are dedicated to building tools to help companies succeed. “Some people say this was too easy. You should make it harder to send money. I'm like, that's kind of the point.

RUNNING A COMPANY THAT INVOLVES COMPLEX PROCESSES AND REGULATIONS CAN BE DIFFICULT. IMMAD TALKED ABOUT HIS MINDSET WHEN THINGS ARE GETTING CHAOTIC, AS STARTUPS OFTEN DO.

“Generally speaking, if you just relax, it's almost certainly going to be better. I know that's easier said than done, but since I've been doing this for so many years, I've just always found that if I'm more stressed about it, it's not like it's going to go better.” He also reminds himself that this is a team effort. Mercury is a 500-person company now, so he doesn’t think of things as being only his responsibility. Founders know what it’s like to have to do everything themselves in the beginning, and many struggle to delegate as their team grows. But those who choose to work at startups want to be involved. They want to be responsible. They want to be part of the creation process. When FDIC regulators sprinted to shut down Silicon Valley Bank, Mercury stood tall amidst the chaos. “I would say that with this SVB crisis, sometimes these points are when you actually gel together as a team… I think it really helped in a weird way. It helped us to step up together and do that. I think that wouldn't have happened if I had tried to do it all myself and things like that.”

Immad is someone who optimizes things to have the biggest impact. To do this, it’s important to have a decision-making process that helps you keep your eye on the long-term vision. He focuses on two axes—how quickly the decision needs to be made and how important the decision is to the company. To build a long-lasting company, it is important to take the time to make certain decisions. “And I try to talk to the team about decisions and talk to my wife about them. If it's important, talk to outside investors or other entrepreneurs about them. I would personally go write something out. I would say, here's all the pros, here's all the cons. I think it helps to have just high-level principles. So we have company cultural principles, and those are both internal, but they're also external.” He allows these principles to guide the company’s decision-making process. He said the decision is often obvious if you do your best to stay true to your principles.

Generally, businesses that want to stay in the game long-term should combine general company principles and life principles and focus on achieving good unit economics. Keeping these things in mind allows leaders to make better decisions. Immad believes that the only mistake you can make is not learning from previous mistakes. “I don't really view mistakes as mistakes. I think the only mistakes that I've truly made is like, I didn't learn quickly enough or something like that.” When it came to trying to sell one of his startups before Mercury, they realized that focusing on selling was a bad way to approach things. Instead, they focused on building a stellar product, and once they prioritized serving customers and creating value, opportunities arose to sell the company. The hardest part was finding fellow founders who had gone through acquisitions to give them advice on the exit. Acquisitions can be long and complicated, especially compared to fundraising (a process more founders have experienced), which can be a three-month-long process on the longer end. “This acquisition was a nine-month process. And it's very hard to keep your team motivated, keep going, keep your emotions in check and all of that over such a long time period.”

So what’s next for Immad? He’s focused on continuing to build a quality product with his team at Mercury and launched a new podcast, Curiosity. The podcast focuses on topics he and his co-host are curious about, like AI, biotech, and much more. Mercury just launched personal banking, and it has been on a growth tear, with 100,000 startups using it for banking. The personal accounts have attractive features, like 5% APY savings and $5M in FDIC insurance through their sweep network. On a more personal note, he’s trying to play more tennis. Overall, he’s looking forward to trying to have more fun and make something big.

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