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 years straight. 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. Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts 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: * Mercury * X * LinkedIn Where to find Nakul: * X * LinkedIn Where to find Audacious Ventures: * Website * LinkedIn 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.” Full Transcript: Immad Akhund on Knuckle Up Immad Akhund: 9-9 is 12 hours. The extra two hours, was that really 20% more productive? I will be shocked if it was 20% more productive. If you have five employees and you hire a sixth employee, that’s 20% more productive. You’re probably a little less creative if you’re not doing anything else in your life. I have my best ideas when I’m on a flight or driving somewhere. Sometimes these decisions or these ideas are actually worth 10x more than an extra few hours of work. I started as entrepreneur. I loved it, but I just wanted to survive. We got to a billion dollar valuation in 2021. At that point, which is like, I would say I really got into the bonus levels on this game where I was like, “I don’t even know what my next goal is.” I’ve tried to make it so the pressure goes down as success goes up, which is I think actually relatively rare. If you’re more successful, why are you more stressed about it? Nakul Mandan: Immad Akhund has built one of the most loved FinTechs of this generation. Mercury serves 300,000 customers and is at a $650 million annualized run rate. One in three US startups banks with them. The company has been profitable for four straight years, and as of last month, they have conditional approval to become Mercury Bank. But what’s interesting is that Immad has accomplished all of this on his own terms. He’s anti-996. He’s still remote first at a time when Silicon Valley has bounced back to fully in-person. He hires for traits most growth-stage companies don’t even look for. He said, “It’s dangerous when everything has to be driven by metrics.” And he said openly that he’s optimized early on to be a founder for life and not for a sprint. Today we talked to Immad about how he runs Mercury, the operating philosophy that got him here and whether that philosophy holds up as Mercury becomes a bank and AI-shaped company and a business serving companies well beyond the tech ecosystem. Knuckle up. Immad, welcome to the show. Immad Akhund: Ah, thanks for having me. Nakul Mandan: Yeah. So I want to start with something you’ve said that actually cuts through a lot of the culture theater in Silicon Valley. You’ve said that the culture is about the founder’s personality, not about some values doc, not about some rituals. The founder’s personality externalized. And I was wondering as I was preparing for this, that works for 10 people, 100 people company, maybe even stretch it to a 500 people company, but at the scale at which Mercury is today, 1000-plus people, does it still work? Immad Akhund: Oh, yeah. 100%. I mean, I think I often talk to people who talk about culture, but I think they don’t know what it means, and I think it’s like an ill-defined word and I’m an engineer, so I hate ill-defined words. So I really struggled with it for a long time. I was like, “Is it like having beers in the fridge and going, ‘That’s what it was,’ or is it like what programming language you choose, et cetera?” So I think there are probably some people mean culture and they mean something else. I think the easiest way to define culture that is very definitive and means something and you can measure it and all that is what are the personalities of the people you hire, what are the personalities that you encourage, what are the types of traits you encourage, kind of thing. You kind of have to decide that very early on because what happened in my previous company is I didn’t really understand that. So we had a bunch of salespeople that kind of ended up dominating the culture because they were the loudest voice in the room and we didn’t really have a counterculture to fix that. So it was fine, but it wasn’t like the type of company I wanted to build with Mercury. So we sat down and I think there was only four people and we’re like, “Okay, what are the personalities that we really cared about?” And for us it was kind of product-minded, humble, helpful people that were kind of curious and at that time we didn’t like meetings so we were like no process, go build things kind of people. And so we wrote that down and we tried to measure against it. We had interviews like every engineer, everyone we did product interviews with, and we would try to test people for, okay, are they high ego? So there’s a bunch of things that followed from that and we have a bunch of things within the company that encouraged that behavior. We pick one thing, like we have a channel called Grateful and people at the company, like every day there’s multiple posts where people are like, “Oh, I’m really grateful to X and Y because they helped launch this project or whatever it is.” A lot of that behavior is organic. I didn’t make that channel, it just came across. But I think it’s important and I also think different personalities can work. I always think of Uber as an examp
