Most founders get more stressed as the company gets bigger. Immad Akhund has spent years engineering the opposite. “I’ve tried to make it so that the pressure kind of goes down as success goes up, which I think is relatively rare,” he says. “If you’re more successful, why are you more stressed about it?” This may be surprising coming from someone running one of the most loved fintechs of this generation. But Immad has reached this point through a deliberate operating philosophy that he shares in this discussion.
Mercury serves around 300,000 customers, runs at a $650 million annualized run rate, and has been profitable for four straight years. One in three US startups banks with it, and in April 2026 the company won conditional approval to establish Mercury Bank, N.A. Immad has done all of it on his own terms: anti-996, still remote-first while Silicon Valley snapped back to fully in person, and hiring for curiosity and humility. The throughline is that he optimized early to be a founder for life, not for a sprint.
In this conversation, Immad walks me through how that philosophy actually runs a 1,200-person company. Why 996 may not make you more productive. What Mercury’s famous curiosity interview is really testing. Why he killed one-on-ones after listening to Jensen Huang. How AI has turned the disruption of banking further in Mercury’s favor. And why, three startups in, the thing he would tell his younger self is to build something he would actually love to exist.
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Immad Akhund is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, the fintech banking platform founded in 2017 that serves around 300,000 businesses and runs at a $650 million annualized run rate. In April 2026, Mercury received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Mercury Bank, N.A., and the company subsequently raised $200 million at a $5.2 billion valuation. Before Mercury, Akhund co-founded Heyzap, a mobile developer platform that went through Y Combinator and sold for $45 million in 2016, and earlier co-founded Clickpass. He has served as a part-time partner at Y Combinator and is a prolific angel investor backing more than 350 startups, including Airtable, Substack, and Deel. He was born in Pakistan and raised in the UK before moving to the United States.
In this conversation with Immad Akhund:
00:00 Who is Immad Akhund?
01:53 Is culture just the founder’s personality externalized?
07:53 Is 996 actually less productive?
13:14 Why is Mercury still remote-first when Silicon Valley went back?
15:52 How did Immad hire Mercury’s first ten people?
20:33 What is Mercury’s famous “curiosity interview”?
25:06 How do you hold the hiring bar at 1,200 people?
28:48 What does Immad’s day-to-day look like?
34:10 How do you know when an exec is no longer right for the job?
37:32 Why does Mercury run on small, autonomous product teams?
40:27 What breaks when a company runs purely on metrics?
47:03 How is AI changing Mercury?
54:09 What does becoming a chartered bank actually change?
56:19 How did the SVB collapse end up helping Mercury?
1:03:40 What does psyche management look like 20 years in?
1:11:19 What does it mean to be at the founder “bonus levels”?
1:15:21 Quickfire: overrated traits, AI blind spots, and being proven wrong
1:17:52 What would Immad tell his 25-year-old self?
Where to find Immad:
Where to find Nakul:
Where to find Audacious Ventures:
Immad’s sharpest lines from this conversation:
On pressure and success:
“I’ve tried to make it so that the pressure kind of goes down as success goes up, which I think is actually relatively rare. If you’re more successful, why are you more stressed about it?”
On the math of a 996 day:
“The extra two hours, was that really 20% more productive? I will be shocked if it was 20% more productive. It’s maybe 5% more productive.”
On where culture actually comes from:
“It does start with founder personalities, but then you try to structure that, try to encourage that internally, then you hire against it. Then it becomes a self-perpetuating thing, and it also shows up in the product and how you talk to customers.”
On why he killed one-on-ones:
“I’ve never found one-on-ones help. One-on-ones is just an avenue for them to try to sell themselves. You need to create avenues where you have visibility into what that team is doing.”
On holding execs accountable:
“I don’t think execs can have excuses. I think that’s the job, to deliver on that.”
On why AI favors Mercury:
“I highly doubt Bank of America has an MCP. We are extremely well situated for that because we are a technology company, and that’s just what we do.”
On reinvention:
“I love change. I live for change. Change is the main thing I want in life.”
On his advice to his 25-year-old self:
“Build something that you would really love for it to exist, rather than being too spreadsheet about it.”
