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Inside Mercury's Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund

Jun 9, 2026 · 50:11

Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, explains how the startup bank captured one in three U.S. startups by launching with product-market fit from day one—a million-dollar deposit arrived within four days from a stranger—and why legacy banks never stood a chance due to their focus on loans, expensive branch structures, and IT rather than engineering teams. Mercury raised $200M at a $5.2B valuation without needing the money, driven by 2.5x growth in Q1 2024 from AI-fueled entrepreneurship. Akhund details building trust as a moat, using small teams and Amazon's working-backwards process to launch AI features like Mercury Insights and Mercury Command, which let users run banking tasks inside AI tools. He dropped all one-on-ones after learning from Jensen Huang's 60 direct reports, favors optimistic curiosity, and angel-invests 250K checks in contrarian areas like space and deep tech.

We Ignored Silicon Valley Advice for 3 Years | Nicolas Sharp (Attio)

Apr 30, 2026 · 57:49

Nicolas Sharp, co-founder of Attio, explains why the CRM startup spent 1,000 days building in stealth—a deliberate counter to the 'ship fast' philosophy he learned from a previous venture—and how that architectural investment now powers Attio's AI-native platform. He argues that the half-life of product-market fit has collapsed, forcing companies to simultaneously iterate and scale, and that Attio's high-resolution data pipelines are critical for deploying AI agents. Sharp also details how Attio used manual waitlist onboarding to validate demand, how fundraising expectations have risen dramatically (Attio raised $52M at Series B with accelerating growth), and why Europe is having a breakout moment as an AI hub, citing talent from DeepMind and Palantir as catalysts.