immad
@immad
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CEO @Mercury . Investor: @RappiColombia , @Airtable , @Rippling , @SubstackInc , @AppliedInt , 300+. Cohost of Curiosity Podcast.
San Francisco, CA
Joined July 2007
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Pinned Tweet
Over the years, I have tried to share learnings from my startups and seed investing.
Decided to combine my startup tweets+tweetstorms into a tweethurricane.
Here are my learnings + advice, from pitching investors to getting through the journey:
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“If you need encouraging words, don’t do a startup” - best Elon Musk quote on Clubhouse.
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The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is some real life superhero shit:
- AZ won’t take a profit on the vaccine till pandemic is over
- Stored in normal refridgerators
- 10% of the cost ($5) of other vaccines
- 70-90% effective
They are going to save millions of lives without profit
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There is some cognitive dissonance in using 🧵 (the new meta app)
It’s currently a bad copy of Twitter. The only reason to use it is if you are anti-
@elonmusk
.
But it’s hard to believe someone is anti-Elon but pro Meta having a full social monopoly.
Am I missing something?
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We are hiring an US-educated engineer who didn’t get an H1b and instead is going to work for us in Canada.
He is now going to build a life and pay taxes in Canada.
In the remote world talent can be anywhere.
Our bad immigration policy is directly leading to lower US GDP!
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Google Calendar has trained me to think that a Google Meet link on the invite is probably a mistake.
That one decision has completely ruined the GMeet brand.
Doing bad/dark UI patterns to pump up usage numbers might be good short term but an awful long term decision.
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Founders should take weekends+vacations off:
1. Time to think high level outside the daily grind
2. The last 10% of time is the least productive
3. Avoid burn out
I used to feel guilty about it, but now I see it as essential.
Startups are a 10+ yr marathon not a 3 month sprint
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I am constantly flipping between:
1. We are in a huge asset bubble that will crash soon
2. US printed so much money which will result in a lot more inflation and assets will appreciate more
Where do you think we are?
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Emmett Shear should next broker peace between Israel and Palestine.
His new found skills must be put to good use.
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Something that blew in mind when I heard it:
2% management fees on VC funds are not one off but every year for 10 years.
The 2% management fee is 20% of all LP funds!
Even if the fund has negative returns the fund managers get 20% of the fund.
That’s $200m on a $1bn fund!
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US Series I Bonds seem like a great deal:
- $10k/yr/family member
- 1 year lock-in
- 9.62% (adjust every 6 months with inflation)
- compounds
- no state tax
- US govt backed issued by the treasury
Mostly a no-brainer.
You can get them here:
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My first ever “venture” round was a $500k raise at $2m valuation. It cost $35k in legal fees!
We just launched ability to do SAFE for free using your Mercury bank account.
It’s smooth too, every SAFE gets a new account number, no more wondering which investor sent the $10k.
Introducing: SAFEs by Mercury for C-Corps.
You can now customize, sign, & share
@ycombinator
-templated SAFE docs on Mercury — and have the funding routed to your account. Plus, you can track the status of your investor checks in real time.
Watch how it works 👇
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Respond to this tweet with a startup idea.
I will tell you whether I would take a investor meeting or not and why for that idea, assuming it came in from a strong warm intro.
I can tell in 280 chars whether an idea is interesting to me and why. Maybe it will be useful feedback.
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1/ Every 2 months I do detailed investor updates. It allows me to get out of a tactical day to day mindset and think at a high level.
An entrepreneur asked me what format they should use so I thought I would share mine here with wider community.
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A surprising thing I learnt recently is that the Bangladesh GDP per capita is higher than India (and almost 2x Pakistan).
10 years ago the Bangladesh GDP per capita was almost 2x lower than India.
Incredible achievement from an often underestimated country. How did they do it?
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Bankers won’t reinvent banking.
I spent 6 months at the start of Mercury trying to find a “banker” as a cofounder or early employee, and couldn’t find anyone that had the right entrepreneurial+product mindset.
Wall Street won't reinvent finance.
Hollywood won't reinvent filmmaking.
Venture capitalists won't reinvent venture.
Career politicians won't reinvent politics.
Innovation rarely occurs from the inside.
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It took 4.5 years and ~$1bn raised for OpenAI to launch GPT-3, which was their first PMF product.
That breaks every “rule” in the startup world, around mvp and being capital light pre-pmf.
Goes to show you that you have to define your own rules to get outsized success.
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We hired someone great recently and one of the primary reasons he left his company was that they were returning to the office in a few months and he had moved.
Feels like remote friendly companies will win a lot of talent in the coming months.
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Amazon’s usage of gen AI to summarize reviews is really well executed.
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I am surprised how many people are into startups but don't read/watch sci-fi.
If you want to invent the future then I highly recommend reading a lot of sci-fi.
Sci-fi authors have spent a lot of time imagining and writing out potential futures.
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1/ Early founder who are not already wealthy should probably take early acquisition offers.
In my last startup we started in 2009 and could have sold in 2011. Instead we decided to go for a “home run”.
Took us another 5 grueling years to get an exit only 2x bigger.
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Y Combinator valuations are up from 1 year ago. Rest of seed market will prob follow
This YC batch:
Pre-revenue in non hot market: ~$15m (was $8m)
2nd time founder and pre-traction: ~$20m (was $12m)
$30k+/month/revenue or hot market: $25m+ (was $15m)
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1/ Before writing a startup deck or pitching investors you should identify the nucleus of your story and how it could be a $1b+ company.
This should be a two sentence story that you then build the rest of your pitch around.
And you should truly believe in your story.
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1/ MERCURY PERSONAL is finally here!
Get all the power of Mercury — now for your personal account.
Up to 5.00% APY savings*, $5M FDIC insurance**, free domestic wires, for a flat $240/yr fee.
Get on the waitlist: mercury dot com/personal-banking
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We worked all weekend to launch Mercury Vault:
* $3m in FDIC insurance via partner banks
* Short term US govt t-bills for >$3m deposits via Mercury Treasury
* Dashboard to help you understand and automate where your money is
Will be improving it all week!
Introducing Mercury Vault: Protect your cash with a money market fund and up to $3M in FDIC insurance – 12x the industry standard.
Learn more:
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1/ After 2 years of hard work we are finally launching Mercury and opening signups to everyone:
thread..
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1/ Doing startups is hard!
@mercury
is my fourth startup, my first two startups failed and I continuously faced roadblocks along my startup journey.
That’s why I’m excited to introduce the new Mercury Raise: one platform to help founders fundraise, network, and get answers.
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1/ Today we're announcing
@BankMercury
's Series B
We raised $120m @ $1.62b led by Coatue
@a16z
,
@crv
,
@sapphirevc
participated as did incredible entrepreneurs like
@typesfast
,
@mathildecollin
,
@jaltma
+we are including a $5m crowdfund for our customers
We're excited to let you know we raised a $120m Series B led by Coatue, with participation from
@a16z
,
@CRV
, &
@SapphireVC
.
We also want our customers to be part of our success, so we're doing something new.
We've set aside a $5m allocation to let you into the round 👇
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Startups with <20 people wondering what management practices to follow?
Should you do OKRs, DACI, single threaded leadership, QBRs, leveling etc?
The answer is: NO
You need that stuff when you are too big for founders to have full context.
Just ship and listen to customers.
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$13.00 a week.
At my lowest startup point (2009), that’s how much money I was spending on food and life (excluding rent). Each week, I would have the same rice, lentils, vegetables, and chicken (and it definitely wasn’t organic).
I’d get invited to parties in San Francisco,…
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For software startup you should almost never get a patent.
In my 2nd startup we spent months applying for 1, the startup failed because we didn’t make money and the patent was useless.
As an investor patents are often a red flag as they show you are focusing on the wrong thing.
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1/ Excited to unveil Mercury Raise today - a program to directly connect our early-stage startups with top investors.
We have 40+ investors in the program including
@eladgil
,
@alisonbarrallen
,
@shl
,
@ryanhoover
,
@a16z
,
@sequoia
and
@crv
.
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Although we compete with SVB, I have always had a lot of respect for them.
They gave my previous company a loan that helped us survive and took me to my first and last Gaga concert.
It’s sad to see them go through this difficult time and hope they make it to the other side.
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Completed our 2nd board meeting where we did a 6-page memo rather than a deck.
Has worked so much better than I expected. I highly recommend it.
Here is the rough outline for our board memo:
1. Top 3 things going well
2. Top 3 things to improve/watch
3. Main business/user KPI…
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Imagine you could drag an invoice into your business bank account and have it OCRd and then just click pay to pay it.
No need to imagine it, Mercury just shipped that:
Introducing: Bill Payments.
When paying someone on Mercury, you can now drag & drop bills directly onto a payments page. We’ll scan each document and automatically populate different fields — so you can spend less time on your accounts payable & more time running your startup.
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Mercury is going to setup a Canada office, partly because the US no longer has a visa for skilled labor:
- sends money out of the US to CA.
- pays taxes in CA.
- talent may found future companies in CA, compounding the advantage.
It’s a huge loss to the US and gain to CA.
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For distribution startups have 3 main choices:
1. Give away your margins to Fb+Goog with Ads.
2. Build a big sales team and go enterprise.
3. Create a community and own your own “media” to get free distro.
I prefer the 3rd option, it’s most aligned with customers + product.
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I learned recently that every time someone walks into a bank branch it costs the bank $300 to serve them (amortized).
Neobanks fundamentally change the economics of banking, it’s going to be impossible for incumbent banks to compete.
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1/ Is your burn too high?
As the 2022 fundraising market is turbulent I have heard a lot of founders asking this question.
Here are some frameworks I use:
A. Runway
B. The Rule of 40%
B. The Burn Multiple
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Prepping for
@Mecury
’s first board meeting of the year this week and reflecting on 2023.
Feeling thankful for the team's hard work and our customers' trust in us. In 2023 we:
* Grew net revenues 180% YoY
* Grew customers 60% YoY
* Grew trx volume by 90% YoY to $95B in ‘23
*…
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Pretty crazy that Y Combinator funded Airbnb (W09), Doordash (S13) and Instacart (S12) all when yc batch sizes were less than 100.
Now the batch sizes are consistently >200 we will probably be seeing monthly YC IPOs 2025 onwards.
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Have many ex-Amazonians made big startups?
Seems like Amazon’s leadership principles and organizational structures are the best at cultivating internal new products among big tech. Wondering if that extends outwards.
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Its crazy that the seed, Series A (Accel) and Series B (A16Z) investors in Slack invested in a completely different company Tiny Speck that then pivoted to Slack.
A successful pivot after a series B is unheard of.
There are no hard rules in entrepreneurship/investing.
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Dilution really adds up.
Pre-seed: $1m @ $5m 20%
Accelerator: +7%
Seed: $4m @ $20m +20%
Series A: $20 @ $100m with 10% options pool +30%
Founders now own 42% shares. And the journey has just beginning with the A!
Avoid rounds completely or do them at <10% dilution if you can.
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I thought this was common knowledge but apparently its not:
If you are a funded startup founder with illiquid stock then you are almost certainly an accredited investor.
You just have to have an accountant or lawyer sign off on it.
Now you too can invest in other startups!
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Here is the simple “management process” we did for <20 startup:
* daily 10 minute eng standup
* weekly 30 minute all hands.
* every 2 month investor update that sets out product + KPI goals for next 2 months and 2 month look back
* monthly 1 on 1s with direct reports
* week per…
Startups with <20 people wondering what management practices to follow?
Should you do OKRs, DACI, single threaded leadership, QBRs, leveling etc?
The answer is: NO
You need that stuff when you are too big for founders to have full context.
Just ship and listen to customers.
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This is a hard day for the startup community. I’ve got a ton of respect for SVB and deeply understand how stressful this situation is for their customers and employees.
We’ve been hard at work at Mercury to quickly onboard hundreds of customers and provide as much peace of mind…
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19 years of grind across 5 startups to get to $4b acquisition with Honey. Wow
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People say that they feel happy and euphoric after exercise.
I feel generally cranky and tired.
What am I doing wrong?
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Today, is the 5 year anniversary from when we launched Mercury!
Pretty exciting to launch Mercury personal exactly 5 years later.
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Gitlab IPO values it at $11bn, hard to believe GitHub sold for “only” $7.5bn in 2018.
Presumably GitHub would be worth ~5x more today.
Just got to HODL.
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The Elon Musk book by Isaacson was a good read:
* Elon is very focused on broad visions for his companies: like SpaceX going to Mars or carbon independence at Tesla
* portrays Elon as super intense and action hungry
* A lot of his work at these companies seems to be focused on…
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Respond to this tweet with a startup idea.
I will tell you whether I would take a investor meeting or not and why for that idea, assuming it came in from a strong warm intro.
Hopefully it will be useful feedback!
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In 2016, when I started investing, it was understood that seed startups are illiquid for 10+ years.
In reality, every company I invested in that’s is now worth >$200m has had secondaries for early investors.
This increased liquidity makes this asset class a lot more attractive.
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There are almost 7.8b people in the world.
My mental model was still anchored to 7b, but we are almost at 8!
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B2B startup: its better to build for self-service from day 0
a) Forces you to make UX intuitive
b) Allows you to get bottoms up growth
c) You can access lower ACV use cases.
Its harder than it seems to build out self-service post launch when you have live user demands.
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A seed investor told me that >30% of the investments he does are to companies using Mercury bank accounts.
Pretty crazy considering we launched less than 2 years ago. But still have at least 70% (and probably more) to get!
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I have a few lessons about “how I CEO”. I mostly don’t share them because Mercury is still relatively young and not obviously true that the way I CEO is the “right” way.
Would people still find these lessons useful?
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is now 7th in the search result for a Google search for "Mercury".
Pretty good considering we have to compete against a planet, element and a God.
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When pre-product market fit avoid growing team above 10 people (unless you are hardtech).
With huge seeds you may be tempted to grow the team but small teams can adapt/iterate quicker.
@BankMercury
we raised a $6m seed but didn’t grow above 9 till be launched 1.5 years later.
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1/ A counter intuitive thing about fundraising is that you should always optimize for the medium success case.
Upside scenario: you have sick growth, it’s a bull market. You will be fine no matter what.
Downside scenario: you have no traction/product. You will have to quit/sell
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Respond to this tweet with a startup idea.
I will tell you whether I would take a investor meeting or not and why for that idea, assuming it came in from a strong warm intro.
I can tell in 280 chars whether an idea is interesting to me and why. Maybe it will be useful feedback.
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36
429
Recently, I have talked to several bubble unicorns or near unicorns that are basically going to zero.
Main themes:
1. Strong Covid lockdown growth that’s disappeared.
2. Bad unit economics startups have no capital available.
Next 12 months are going to be rough.
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3 years from launching Mercury and we are profitable and almost 400 employees!
Set up to build a long term sustainable company.
Here is how we work with partner bank and keep deposits safe.
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1/ Excited today to be announcing
@BankMercury
’s $20m series A investment led by
@CRV
.
Since our launch we have been working insanely hard keeping up with the growth and building new features
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From Monday everyone on Mercury will get $5m of FDIC insurance via our partner bank sweep networks.
For >$5m you can use our Mercury Treasury to get access to US govt t-bills MMFs.
We also did a huge UX revamp to Mercury Vault. You should check it out if you are a user already.
It’s official: by Monday, Mercury customers will have access to up to $5M in FDIC Insurance – 20x the per bank limit.
Learn more:
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Looks like people are using a new term for pre seed: micro seed.
Now:
Seeds = $3m-$10m
Pre seed = $1m-$3m
Micro seed = <$1m
Just 3 years ago this was the exact definition of A, seed, pre seed respectively.
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Back when we had 10 people working at
@BankMercury
I could not imagine what 100 people would do here.
Now that we are almost at 100 people, I can easily imagine what 1,000 people would do here.
So much to be built!
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@snowmaker
raising too much money and a corollary to that: hiring too many people before PMF
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1/ As an investor you are often making very quick decisions about startups.
Here are some questions I think about:
Team:
- have they built something impressive before
- have they thought about the problems deeply
- have they shown perseverance
- do they care about the problem
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I read “Why we sleep?” a year ago and since have been taking sleep more seriously.
I now try to be in bed 8.5-9hrs a day. Before I did 7.5-8hrs.
Some people find that really surprising and think 6 hours in bed is normal. I was shocked they only do 6.
What’s normal?
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1/ We shared stats with TC on
@Mercury
growth post-SVB:
* 26k new customers since March growing twice as fast as before
* 4x net revenue end of may 2023 vs may 22
* 95% of ex-svb Mercury customers retained 90 days in
* 30% of Kruze Consulting clients using Mercury vs 17% in Feb
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Can we ban TikTok already?
Geopolitical risk, creating polarization, and just not good for people…
The TikTok War: Why High School & College Kids Are Getting The Wrong Information about Hamas & Israel
I spent the weekend trying to reverse engineer the TikTok algorithm, as I am convinced this is the reason we're losing the information war with high school & college students.
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One painful thing about running a remote company is how much complexity there is with regional taxes.
We have to register and do taxes in every state we have an employee. There are also per city taxes to worry about!
We file 30+ tax forma for different jurisdictions.
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Pretty wild when your company is big enough to co-host a party in New York and no one invites you to it 🤣
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What are good questions that lead to interesting convos? (I hate small talk)
My go tos:
* what are interesting books you read recently?
* what are the biggest challenges you have dealt with recently?
* how did you end up getting into your line of work?
Always looking for more.
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Even though
@BankMercury
has 12 support reps I still receive 100% of the support emails and look through them often.
Having everyone at the company stay in touch with issues affecting users is especially important as we scale the company.
Any tools people use that make it easy?
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One of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur can make early on is getting lost in paralysis.
Some people get stuck in ideas. They jump from idea to idea, holding out until they land on the perfect one. But they never actually build anything.
Other people get stuck in…
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One of my fav
@paulg
-isms that I have adopted is asking people what they found surprising.
Works great at work: "what did you find most surprising about this project?"
Or fun: "what was the most surprising thing about that trip?"
You get interesting insight/convos every time.
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The fed somehow got inflation under control without a unemployment or a recession.
Did anyone see that coming?
I guess we could still see recession soon but US economy seems surprisingly resilient.
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I miss in person YC alumni demo days.
If
@ycombinator
doesn’t do it next batch maybe a bunch of us can get together and do a huge unofficial same day gathering…
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Is there an investor database / website where you can learn about seed investors? Things like:
- stages they invest in
- industries they invest in
- geos they invest in
- average check size
- top deals
- how to contact them
- etc
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Pretty hilarious joke from PG that Elon completely misses.
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Have talked to several people who have used GPT-4, they all say it is uncanny how good it is.
Haven’t been as excited about an upcoming API launch.. ever.
GPT-4 is rumored to be coming soon, sometime between Dec - Feb
- GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters
- GPT-4 supposedly has 100 trillion parameters
It is something like 500x more powerful than GPT-3
What kinda stuff will you be able to create with GPT-4!?
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