YouSaid · the spoken record

Immad Akhund

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-05-12
most recent: 2025-05-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Like all the B2B SaaS companies out there, there's like thousands, and that market is smaller than this market. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about it.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we're in these two huge markets, right? Like banking in the US is a $2 trillion market and then kind of financial software tools is like another $500 billion market. And to me, these two markets should be the same market. You have your bank account. That's where you do invoicing. That's where you do bill pay. That's where your credit card and employee spend tools are. The only reason these markets are separate markets is because banks don't know how to build software. I think in 10 years time, it'll be obvious that like your bank is really powerful and it can do all of these things and it's all fully integrated. So yeah, that's just a freaking huge opportunity. And that's just the US, right? Like there's a global opportunity around it. There's like lots of different types of businesses, lots of consumer kind of financial stuff as well. So yeah, I think this opportunity is like ridiculously huge. That's why like, you know, when you are like, oh, it's so competitive. I'm like, I don't know. I mean, like for how big this opportunity is, I'm always like, this seems very uncompetitive, right? If you think about...”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three and a half is probably the exact money I would have needed to get to my Series A and have like a buffer. So I was a little too conservative. I was like, okay, you know, we need to be really safe and have a lot of money. And I could have raised that much. But yeah, very high dilution.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably like the most obvious thing, but anyway, it's probably fine. It's like we raise too much money in our seed round. Like, we raise $6 million at like 23 million valuation. And this was because I was like, okay, fintech is hard. Like, I want to have so much money that I can go on for three years without raising again, et cetera. But it was such a high dilution round for us. It's by far the highest dilution thing we've done at Mercury. And in hindsight, if I knew we would be instantly successful when we launched, I didn't need to raise that much money.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that has been really powerful in Mercury, and I tell every entrepreneur to do this, is like first thing when there's like three or four people write down what is your company culture. We wrote down like six attributes. And these things have to be like things that have some trade-offs to them. And you're going to go like the hardest one is we look for humble people. Especially successful people aren't very humble and you have to kind of make that trade-off. You're like, oh, this is like a successful exec. and they seem great, but like they just have a massive ego and we never hire those people. But we wrote that down like day one and we've always talked to her and we came up with like we had these six attributes and we came up with like interview questions against them and we've always encouraged them internally and it's really helped build even at like a you know near a thousand people we have this like really strong cohesive culture but it's because we did it at day zero and it's very hard to do it later”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I use ChatGPT for everything. Like, actually, I was just doing a presentation yesterday, and I basically just talked to ChatGPT for like 30 minutes about the presentation. And I was like, oh, like this and that. And it just like basically like at the end, I was like, okay, can you write that all in a slide format? And it just did it for me. And I was like, okay, that's pretty freaking cool.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know if I've quite changed my mind all the way on this, but I would say 12 months ago, I was very skeptical we're going to get to advanced superintelligence. Now I'm like a lot more, I don't know whether we'll get there, you know, very soon in the next five years, but the advancement on AI has just been like relentless and it's going to persuaded me more on the train that like it's probably going to happen sooner than we think.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Eli's great. I really like 50 year fund because they do these. I'm an LP in the fund as well. But they do these real long-term focus often strange seeming deals that I kind of like the entrepreneurs they invest in. I think they're high quality. Other people, I mean, I'm a big fan of Shio and Jake better tomorrow ventures. Yeah, they do fintech specific stuff, but they really know that space really well as well. So yeah, I tend to, for deals I receive thesis-driven funds are not that great. Like, I think it's better to have a broad investing strategy. But for deals that I receive are kind of like thesis reviewed funds because I'm like, okay, they know that space really well and they tend to be good at picking it.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My take on it is if we were a public company, we're getting priced all the way in every direction, right? It's better for employees to feel like they have a relatively liquid thing as comp. Like, I don't want this to be a lottery ticket that you get it, like at some point if I decide to go public. I want this to be actual valuable stock that like you feel the ownership and you feel the upside. Part of that is like a viable liquidity option. So I'm like relatively open about it. So far it's not been an issue.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we just did a tender, employee tender. And even without that, like, there were a lot of people selling secondaries along since 2021 when we became a unicorn. There's been a lot of early investors, early employees selling secondaries, and there's a pretty liquid market for it.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Created these kind of structural things that just mean that you want to be as big as possible. I mean, Scribe could definitely do it, obviously, but you don't want to be Mercury-sized company in the public market. I think most people are saying like 10 billion is probably the minimum before you want to be a public company. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know how to fix it. I mean, ideally, we'd make some actual structural changes to make it easier to be public. Otherwise, we just all have to wait. I would say there is a lot of liquidity now in private markets.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think about it as well, and yeah, I would want Mercury to be like a legacy long term company. So being public is inevitable. But yeah, why do it today and not five years from now on, six years from now, seven years from now and obviously Stripe and a few others have delayed it multi-decades even. I think the biggest issue is kind of structural issues in the public markets. So the two things are, number one, the cost and rules around being public are just so much right now. So it's not just not easy being a public company. So you might as well delay it longer. And then number two, there's so few active investors in public markets now, you know, between the passive index funds. Like if you're not going to be in the S&P 500 or one of these other index funds, it's hard to get anyone's attention as a subscale public company, right? Even if you're like a $5 billion company in the public markets, you can hardly get an analyst to look at you.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question. I mean, it seems inevitable that a few of these multistage funds will IPO and be public companies, right? Like we heard some stuff about GC doing it. I think that's just going to happen. And actually think more and more money is going to come to this space, which ironically, you know, we as investors are like, oh, be better if there's less competition and less money. But I think the big changes, right? Like these companies are huge now, right? We have trillion dollar companies, right? When I started investing a hundred billion dollar company was huge. So the end results are so big that people want to put more money in the space. And yeah, I know we're in a current liquidity glut, but I think that will work out through the system. Yeah, probably bigger multistage funds and their public. I think the bit that's probably hard is there's this kind of idea of like the barbell kind of stuff, right? People like me that are investing kind of smaller checks, like we'll do fine and the multistage ones will do fine. I don't know what happens in the middle. I think the middle will have more finish issue.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They've made it difficult for you, but not for me necessarily because I'm just like, okay, sure. And Reason's reading leading a ride, let me join in. There's not that many multi-stage billion dollar funds, right? There's, what, like eight or nine that have a brand? Seed is like by definition, there's so many unknowns and those multistage funds are only going to do a certain flavor of entrepreneur, right? Like often it's either an exec from a big company that's doing like this thing or it's like a multi-time kind of entrepreneur. So if there is that flavor that like ticks the boxes for those kind of multistage big funds, yeah, it's very hard to try to lead around against them. But there's entrepreneurs come in all flavors and I don't think these first time entrepreneurs that are like hungry and don't know a space but like fig stuff out those you know the multistage funds like have a much harder time with those.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know exactly like this is the first fun, so I'm not coming at it like, you know, I'm coming at this, oh, let's explore it. But I want to be helpful to entrepreneurs. I think I can be helpful to entrepreneurs and I can scale that. And working with someone to get the best investments, to kind of scale that portfolio approach and doing it with more money allows me to have a bigger impact. And yeah, eventually there'll be opportunities where we maybe are the biggest check at Seed Stage or, you know, maybe instead of doing 60, we do 150 in one fund. Oh, like maybe we incubate ideas. I mean, I have a lot of ideas. So everything's on the table, but at the same time, you know, it's the first fund and I'm definitely approaching it with an open mind.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's fun to build institutions. You know, I'm working with Yosh on this fund. I think it can be bigger than just me and just a few angel investments.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies where I have like this unique perspective of being an active kind of fintech entrepreneur. So I think as long as it works for all sides, and like it probably doesn't work for all entrepreneurs, like Mercury is in a unique position where we do south to startups and that ends up being like my investing is helpful to Mercury is helpful to my investing and my investing is helpful to Mercury. That's probably not true for everyone.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel very transparent about it. Like, this has always been the story I've said. Like, I'm a successful CEO, and this is what you're getting. And Mercury is my main job. So I think that's one thing. B, does it work for both sides? So I have always done that, like even before I started Mercury, I was an active investor with other people's money. And then during it, I was. And I would say part of Mercury's success has been my connection with early stage founders. You know, actually like from the first 30 kind of alpha customers of Mercury, I think 100% of them were like companies I'd invested in. So like it's always been a core part of like building Mercury has been my invested journey alongside it. And I talk to my co-founders about it. I was like, hey, I do this, like, do you mind? And they were like, no, like this is part of why what makes Mercury successful. So that's one side of it. And then on the other side, Mercury success gives me access to that deal for gives me the ability to win. I do invest in a lot of B2B companies and fintech.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, fund of funds is like 60 ish percent, and then a bunch of kind of entrepreneurs and GPs is like the bulk of the rest of it.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe this is a little harsh. It's boring, it's very boring. Obviously, when you're pitching a company, you're saying the same story again and again. But you do learn something from the questions you get asked and like you kind of do change the story over time. Like I feel like pitching a fun, like there's not much to learn in the process. It's very much do a bunch of like very repetitive meetings. I don't know if that's surprising. I'm sure you know this. But yeah, I was like less fulfilling than I wanted it to be. Like I wanted to go like, oh yeah, I'm going to speak to some smart people and learn something. But I was like, okay, you know, I didn't feel like I really got that much out of it beyond like doing the process.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. But yeah, the easiest ones are definitely like a Meta. I'm like, hey, do you want to invest? And then you don't even have to pitch them. They're just like, hey, there's a million or whatever. But yeah, it was a quick process. I mean, actually, the hard bit is getting the LPA done is ridiculous. Like, I don't know how you all do it. It's like a multi-party negotiation for these kind of esoteric terms. I mean, there wasn't any real staking point. It just took a month and a half to get it done. And I was like, this is a silly person.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I didn't want to have, even to get to 26 million, having a bunch of mates with like 250k each takes forever. So, yeah, we had like three kind of anchor LPs that are like more funder funds. And actually, the easiest ones are definitely like.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm very good at winning right now with the strategy we have of non-lead checks. Yeah, I mean, I've done rounds recently where the round is fully done with some hotshot VC. I still get my 150k after the round is fully done. So winning is definitely easy right now. I would say the most fun is those kind of selecting side of things in the sense that you have these entrepreneurs that are really teaching you the future. I think it's just so fun to talk to entrepreneurs and like go like, oh shit, I never thought about that. That's super interesting. You know, I did this company, etched. It does like ASIC chip for Transformers. And it's like super interesting. That's my only ever semiconductor investment. I probably won't do another one. But you learn so much and just like a short conversation. You're like, oh, wow, I had no idea it works like that.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, I am so surprised how considerate people are. And I wish they would actually ask more for help. So normally I'm like, hey, here's my phone number. Just text me if anything comes up. And most of the time you can actually be pretty helpful in like a 10 minute conversation and I can slot that in most times. So I would say I end up speaking to an entrepreneur maybe three or four times a week. But like I think one thing that people don't understand about time is like time is about energy, not time. There are things that drain your energy and those are hard to do and they like suck up time. And then there's things that are fun. Like I love talking to entrepreneurs and helping them out. So like it doesn't like I can do that. Like I'm literally like I'll go for a walk to like go get lunch and I'll just like talk to an entrepreneur and it's like so easy and it's like it's just like having a chat with a friend.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at seed stage. I mean, at seed stage, these companies are like, I mean, they're like better than these AI SaaS companies at seed stage because they're like, you know, you get there and these are like, it's hard for them to raise big rounds when they're just starting out and then they have to prove some stuff out. I can't remember the initial stoke round, but it's probably like 20 million valuation. You know, they had to prove out like a rocket test and then they got like funding from the government. And now they've raised, I don't know how much they've raised like more than 100 million. But yeah, yeah, you do have to take the time and be careful to understand it. I don't personally do bio because, you know, I speak to someone and they're like, we've cured cancer and I speak to the next person. They're like, we've cured cancer. I'm like, I don't know. You sound good. But I really think space is not like as hard, but I have spent like years kind of trying to understand it.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like getting things up and down, which obviously SpaceX dominates. There's taking pictures from space. And that's actually a pretty big market, like $40 billion market. And then there's communication, which obviously Starlink and other people are doing. Those are the three markets. There's almost no other market in space right now. And I have investments in, like I did Stokespace, which is like doing reusable rockets. I did albedo, which is like taking very high resolution pictures from space.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How I think about it is when I enter a new space that I don't know that much about, I will make a couple of investments and I'll try to learn from them. So I made my first space investment, I think 2016 or 2017. It was momentous space. They ended up doing a SPAC that didn't work out. But when you make a few investments and you know, to make one or two investments, you end up speaking to maybe 10 people, right? And these people tend to be like, you know, they're at the edge of their space. Yeah, it's like people from SpaceX and Blue Origin. So you end up learning quickly about, okay, what are the markets? The thing about space that maybe is unobvious is like it's no longer that hard to get into space, right? Like SpaceX is very repeatable. Like these people are not doing space. Well, they are doing difficult hardware things, but they're not doing scientifically impossible things, right? They're literally saying like, hey, I'm going to put a computer and a satellite. I'm going to put it on space. It is tricky though. Like there's three, I don't know how deep you want to go in space to care, but there's like basically three existing markets in Space Deck.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The founder needs to be probably more of a second time founder where they deeply understand that space, and they happen to be applying AI to it, but it's not like AI for the sake of it. I did one where like really deep in prop tech and they have like a really specific AI application there. So either that or this is like, you know, they already have the traction. Like this is like already seems like a rocket ship.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seed stage, it's so hard to do AI. I mean, I don't know what you're seeing, but it's like the fourth time I've heard the pitch of the same idea the founder's raising at like a 40 million valuation. They even have like great investors. There's a little bit of traction, but the math is just so hard right now in AI. I mean, I'm still doing it. So like, you know, in the last eight investments that we were just looking at, four of them are AI. So yeah, it's hard to avoid AI completely. I'm just way more selective. And there's actually a lot of, like, if you look at FinTech or I'd end up doing like a lot of space tech or hard tech, there's not that much competition there right now. I think as a seed investor, you can't be doing like too many investments at the top of the hype cycle, right? Like the same thing happened in 2021, right? Like 2021, I mean, it was everything bubble.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you end up being a price taker as a non-lead. So I care about it. Like if it's silly, I won't do it. But often the seed market actually as a whole is a little silly. And, you know, I've ended up, especially recently avoiding AI. I think AI is overhyped and overvalued.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe. I mean, if I look at mine rappy, definitely new within six months, Truebill definitely knew within six months, rippling. I mean, rippling was just hard to get into, but it was pretty freaking obvious. Airtable definitely knew very early on. So there's definitely like Airtable, even like, you know, there was like a three-year period where they kind of took a while to kind of ramp up. So I know, you know, maybe six months is like too early, but you definitely know before everyone else knows because you have the company and you can see.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You actually know in both directions. Like, you have signal. I mean, it doesn't mean you have a guarantee, but like six months later, if you see that progress, like and if you, I would bet that, Harry, even in your portfolio, six months later, if you invested in every one of the things that you think will be a hit, like probably 50% are going to get left.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Timely manner if it's Yeah, maybe the other issue I've had with SPVs is like normally they're FOMO SPVs where it's like, oh yeah, some lead check comes in and you're like, okay, give me an allocation. Let me go do this SPV. I don't like that game. Like, I want to do these reserves when I'm like, hey, I invest in the seed stage. I look at their progress and like, you know within six months whether that company is going to kill it. At least that's been my experience.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reserves, but I want to be kind of more selective about it. I've never believed in this every company gets a pro rata check because that's just what I do. I'd much rather go like.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's going to be a few other, like the strategy also involves some kind of initial conviction checks. If I know someone for years and I could put like a million dollars into their seed round it.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, what's a little unusual about the fund is it's a fairly diversified fund. The idea is to invest into 60 companies. The reason that works is we're doing these non-lead checks. That makes sense. Like I'm an active CEO. I can't lead around because I just won't have that time for the company. But also on the other side, I get a lot of deal flow. The best entrepreneurs want me on their cap table. But isn't it better if like Sequoyo or Founders Fund is leading around and I get to invest alongside them because I'm not competing with them. So the average check size is going to be 150k. So if you do the math, if you're doing non-lead checks with a smallish kind of average check size, at least we're targeting 60 company portfolio. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to have like 100, 200 companies in one fund. Then you can kind of...”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those kind of two factors for me that drove it, maybe three. Number one, I had a bunch of LPs recently approach me saying we're not going to put money in your angel list. But if you set up a fund, we will back you. Secondly, my deal flow kind of went up another level when 30 to 40% of like all startups use Mercury. Like everyone knows about me. And then that tends to mean that a lot of people want me to invest. And I got to a level where I just can't look at all of these things. So I really wanted to work with someone on the deals and on the fund. I don't like doing things badly. And I felt like I was being a bad angel master because if I can't even look at all the things that are coming at me, like, how can I do a good job of it?”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, each company has to prove out its own thing. So I don't know if valuation is like the thing I focus on personally. It's a different market, right? Like people understand enterprise, like Sassan payments a little bit more than they understand banking, you know, apart from Mercury, like who else is at scale in banking in the US? There's not that many companies, right? Like Chime and a few others. So it's a different market. It's just valued differently.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe that worked for Eric and Gironim. That just doesn't resonate with me. Like, I. Thousand plus customers, our scale is much bigger than Brexit ramp, but not because they're doing something bad, they're just in a different business, right? They have bigger companies, they do more enterprise stuff, whereas we're much more at inception stage.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two responses number one, yeah. I've been doing startups since 2006, and every single year there's been some competitor that was like better funded, that was seemed really scary. 99% of the time it didn't matter. Like what mattered is just focusing on customers, building a great product. And most of the time, if we failed, we all failed because it was a bad market. And if we succeeded, it's because we did our own thing and we just listened to customers and had that long-term vision. So I think it's really dangerous to be very competitive focused. I don't let our team speak about competitors very much. I'm just like, hey, if you have something you want to do, tell me why the customer wants it. Tell me why it's like part of the long-term vision of the product. But if anyone says, we should do this because like someone else did it, I'm like, I don't care. This is not a reason we do anything at Mercury. So that's one thing. I think most of the time it really doesn't matter. And if you're copying.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decided to kind of focus longer on banking, and it wasn't like a mistake that couldn't be corrected, like we did launch in 2022, and now Mercury for Mercury customers, Mercury credit card is bigger than all the other kind of corporate credit cards on the platform. But it was, you know, it was two years later than it should have been.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the obvious one and the data we had at the time, I don't know if we would have done any differently, is we launched mercury banking in 2019. And at that point, Brex was the main player in the credit card space. And I was like, hey, we'll do banking, you do credit card, we're all good. And then what happened is, you know, Brex then entered the banking space. And then later, Ramp came along and they launched a new credit card. And at that point, I was like, okay, that was a little silly that we didn't just launch a credit card because, you know, it wasn't in some ways the credit card was easier than banking because we already had debit cards. So we didn't end up launching our credit card until 2022 because I was like, let's just focus on banking and let's go really deep here. And I think that was a mistake. Like we could have launched our version, you know, in 2020 probably. Like we instead worked on some other products. So in hindsight, I think we waited too long to launch that second product.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I'm contrarian about it a little bit, but to me, if my engineers get more productive, I'm going to come up with more things to do. Like I'm going to have like so much stuff that I want to do. Like I have infinite ambition. So I think that just unlocks more rather than constraints means that you don't hire people.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, we're still in the kind of flashlight slash FART apps era of AI, if you know what I mean. There's going to be so much change in Chern in the next few years, but eventually things will settle down and then we'll have the same defensibility that SaaS apps and other things have had forever, which is what's the strongest brand and who do people say like, hey, I love this thing, I used it forever, et cetera. And that brand is going to be able to continue investing more and more in the product because they've consolidated a market position and they can keep improving the product and they'll become multi-product. And now you're getting like two or three things from the same place and that's sticky in its own way. And they built up the enterprise connections, et cetera. We're just in this place right now where like no one knows anything. Everyone's trying to try everything. But I don't see why the same things that allowed people to create big companies like HubSpot and Salesforce, et cetera. I think most of those things will exist with the modern age.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To charge for the productivity gain, they could charge a lot more, but competition will ruin that, right? Like Windsurf will come along and charge $20. So because of these competitive markets, it's not possible to charge for the value you generate. It's actually more, you end up charging for what you can charge against competitors and have people not think about it. But yeah, those things are very sustainable, right? Like I think once engineers are using cursor or windsurf, like engineers don't like changing tools, the value is much higher than the charge. So I think there's that set of it is much more sustainable.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competitors doing at half the price because the cost basis of the software is way lower than a third of the cost. So the sell that VCs get and entrepreneurs are making is, oh, we're replacing your labor costs, therefore we should charge a third of that. But the reality is once you have a competitive market dynamic, the actual margins are going to compress massively. And we'll end up on like a 10th or maybe even a 20th of the labor cost as actual eventual revenue. And in these spaces, like everyone's using the same foundation models, like we're going to get incredible competition and the margin compression is just inevitable. And there's like very little moat and network effect against it. So that's one side of it. I do think the other side, you know, we've seen cursor with like, I think they're like saying $400 million in revenue or something like that. I think that SaaS revenue and it's actually like the value they give is relatively high for the revenue. Again, like if they try”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it really matters what type of revenue it is, right? Like, I think the revenue that I am most skeptical on right now is this kind of labor replacement revenue. You take AI and it's like, hey, we're going to be a third of your labor cost just install us. Initially people see the ROI, they're like, oh, wow, like I get something for a third of the price and maybe it's slightly worse in some situations, but I still have humans as back off. But it's just like an obvious cost saving everyone will do it. You take AI and it's like, hey, we're going to be a third of your labor cost just install us. And initially people see the ROI. They're like, oh, wow, like I get something for a third of the price and maybe it's slightly worse in some situations, but I still have like humans as back off. But it's just an obvious cost saving everyone will do it. The reason that's particularly transient is especially in this environment, you're going to have three or four competitors also selling that same thing. And eventually a company is going to go like, okay, this actually worked, right?”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, A, the bowlcase for me is how he's like an incredible founder, and I think he's going to figure it out. B, yeah, if you look at AI, I think it actually really improves their position. Like you have a bunch of data, you have people building basically like internal apps on Airtable, and they've done a good job of kind of incorporating AI. But I mean, mostly I would say they already have, the last valuation was 10 billion, so we're only talking about 5x. I'm pretty sure you can figure out.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess at one name in the company, but there was a company where softbank came in with this crazy number and they offered everyone a secondary. And I was like, you know, if softbank's doing it, I should probably take some money off the table. So I did do it. In hindsight, I probably should have done more. But, you know, I'm really aligned with like, let's go long. Like, I don't, I don't need the money. I'm in it. I'm in it for the game as it was. And, you know, these kind of compounders, like Airtable, you know, like this company's I'm in where I'm like, okay, I can see this being a $50 billion company. And if I just stick with it for maybe it's 15 years instead of 10 years, yeah, that return will be worth it.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, you can do the math, but if your entry price is like 20, 25 mil, after you get that dilution unicorn, like I've seen as low as like Ajax return from like a seed stage investment to unicorn, which I'm like, this is awful. I mean, obviously there's also you can get like 3040x there. But yeah, I think if your entry price is like that, you're mostly like unicorns, like you need a few of those, but you really want to get like a 10 billion plus two to have like an outside return. Like I want, you know, I'm not happy to get like a 2x or 3x. Like I want to have a 10x fund and that's not going to happen with unicorns.”
2025-05-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund | Why Founders Should Take the Highest Price | Why Serial Entrepreneurs are Better | Why AI Is So Overhyped | The Future of Venture Capital with Immad Akhund · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source