Live @ Nvidia's nerd Super Bowl, poker takes over tech, and the future of AI banking

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0:37

If we do the best thing for customers, people will gravitate towards us and I don't have like a fear around it. There's just so much to banking. Like it's, it's not like Claude is going to go build a bank.

1:09

We're going to hold you to that. Imod.

1:18

Yeah, you say that. Don't give him an idea. This week on the show, Ellis and I chat about how south by Southwest is isn't a tech conference anymore, Jensen Huang's nerd Super bowl at Nvidia gtc and Ellis's obsession with old school Nvidia graphics card box art. Of course he is. Then we're joined by Mercury CEO Ahmad Akun. We chat about his side hustle as a vc, whether AI will eat banking if credit card points are a scam, and tech's poker culture versus the gamblification of everything. Welcome to Access Foreign. Here with my co host Ellis Hamburger. Ellis, how's it going man? Good to see you.

1:20

You too. I'm good. I am hopefully looking good because I resolved a very embarrassing camera problem that no podcast co host should ever experience. I could not figure out why I could not align my eyeline with the camera so it looks more like I'm looking at you. And the problem is that no matter where I put my camera, it always seemed like it was too zoomed in. And do you know what the problem?

2:00

You were zoomed in.

2:24

The camera was too zoomed in. I was on the 50 millimeter focal length. I did not realize that this camera vox gave me zoomed. And ever since the beginning, I have been fully zoomed, which also is not very flattering for the shape of my head.

2:25

Right, Yeah. I mean, I thought you were a camera guy. Every time I see you, you've got a different camera. So I thought you understood that cameras zoomed.

2:38

That's why this is embarrassing. I'm being revealed to be a poser.

2:45

Access is a safe space. How's it going otherwise? I've been traveling. I haven't been in LA the last several days. Everything good while you've been traveling?

2:50

I've been enjoying my daily rewatch of Moana with my kids. I think we're getting into the approaching triple digits, I would say. I think what's interesting about it is that, you know, as much as we talk about screen time being a problem these days, it's like we all grew up watching the same Disney movies, like, over and over and over again. Why is that not part of the same conversation? I think most of us who watched Aladdin 100 times turned out fine. And it's not like every single second of that movie is some, like, ethical moral lesson. You know what I'm saying? I think if that were to literally be on an iPad today, we'd be like, oh, my God, my child is watching the same video a hundred times and in a row, but because it's Disney, all of a sudden, we give it a free pass. So, yeah, Long story short, I think my. My firstborn may have learned a bit more from the Coco Melon songs about brushing your teeth, as maligned as they are, than our second born is from watching moana for the 50th time. That's my soapbox.

3:01

I've not seen Moana once, which I need to rectify.

3:59

It's great. It's actually great.

4:02

Yeah. Well, I have not had time to watch anything. I have been on the road, road warring, as I tend to do at first at south by Southwest in Austin, Texas, and then at the Church of Jensen, Nvidia, GTC and San Jose. I actually did a day trip from Austin to San Jose, where I did not even check out of my hotel in Austin. I left my suitcase there, and I flew from Texas to California in one day on Monday and would not recommend it, especially during spring break and TSA government shutdown. It was a long day, but everything actually, logistically went perfectly, and I felt like I hacked life a little bit. Wow.

4:03

I was gonna say. I mean, even the travel pro Iest of the travel pros, you know, can't squeeze past. I mean, was clear open or TSA PreCheck? A bit more open because I mean,

4:49

I saw like, oh yeah, you gotta do touchless id. Tsa. Touchless ID with Clear is the ultimate hack. I think I saved about an hour Austin airport that morning with that.

5:00

That's unbelievable.

5:10

But yeah, man, I mean flying, you know, 5,000 whatever miles in a day and still going back to the same hotel is, is quite a time warp, especially when you're going to gtc, which is it's just own unique universe. But first, South By. You haven't been to south by in a while, right? It was what, over a decade since you've been.

5:11

It's been a while. And I was going to ask how many PR guy viruses have you brought for show and tell?

5:35

Oh, so many. Everyone is a brand strategist.

5:40

You must have a great immune system.

5:44

The, the immunity to thought leadership that I have built up over the years is so strong because everyone is a thought leader. Everyone's a strategist, everyone's a podcaster, futurist. I was on a panel where someone said futurist with a straight face and I almost laughed. I probably should have. But yeah, south by is an interesting thing, man. Like it's, it's not a tech show anymore. I mean, tech brands come. But I would say like the coolest tech quote, unquote, tech brand activation was Yahoo this year. Right. Which kind of says a lot about the state of things. South by used to be where really cool products launched. I mean, Twitter, Foursquare, like back in the day, it was actually kind of at the vanguard of tech and culture. Now it's at the vanguard of futurism and brand marketing. But as a film and music festival, it's actually quite good in a sedent.

5:47

So what did Yahoo do that was so impressive?

6:44

They took over a local outdoor saloon type space and had, you know, square dancing and really good local barbecue, open bar, all that stuff. Of course it was good to catch up with lanzone, the CEO there. Sources subscriber and Emily Sundberg was there doing a Q and A with him and they had a nice mix of, of creators and, and tech people. But yeah, I mean, I mean south by is just, you know, it's, it's not where the big companies show up like they used to. And you've got kind of a new crop of more AI native or younger companies. Shout out superhuman. Which had me come and, and talk on a panel about taste in the age of AI As a. As a creator, which. Which was. Which was fun to. And then I did a panel with Tencent on the future of gaming, which was good. But yeah, man, the main thing at south by was. Was podcasting, and so it was nice to hang out with. With our Vox Media familia. We had a. We had a little party with a bunch of the POD hosts who were in town, got to see the. The K. Swish, the one and only Kara, who's given us a lot of love with feed drops and pivot and some of our other hosts and, you know, schmooze the CMOs, you know, convince them why they need to get in front of the elite audience for access.

6:47

Well, makes a lot of sense that the panel was about taste, because no one's talking about taste anymore, and south by is always a few months behind. Hey, I'm in the hyper local think circle that is setting the trend. As we learned in the last episode, I am the tastemaker.

8:10

If you say that you're not a tastemaker, if you say you're a tastemaker, you're not. That's my rule.

8:28

Well, I'm undoing that rule. Okay, I guess you have more followers for the time being, but since I got back on the podcast, I'm rapidly gaining on you. And so when I have more half years, or bots anyway.

8:32

That's true. Mine are pre Elon bots. Yeah.

8:47

So there was a moment early in my career where I passed my boss's follower count and that. It definitely got awkward.

8:51

Oh, yeah, right.

8:59

Like the power dynamics change. So we'll see how that feels when that happens again.

9:01

Well, we'll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. I then got to go from south by to Nvidia, as I was saying, to see Jensen, which was my first time seeing a Jensen Huang keynote. I don't know if you got to read my write up of it, but it is a unique experience, man.

9:06

Well, so how long did he go? How long is long?

9:25

Like two and a half hours. And he doesn't have a script. He just kind of freewheels it. I mean, he has his slides, the next slide, but there's no script. He doesn't. He doesn't prepare. And it's clear he doesn't need to because it's all in his head. Like, he is the LLM of Nvidia. And the amount of acronyms that man was spitting at the audience and, like, highly technical language was incredible to watch. The mastery he has of his domain but then also just the fact that, you know, this was at the SAP center in San Jose and you know, there's like 30,000 people in here to watch this, like two and a half hour, highly technical, you know, acronym heavy keynote. It just, it was in stark contrast to say Apple.

9:27

Right.

10:11

Where, and this is where a lot of the keynotes have gone, I think, especially out of the pandemic thanks to Apple, is that they're just these prerecorded on rails things. I mean in Apple's case, they literally gather you to watch a video. The same thing that they stream online for everyone.

10:12

Yeah.

10:28

And I actually really appreciated the, the realness of Jensen just getting up there and shooting it from the hip for two and a half hours straight. And he was making jokes and like there were moments where things, the transitions didn't work right and we had, he had to stop and start and you know, just think on the fly and it's like, okay, no, this is like worth going to see in person. And obviously like Nvidia is the most important company in the world right now, so there's also that. But he is just a one of a kind. I would say the closest thing that I've seen from like a tech keynoter to like what Jobs used to be. There really isn't anything else like it anymore.

10:29

I guess I need to watch the footage then because there aren't many who can do the El Jobso. But I mean, I feel like this is just another reminder as we are reminded constantly by Elon, that the ultimate scarcity is actually being funny and just being able to like make a crowd laugh.

11:07

Yeah.

11:24

And I feel like there's that, you know, unifying theory of Elon that all he wants is to be funny and just to like be liked. And I think that's probably where all these CEOs and founders have found themselves arriving at. They have the yacht. But like the final apex of being the renaissance man that they aspire to be is being able to actually do stand up comedy, which is really freaking hard. Right. And so I think it all tracks or even just be being able to feel like you can own people for two and a half hours.

11:24

Yeah. And just the world revolves around him, man. I mean it was obviously his conference and everyone was there, but he was just talking about how involved he was in everything from like there was this hilarious pre game. You know, they kind of like are turning this into like a Super Bowl. I mean that's what it is. It's like nerd super bowl. But in Terms of, you know, there's a pre game where they're all ESPN style, like sitting at a desk before. And I tweeted this, but all the AI CEOs that Jensen hand selected to be on the pregame commentary bench were all wearing all black with sunglasses. He was talking about like all of the sponsors. There were over 400 sponsors. I mean, everyone just wants to be close to Nvidia.

11:52

That's some sponsored dilution.

12:33

Yeah, everyone was thanking him, like even during the pre game, like the CEO of Open Evidence was like thanking Jensen for the GPUs. And I actually was. I was at the Nebbyus booth that afternoon doing some interviews and Jensen did his kind of walk through the expo floor with his entourage and to see, you know, everyone from Michael Dell to like the founder of Coral Weave to the Nebius folks just kind of enraptured by his presence. He was literally signing badges. Like he was text Taylor Swift. I expected to see him like sign a forehead or sign a chest or something, but he was signing literally pretty much anything presented to him. He signed chips. He signed like parts of the booths that he was walking by. Jensen. Jensen the God, I guess.

12:35

Can you take us back to like before the AI boom, what Nvidia was doing? Because I feel like this all happened just like so spontaneously.

13:22

They were a gaming company.

13:32

Yeah, that's. That's like what I'm saying, like. Or does he say kind of in retrospect that this was all part of the plan?

13:34

He did give a shout out to the gaming business and the gaming chips at the beginning was like, this is. This is the thing that built this house. And I thought that was cool to see him like, throw that back. But yeah, man, he. Nvidia was kind of toiling away in obscurity. I mean, they were obviously super important as a chip maker for gaming, but you can see it in their stock price. I mean, they were just flat. And then when ChatGPT came out, it was just off to the races. He is the king maker of the tech industry. Whatever he touches goes up, stock go up. You know, Nebius, I was there and like Nebbys is a great example. It's this like core Weave competitor. And since Nvidia invested in them, their stock is up like 300%. And so of course when he comes over, it's like, you know, thank you, Jensen. Like, you're literally like, you know, making me money. And he has that thing that everyone wants.

13:41

How many dude bros even know that the G and GPU is for Graphics.

14:37

Yeah. He has the thing everyone wants and they. They can't get, which is more gpus. And who he decides to give them to can make your company or not. And he, I think, is very much enjoying that kingmaker status. I could feel it, not just in the keynote, but in observing him interacting with the partner booths on the expo floor while everyone was taking selfies. You know, he came over and was like, when I invest in you guys, like, he knew the exact market cap number and like, it's up 300% since then.

14:42

So it's just too bad. It's just too bad.

15:14

What?

15:18

Because I'm a lot more interested in all of the old, like, Nvidia graphics card box arts, of which I have a whole book, than stock prices. Oh, here's an Nvidia right here. The Nvidia GeForce 4 Asylum.

15:19

Wow, you just had that.

15:38

This is what excites me.

15:40

You just had that lying around.

15:43

I just had it.

15:44

Wow.

15:45

I told you, I'm a tastemaker.

15:45

It has become super financial. There were people like day trading during the keynote. I saw. And then there are just a ton of analysts and investor types there. I mean, Nvidia is the economy in a lot of ways, so I understand the focus, but even in the Q and A that Jensen did, where he literally just takes questions for like three hours straight from creators and press, people were asking about specific stocks. And yeah, man, it's. The tech is still important, but it does feel like the money has really started to overtake things.

15:47

Bring back graphics cards.

16:18

Yeah. The only other, like, headline news I would say is, is Nvidia getting into the inference game and expanding what its chips can do to better handle running AI versus just training it. But everyone kind of knew that was coming, so there weren't any, like, huge surprises. But I guess the only real surprise was he brought out a AI powered Olaf on stage at the very end to hang out with him. And then this keynote was literally so long that they had to do a musical recap of it for like four minutes. And it was Jensen sitting at a fire like a campsite with a bunch of humanoids playing music and singing about what he talked about.

16:24

Amazing. Well, Alex, your Internet is sputtering to a halt, and so I think it's about time to cut to the interview.

17:05

Is that why you were taking so long to respond? Because I'm super delayed.

17:12

Yeah. There's literally like a two second delay.

17:15

Dave, do you think we should be concerned?

17:18

Dave, who. Who's the problem?

17:20

Alex is the problem.

17:22

Shit.

17:23

No question, everyone, that's our producer Dave on the mic. No, they're not gonna.

17:25

They're not gonna hear me. They're not gonna.

17:31

No, we're keeping this. We're keeping this. I need people to know Alex is bad at tech.

17:32

Wow.

17:37

I wouldn't blame Alex per se, but

17:38

yes, you're something's with your. Something's with your Internet or your computer.

17:41

Weird.

17:44

Well, with that, we're gonna roll our interview with Imad Akunt.

17:45

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18:24

Welcome. What's going on, Ahmad?

18:57

It's good, it's good. I'm excited to be here. How are you?

19:00

We're solid. You're a podcaster as well, aren't you?

19:03

Yeah, we all got the mic set, up we go.

19:06

I mean, I feel like we have a lot to learn from you. I feel like there are a lot of. Lot of growth hacks out there today for podcasts and companies and startups, many of whom I work with, but I have not heard. I've not heard about peanut butter and jelly delivery as a growth hack before.

19:09

I'm not good at my podcast. Like, I just. I just have fun talking to, like, people I meet in friends minds. That's my main kind of vibe in the podcast. I'm not very good at promoting it.

19:25

Hey, that's our vibe too.

19:35

Tell us about the peanut butter and jelly delivery though. How did that work as a growth strategy?

19:36

You know, with these marketing things, you never know if it's just like you're just out there in the rain delivering peanut butter and jelly for no reason or whether it's actually going to like, drive usage. But honestly, it was like one of my favorite days of the last, like 12 months. Of working at Mercury, it was just kind of fun to get out there, like deliver tasty food and like talk to customers.

19:41

Where did that idea originate, I wonder?

20:02

Kind of like a convoluted in joke, basically. Like, you know, for a while we were working on this product, but we hadn't launched yet, so we'd call it PB and that was like the code name. And yes, someone connected PB to peanut butter. And then we had this like jar that all the team got with like peanut butter in it, but like instead of ingredients, it was like all the features and yeah, it was like this kind of funny jar of peanut butter. And then so peanut butter was like a thing happening and then we were like, oh, this year we're trying to do more creative things and more in person things with marketing. So we're like, oh, it'd be cool if we just went around SF and delivered peanut butter and Jenny sandwiches. So it came from my co founder who's way more creative than I am.

20:05

Classic situation of startup codename actually becoming part of the product. I love it though. I mean, I'm just so fascinated. Like, I've been doing marketing in comms for a very long time and people look at inactivation like that and they're like, well, what's the KPIs, what's the conversion on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich? How much time can we save by, you know, cutting off the crust versus not? And it's like, no, I feel like the best storyteller is just kind of feel it out. Right. And know that some of this stuff can't quite be quantified.

20:51

Yeah, I think actually with marketing, you want to do things that are like, weird because there's such a. There's so much noise out there that like, you know, you do something and like, basically no one's gonna listen. But if you do something that's like kind of interesting and it stands out, like you can have a hundred x higher impact. So I'd rather do like 10 things and they're all like kind of fun and interesting and maybe nine of them like fall flat. But one of them is like a big viral head or whatever and lots of people hear about it and it's kind of aligned with the brand.

21:23

Speaking of market, the brand was. Was activated at south by Southwest this last weekend. I was there in Austin. Were you there?

21:53

I wasn't there. I've never been to south by Southwest, which is kind of.

22:02

You've never been? Okay.

22:05

I've been in the startup ecosystem for 20 years. So I feel like every year I'm like, oh, maybe I should go.

22:06

But if you want to be hounded by branding and comms consultants for four days straight, it's a great place to go.

22:10

Why. Why did you go?

22:18

I had a couple.

22:20

Why did you go, Alex?

22:21

Vox Media, who. Who. Who distributes this podcast, had a bunch of stuff. Podcast stage there and I was there with. With the Vox fam. And, you know, it's the good time to rub shoulders and do deals, you know.

22:23

Did you. Did you go to the Mercury thing? We were doing there. I think we were giving away some stuff. But you.

22:38

You guys were giving away, like, Casios and Aeropresses and really cool stuff. It looked like.

22:43

Yeah. One of our themes this year is to, like, kind of talk about craft. So, like, part of the peanut butter and jelly thing was like. It was like. It was like very, like, well crafted peanut butter and jelly. It was like coconut peanut butter, and the jelly was mango flavored. So that's why it's like Casio and things like that. Like, things that are, like, well crafted regardless of kind of, you know, how simple they are.

22:49

Also Amad, I've been waiting to see if you remember that we've met before. Do you remember how we met?

23:10

No idea. I feel like this might be a trick question.

23:16

No, we. We played poker together. We sat next to each other and played poker at CO2 a couple years ago.

23:20

Oh, that's cool.

23:27

I can't. I can't remember who played better.

23:29

Alex still remembers your tell, though, so we're gonna know if you're lying on the podcast today, Ahmad.

23:32

Okay, that does seem familiar. You had the Go to East meets.

23:37

Yes.

23:40

Thing.

23:40

Yeah.

23:40

Okay. Nice. Yeah.

23:41

Yeah. Are you. Are you a regular player?

23:42

I feel I. I have a game that I play, like, I mean, in theory once a month, but we get around to it, like, every two months. But I feel like that's pretty fun. Like the CO2 ones, I feel like everyone takes it, like, a little too seriously. Like, I, you know, I mostly pay poker just to, like, have an excuse to sit with people and chat with them, not to, like, try to make money.

23:44

What are you talking about? I thought as a founder, you just have to win everything or go home crying.

24:03

I mean, I feel shitty if I don't win, but, like, that's not the point of it. Like, I'm, you know, I'm competitive, but like that. I. Yeah, I want to play these games to have fun.

24:08

I think you did. Well, I don't think we Got in any heads up situations now that I'm remembering. But yeah, I remember.

24:17

I really can't remember.

24:23

Yeah, this guy plays. It's interesting how poker has become such a part of like tech culture. I don't know if it's the all in guys or what, but I feel like I'm seeing poker games at conferences and just like house games happening in SF in New York and like the tech scene like constantly. Do you feel like that's always been the case or is it a relatively new phenomenon?

24:24

I think it's always been the case. Like I mean even, even when I first got here in SF in 2007, I used to arrange like poker games. So it's like it's a thing. I just feel like tech in general has become like a little bit more like a showy thing over the giant gamble. There's just a lot more money in there. There's a lot more. Yeah, things just like. Yeah. In 2017 even it was kind of a small industry and now it's just a big deal across everything. So I think there's these little characteristics of it have become bigger.

24:46

I mean it makes perfect sense to me that founders would like poker because it is a combination of bravado and showmanship and understanding of probabilities that is going to be able to maximize your output.

25:20

Yeah, that's true. There is something geeky about it. And I think that generally speaking, tech doesn't like golf as much or at least like, I mean it's. Golf is doing its thing. So. So I feel like you need some social, social kind of networking thing. Right? Like if it's not golf then is it going to be like poker or you know what, what else would it be? And you don't need to be fit for poker. So I think that helps.

25:35

Do you have a crazy poker story?

25:59

I don't think I have a crazy poker story. I mean I've been in my fair share of things where I should have won and I haven't won, but I know how crazy they get. What's your, what's your crazy poker story?

26:00

I don't know. You do meet so many interesting people. You meet like random celebrities obviously, like tech people.

26:12

Oh, I did go to a CO2, another go to event where they were also doing poker. And I sat next to Steph Curry for like a solid one hour. Talk to him while I was like poker. That was pretty cool.

26:19

How was he? How did he play?

26:30

He was okay. I don't think he was like that good, but he wasn't bad. It didn't like, blow me away. I think I did pretty well in that game. This is a few years ago, but it was just, it was just fun to talk to him, like just, you know, sitting next to him and just shooting the shit kind of thing. So I wasn't, I wasn't as focused on poker.

26:31

Well, I have a pro level podcast segue, which is that I feel like, you know, gambling scene, especially with like the mobile games and Draft King and fanduel and all the prediction market stuff. I think you could argue that they are one of the very biggest problems for like, personal financial independence and literacy. And now you're building that type of product.

26:47

Oh, this is a great segue, Alice. You really, really nailed that.

27:10

I told you. How do you feel about that stuff philosophically? Because it's kind of funny to me to think that like, all right, we're going to build all these personal banking products that are trying to solve this, you know, mission or this big idea around helping people get control of their stuff, whether they're independent or solo, like some of. Or Sorry. Or in a couple, like some of those videos you've been making. I mean, are you going to participate in this side of the story for financial literacy and banking independence?

27:14

Yeah, I, I hope so. You know, I, I personally really dislike, you know, gambling as like a. I think it's like, poker is fun and

27:43

like, poker's not gambling. That's what we tell our wives.

27:52

I mean, I never bet more than I, you know, like a recreational amount. But like I, you know, I have friends that like lost their lives or they have family members who've like, fall into gambling addictions. It's like a, it's a serious issue and I don't, you know, a lot of tech, like, unfortunately, you know, whether it's Poly Market or DraftKings or whatever, like encourages this stuff even more, which I've never been a fan of. Yeah, I would love for, I guess at a basic level like Mercury, both on the business side and the personal side is a utility product. It's like banking. Everyone needs it, both on business and personal. But bank accounts, like, until Mercury, have been pretty stupid. They don't do anything for you. Right. It's just like, if anything, they kind of get in the way of your life. So, yeah, I would love for us to kind of help people run their business better. So we actually just launched literally today this product that we call Mercury Insight.

27:55

Okay. So I know the Insights has natural language questions you can ask. So maybe Alex now That he's a, he's a user. He could say, am I up or my down? I need, I need PDFs, I need insights, I need agentic reasoning helping me understand how much I should bring to the table on my.

28:52

Yeah. Should I bet or not?

29:10

Because you could spin off cards with certain amounts of money, right? It's like, honey, it's only 250 tonight. You literally can't spend anymore.

29:13

Yeah.

29:21

Or is it all cash, Alex? Is it all cash?

29:21

You have to, you have to do cash. But I mean, Mercury will see the atm. Atm. You know, Mercury sees that ATM transaction and I definitely tag it. So. Yeah, I should ask. I'm kind of scared to, but yeah. Ahmad, I am a dau. I. When I went independent in September, it was. I spent about, I spent about 15 minutes looking for a bank. And Mercury seemed like the simplest and the best from like a cost perspective too, for a solo person like me. And so it was actually for your business, right? Yeah, for my business. And it was a pretty, pretty quick decision and have not regretted it. It's actually a legitimately good product. It's Rare we have CEOs on where, you know, one of us, like, I don't know if it's that rare actually, but it's nice to have someone on and it's like, oh, yeah, no, it's. I'm. I'm a dau.

29:23

Nice. You should check out the Insights launch. We just did it, actually. We have a. We have a fun little kind of creative marketing thing with it as well. We actually worked with this like generative artist. And basically how it works is like, we kind of plug in the transaction data to this like generative art thing. And it makes like a different piece of unique art for every, every customer based on the data, which is kind of fun. And it's got funny things like if there's a lot of international transactions, then I put a globe there and there's a lobster that shows up. I can't remember why the lobster shows up. Anyway, we have a fun little podcast about it.

30:15

Says, Alex, your newsletter revenue sucks, but we made you a watercolor of a squirrel.

30:54

Exactly. At least it looks pretty.

31:02

I mean, why is this so freaking hard? I mean, I feel like even back when I was at the Verge, I remember covering that startup like Bank Simple. And it's obvious that there's a lot of complexity, especially with actually being the bank. But why, why has this been so hard for anybody to do? To just make something that's, that's better, especially for, for consumers, which I know you just launched.

31:06

I think there's like two aspects to it. Number one, it's just much, much harder to build fintechs than it is to build pure software things.

31:30

Is that a burn to all the other stuff?

31:38

No, no, it can be.

31:41

I'm open to it.

31:43

All my previous startups are software startups. It's so simple to just build some software. But yeah, with fintech you got to go integrate into these backend legacy systems. Wires are just this. It's literally like SFTP files going back and forth with a ton of exception cases. So it's just like these complicated legacy systems and then yeah, you of the regulations around it that also make it tricky. And it has been hard to be a chartered bank. So you know, the way Mercury works today is we partner with two sponsor banks. We actually just applied to be a chartered bank but you know, we only did that after we reached like a pretty massive scale and you know, we raised, raised a 3.5 billion valuation before we were like let's go get a bank charter. So yeah, you have to work with sponsored banks. It's actually relatively recent where there has been enough sponsor banks out there, they've built enough tech on top of the sponsor banks that you can even do something like Mercury. When Mercury launched we were the first neobank to have wires. Yeah, bank simple did not have wires. They also worked with sponsor banks. So that sounds simple but obviously you can't run a business on a bank that doesn't have wire support. Right. That's just like a basic requirement for business banking. So we had to push pretty hard to find someone who would do it and we were probably the first people that got it working end to end. Fintech has only recently reached the kind of scale that we can get enough funding to kick these things off. The products are good enough in the back end and enabled people like Mercury to.

31:45

The charter thing is fascinating. I don't think people fully appreciate how unique and difficult that is. I guess to go back to our earlier conversation, it kind of reminds me of getting a gambling or a casino license or something in a state. It's equally political and regulated and difficult and there's just a very, very finite supply. And what does that basically unlock for you? It lets you do the whole stack yourself. Is that it?

33:20

Yeah, whole stack ourselves. I mean the biggest thing for us is delivering the best customer experience. So there's certain things that are really hard to do as a fintech. Like we don't have Zelle support. Zelle only works with banks, it does not work with fintech. So we'll be able to do Zelle. We do very little lending right now. It's much easier to do lending. I mean it's still not easy but once you have the low cost of capital of being a bank, you can really provide lending at scale. So yeah, mostly own the experience end to end deliver the best kind of customer products. Also I think it'll build trust with customers. Right. Like right now if you go to mercury.com, there's a lot of disclaimers everywhere and we have to really explain to

33:48

you like you're actually banking with someone in Arkansas that you don't know or something. Yeah, I've seen this on other banks. It's like another thing.

34:26

Yeah, yeah, most fintechs have that. But I think like people will, yeah, should trust us more if they see that we're like directly regulated and yeah, the hardest thing about Mercury is that trust element. Right. Like it's like we have this kind of internal joke, I guess it's not funny actually. But we will say like, yeah, step number one, send us all your money. That's how Mercury works.

34:33

We all know the best way to build trust is making someone a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

34:55

Or you're me and you don't have money yet and you just started your business and you can start and build your Mercury from zero and then it's a little bit de risked from the trust perspective.

34:59

It's a little easier when you're small and you're just starting out. But, but it's still like, you know, you're still trusting us with money. Yeah, there are lots of options out there that, you know, there's been banks that have been around for 100 years. So like, you know, we're, we, we're definitely like on the trust side. We have to like win that trust over time and I think the, the bank charter would help us do that as well.

35:07

Well, so what do you think are your best tactics to build that trust? I work with a lot of startups on like their storytelling and writing and I've come to believe that like they're really, I think in this case there is something you could say to increase the trust. But if you are a tech startup, do they even believe you that you are an actual bank? You know what I'm saying? And I've kind of gotten to the point where like saying trust us just kind of doesn't do anything and it's more about, you know, the even Doing a commercial with Steph Curry, it's like, all right, well, if he and his manager must have vetted this thing. And it's like, no wonder celebrity endorsements are such a big part of product commercials for new companies and whatnot. I mean, how are you thinking about that?

35:26

Yeah, there's. There's probably, like, three elements to it, right? Especially initially. There was like, trust by proxy. You know, we had Andreessen Horowitz as one of our first backers, and actually we had a bunch of. We did have a bunch of celebs as backers as well. We had the original founder of Silicon Valley bank as an investor in Mercury. So, yeah, you get, like, trust proxy. We had Serena Williams one, and, yeah, we had a few other ones. So there's like this trust by association, which is like, oh, yeah, if all these people think it's good, that must be good. The second one, which I think is actually slightly unintuitive, and I didn't even think about this, but how polished the product is, especially the initial experience. Yeah. Alex just went through the onboarding process. We have spent so much freaking effort in the onboarding process to make it very easy to upload the right files. And when you upload your formation docs, it'll tell you if you've uploaded the wrong kind of file. And we try to get people that account within a few hours if we can. So making that experience super smooth, we want people to say, like, wow, that was actually amazing. Because the alternative is you have to walk to or drive to a bank branch and sit in the line for two hours and talk to someone who doesn't understand your business and try to get a bank account that way. So you build the trust by having this polished product. And then the third thing is you really want our customers being proponents for Mercury. So even today, 60% of our customers come from their friends and communities telling each other about Mercury. So I don't know where, Alex, you kind of research this, but if you look at X or Reddit, you know, Mercury comes up often. People recommend us there, or if you ask your friends, they will be recommended. So, you know, having like, that customer, customer love where you've done right by a lot of customers, both product and customer support and things like that goes a long way to, like, build that trust as well. But it's definitely like. It's like a boulder. You got to keep pushing it uphill. Right? Like, we, you know, when we first started, if you raised a million dollars, you would be like, oh, my God, I'M not going to leave ahead now. We have several customers that have more than $400 million using, using mercury. So yeah, we keep pushing that boulder and we keep building that trust over time.

36:08

Here, here. I needed to receive a wire to my LLC the day that I set my account up or at least like initiate it. And I was just like, I need something that will get me from zero to making this happen in the least amount of time as possible. And I actually tried some of your competitors and in onboarding it just was confusing or it didn't work or there was like some kind of hiccup that I couldn't figure out. And it feels like that does matter, especially when you're onboarding like someone like me who's just like a one person entity.

38:22

Here's a barrier though. I know you're trying to ostensibly make things more transparent with the membership fee, but that also creates, you know, a hurdle to jump over for a lot of people. How are you thinking about that trade off?

38:54

So the business account is completely free. The personal account is actually, we just made it. So if you have a business account you get the personal for free. But we do charge for it if you do not.

39:08

Was it 250 a year or something?

39:17

It's yeah, it's 240 a year. So 2820amonth. Yeah, we'll probably experiment with this over time. Our main thing is we want to provide like a super high touch, high quality service. And you know, on business, obviously people who set up businesses, maybe not Alex, but you know, they tend to have higher balances and they're using it actively. And like you make, you make money through various things. You can definitely and I've talked to a bunch of like other neo banks that have done this. You can end up with like a consumer product where you know, you have millions of customers that have like hardly any money in there, they're hardly using it and it just costs you like a ton of money to service that. So that's the main thing we're looking to avoid. On the personal side, it's not, I mean obviously we'll make some money on it, but it's actually to make it. So like, hey, are you really, really committed to this product? Are you actually going to use it rather than like just sign up and put some money in it and then forget about it kind of thing. So it's more about that than actually using the subscription service to make money. But it also means that we can provide this really, really kind of high quality product Right. Like, we have great support around it. We have really High Yield Savings Account. We're going to launch a credit card at some point. It'll be an amazing credit card. So, like, we really want to make that product really amazing. And they're making it amazing. And like, like, High Touch does cost money and we want to make sure those customers are committed to it.

39:20

You got to spend money to make money, as they say.

40:44

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of silly, I think, you know, with the upmarket approach, a lot of those folks do really care about, you know, the airport lounge or the edit by Chase Sapphire Reserve with a whole lot of disclaimers on it. Is that kind of the motive behind, like, doing, doing the credit card thing? Or do you think all of that is kind of BS and like, actually it's a less stressful life to just get cash back on everything and just let it be? Because I'm certainly on Reddit trying to maximize my points and I feel stupid.

40:47

You are. You're a points guy. I hate points. Personally, it's hard to actually figure out exactly what percentage of people like, love points and hate points. I think it's like, I actually think probably, like, people love points are like these really loud people where they're like, oh my God, you can get points and did you get this card? You know, like that kind of thing. And people who hate points don't talk about the fact that, that they hate it mostly, I think.

41:19

Do I sound like that?

41:41

Yeah.

41:43

Great. So. So I suspect a lot of people just don't want to bother with this stuff and they just want to get like a reasonable cash back and not jump through hoops. Like, I have a bunch of safe Chase Sapphire points. I can never freaking figure out how to spend them.

41:44

I can help you with that after if you want.

41:56

Yeah, but I don't want, I don't want to think about it. I just want to, like, either give me money or just get out of my way. It's like you have to book it like 300 days in advance to get, like, a business. I don't know. It's so confusing. Big I. I hate points.

41:58

Dave Portnoy has a million amex points, famously, and has never spent them, which I also love. Yeah, I mean, that's probably a problem for AI to help solve. How to spend your points.

42:09

Well, I was actually gonna ask Claude about that this morning, but I forgot. Thanks for the reminder.

42:19

The answer is they don't want you to spend those points. Right.

42:23

Of course.

42:26

That's the Trick like they're making money on people by like all this points that you never spend it and like it's just like free money, so.

42:26

Exactly. So if you look at the Chase Sapphire Reserve, they got DoorDash, they got StubHub, they got Lyft, they got the $300 travel credit. My calculation in my mind is that if I'm using it all, then I'm clearly getting an added value because that's their whole bet is that no one's using it. And so yeah, they want you to

42:33

spend the money, pay the yearly fee and not use the rewards. Like that's.

42:54

That.

42:58

That's ideal thing.

42:58

So is this going to be a part of your credit card philosophy? Because I mean, this could be a storytelling lever to say, listen, like, yeah, the credits can. The points can be fun and this and that, but like, yeah, we want

42:58

to make it simple. And yeah, we're gonna just give you, give you the money and not make you think about it. I do think there's like a world where air miles makes sense for people who like travel a lot and you know, maybe we'll have a ML program at some point. But yeah, the rest of it is, I think it's like a hack to like, like make money from people.

43:09

If you can somehow get every airline on there and be the first credit card to have every major airline alliance because, you know, amex only has some and Chase only has some, that would be huge. That would be AGI is like hard too possible.

43:29

But yeah, sure, we'll try.

43:43

Alex, something else. Ahmad, while, you know, when we have CEOs of products we use on, we like to, you know, just ask them to build things for us. When will I be able to talk to Mercury and my Mercury data securely via Claude?

43:46

Yeah, you can do that already.

43:58

You can do that already.

44:00

So a. The Mercury Insights launch has it built in Insights. So you don't need to go to Claude. You could just like just log in right now. Alex, click on Insights on the left hand side and you can talk to it.

44:01

But what if I'm doing like financial planning, tax planning and cloud and I want to pull in my Mercury?

44:15

Yeah. So then we also have a Mercury mcp. So if you go to Claude and I should really know this, but there's a place in there that you can like add cvs. Yeah, so that's actually growing super fast. We only launched that a couple of months ago. Yeah, we really love it. So you can pull in all that data and you can. Yeah, you can plug in Whatever other data you have.

44:20

So that's growing, people are using that.

44:39

Yeah. I mean that's partly what kind of drove us to build it directly into the product. Because obviously like there's geeky people like you that want to, to learn what MCP is and do it themselves, but other people just want to just be able to pull that data directly into the AI, directly in Mercury. But I do think this is one of the interesting things to think about that banks are already so far behind that I think AI just accelerates that. Right. I haven't actually researched it, but I assume none of the big banks have an MCP server or know what that means.

44:42

I would doubt that bank of America is on mcp. So how do you feel though about giving over the interface essentially to Claude, in this case via mcp? I assume it can also plug into chat. But is the SaaS apocalypse coming to banking or how do you feel about that?

45:19

I think at the end of the day, do great things for customers. Right. Like, I think this mindset of like fear is yeah, if we do the best thing for customers, people will gravitate towards us and I don't have like a fear around it. I think that idea of then, yeah, there's just so much to banking. Like it's not like Claude is going to go build a bank.

45:36

We're going to hold you to that. Ahmad.

45:58

Yeah, you say that. Don't give him an idea.

45:59

But that's just like the depth of features is really deep within Mercury. And there's certain things where you do want to like talk to it and there's certain things where you want to click around. Right. Like if you're, if you're looking at graphs and you're like adding a user, there's a set of things where talking is the right interface on a set of things where actually you do want to click around and see the information in a densely packed kind of way. But yeah, we keep building things and as long as we're doing good things by customers, I think we'll succeed. I don't see it as a threat.

46:03

Thank God. I'm in Insights and it's telling me I'm making more money than I'm spending, which I wasn't actually aware of until now.

46:35

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46:41

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47:45

Well, here's what we need to do with mcp. We have Alex's little poker card that we're going to spin up, up. And whenever he's up, his eight sleep bed is gonna like be like the perfect temperature. Whenever he's down, it's gonna like go to 100 degrees and make him sweat and like actively punish. And I think, you know, there's kind of going to be a little Pavlovian loop there to help Alex play better.

47:54

Just no interest. I know you're saying like, you know, we, we'll just got to build the right product and it'll be fine. And I mean, you do have the benefits of being in a heavily regulated space, right? Like you're going after a trip charter and it's, you know, you're right. I don't think Anthropic is going to go for a bank charter, but they probably do want to absorb a lot of the, even this insights announcements today. You know, they probably would like for a lot of that to be happening in Claude and you've got the connector to kind of make it happen at the data layer. So is this just kind of early? Everyone in tech is, you know, figuring this out and going like, what do we give to the AI? What do we keep? And it's just early and therefore it's fine to do both. Or do you think that that will change at any point?

48:16

I mean like, you can kind of think about like, what's the, what's the potential end result, right? The end result might be like, I've got this like AI in my ear and it's just like running my life for me, right? It's like, and it's like if I, you know, if I want to buy a car, it like negotiates it for me and if I want to get a mortgage, it sets it up for me and all that kind of stuff. I Think the benefit of being a startup and being creative is like you can actually try to write that, right? I think most things I've gone wrong since Mercury has launched have helped Mercury, which is. This is maybe a morbid way to say it, but Covid happened and suddenly all the bank branches shut down and how would you get a bank account? And Mercury was there, right? Every year something crazy happens in the world and Mercury ends up doing well. And I think when you're on the side of the future and where the future is going, you do well. If you try to fight the future, eventually maybe you can hold that line for a little bit. Maybe you're some SaaS app and you refuse to give API access and you try to block computer use agents from using you and you do all this stuff and at the end of the day the AI is just going to act like how a human acts. You just can't block that forever. I think a better move for that SaaS app is to go like, okay, how do we enable this AI? How do we build our own agents to interact with people? And that's like, I'm also an investor, but when I think about Mercury, when I invest in people, I want to go, does this feature exist in 10 years time? And I think the future is this. The future is AI is going to be a big part of how people interact with all services. And maybe in that world every other bank tries to block it and Mercury is like, sure, let's just do it. And everyone has to use Mercury. I think the alternative is you try to fight the future. And I think A, that's just not going to be possible, but B, I think you're going to lose out on the opportunity when you try to fight the future.

48:55

Is there still speaking of the future, are there any narratives going around about whether it's with stablecoins or being able to have a custodial wallet of your funds, that that's completely within your control or is that kind of passe at this point? Within banking world?

50:55

I think there's like strong use cases for this. Honestly, I think if you're in the US and you want to do things with US dollars, it's not that useful, right? Like you can get a Mercury account pretty quickly. You can send money between people same day, you can get cards spun out. Like it's just a pretty good system. I think the, if you're in, I don't know, Turkey or Argentina or whatever, right? You don't necessarily trust your local currency. If you want to do any Sort of international stuff. Like, you want to contract with people and do remote work or whatever it is, you need to be able to operate outside your kind of local currency. And that's where I think stablecoins and wallets have done well, and I think they'll continue to do well. And there's Stripe acquired a company corporation that's done a really good job of enabling a lot of those players. So I think there's a place for it. But, yeah, I think in the basic US dollars, US ecosystem kind of world, I think stablecoins actually add a layer of confusion rather than make it better for customers right now, at least.

51:11

Yeah. And I think, speaking of onboarding and craft, I was experimenting with a lot of that stuff, like, years ago, you know, during the crypto boom, just to see what was going on. And while it sounds nice philosophically, to be able to, you know, own your shit and have it on you, that's also, like, incredibly scary. You know, Like, I perpetually hide things from myself and lose things. And as cool as the Tony Fadell ledger wallet looked, and as much as I love the tagline, which was trust yourself, which is one of my favorite taglines, I'm like, I'm literally going to lose this thing, and then there goes the nest egg. And so, you know, whether it's with the FDIC or otherwise, it's like you want to have that safety net.

52:21

And like, when you, you know, when you swipe a card, right, like, you can go complain about something if they don't deliver the service, right? Like, what happens in the world where you, like, own your wallet and you send them money and they just disappear?

53:03

Ahmad, it's. It's rare that we have founders on who are as prolific investors as you are. I think it's always fascinating to.

53:13

To.

53:21

To talk to CEOs who also invest a lot. We had. Dylan Field was one of our first guests, and he's also a very active angel. And you've invested in, what, hundreds of startups. You have your own, you know, fund. How does that intersect with running Mercury? Do you find that that gives you a unique vantage point or alpha in how you run the company? Because you're seeing all these new ideas and meeting all these, you know, really interesting founders. Building the future or how does that. Yeah, yeah. Does it. Does it affect Mercury at all?

53:21

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think investors are kind of like the superstars of the tech ecosystem, so, like, everyone wants to kind of talk to them and, like, aspire to be them because, like, I guess you need them. So our initial Mercury customers were investors, things I'd invested in. That's still obviously the case. A lot of my invest portfolio companies are Mercury customers. I also think for me personally, especially as your company gets bigger, you're CEOing, you're hiring execs, you're doing all this stuff that takes you away from what it's really about in terms of innovation and building product and things like that. So now, like everyone, I invest a lot in AI, so I have a chip company that I invested in. And I know you don't know a lot about it, but investing is kind of fun. Especially for every one company you invest in, you might talk to five other companies. And I've done one fission startup, so I've talked to probably five fission startups. So you end up just knowing a little bit about a lot of things. And generally people doing new things are doing it at the edge of what's possible. Right. So to go back to showing you the future, right, they're telling you, oh, I literally had this conversation yesterday where they were like, oh yeah, this barely works right now. This is a C stage company. But they were like, imagine how good it's going to be in 10 years time. And I was like, okay, years, not 10. Anyway, obviously they're selling me. He'll be really good at one year's time. But I do think, like, startups are like, you're always taking risk doing new things and entrepreneurs, when you invest in them, can really show you what the future is going to be like and they can help go like, oh, yeah, this is like, this is what it'll be and I need to get on top of it kind of thing. Also just gives me a lot of energy. I feel like I have this like idea that, like, you know, what is not limited is time, but what's limited is energy. Like, I think like, you know, you can just keep going. If, like, if everything you do is kind of fun and it gives you energy, you can just like do it for 24 hours, right? 18 hours.

53:51

I definitely relate to the energy of learning a little bit about a lot of things. As a journalist my entire adult life, there is a lot of intersection with the patterns that a VC goes through day to day. And it is the kind of thing that if you're deeply curious about this stuff and you're just interested in where tech is headed, it's really fun to get to actually also place bets, I would imagine.

55:54

So talk to us about what you're looking for in the Companies you invest in, in how they're using AI at this early stage and talk to us less so from the product building point of view. But I mean, you brought up hiring executives. I feel like I've known a lot of executives historically that are frankly, God awful at hiring. And it seems like a ripe opportunity for AI to help establish, like, what are the actual criteria we need to be looking out for this role? What type of questions are we asking? How can we involve people more in like teasing out better reviews, especially on panels, you know, for hiring and whatnot. Have you seen AI come into that part of the process yet with the companies you're investing in?

56:18

Yeah, I feel like hiring is like, not something that's changed too much. I think one. One part of the. One part of it that is changing, especially if you're hiring engineers, is like, how do you. How do you judge someone when they can like, you know, do any coding challenge very quickly and like perfectly? So you have to kind of. Yeah, I've seen like coding challenges are getting way more complicated and people are asking for, give us all the prompts you use to build this thing and then maybe you ask them a bunch of questions about how does it work and why they made choices they did. Outside that. I'm wondering whether AI would be good at this yet. I feel like AI is not always great at judgment.

57:03

Well, you need to create a criteria or a rubric, I think, and then it can be good at it.

57:43

I don't know. There's just a thing about when you put a box in it, people will learn how to cheat the box. And it's part of being a good hiring person is to try to really get underneath the hood and learn the unique experiences and get a. But I was saying even a year ago, something like Insights wouldn't have worked. AI was really bad in numbers, and now it's actually pretty good at reasoning about numbers and things like that. So, yeah, I think even what I'm saying here could easily be wrong in six months time or a year's time. Where I can imagine in a year's time you would not trust a human to run a hiring process. You'd be like, of course.

57:48

Well, the hallucination rate was a huge factor for a while with this stuff. I mean, I imagine for Insights, your hallucination rate for that needs to be zero, right?

58:29

Yeah. And it needs to not try to make up numbers, but actually look at real numbers and reason about them. But yeah, to come back to your question around investing in AI, it's actually kind of funny because like AI just changes so much that the criteria you use to invest every three months is completely different. Right. To give you an example, there was a bunch of accounting software like a year ago everyone was super excited about, hey, accountants have lots of humans and AI could do this. There was this kind of bloom of 10 startups that raise seed or series A kind of.

58:37

Isn't that sad? Lots of humans is the problem statement for tech builders.

59:13

Well, there's a, it's a combo effect, right? It's like lots of humans and labor shortage which we have in accounting and we have in a few other places as well. But yeah, I mean in general I don't think humans should do things that AI can do over time at least because at Beast right now AI actually does relatively mundane things. And it'll be better for an accountant to give you tax advice and really give you thoughtful business advice rather than like click there and like is this transaction a travel transaction or is this a meal? Like you know, like going like one by one categorizing things like that's. No one's having fun doing that. Like we should have the machine do the non fun.

59:19

But I have to get my books in order for my cpa. Can I just prompt Mercury to do that for me yet? Or when do we get to that point?

59:58

As part of the insights thing, we auto categorizing all the transactions. I think we went back and categorized everything in the last 18 months as well. So check it out. We're always improving things, but I think we'll have it all categorized for you. So you should be able to just hand that over.

1:00:08

Well, so what do you expect your employees, your human employees to be doing? Let's just say even a year and a half. Like where is that leverage do you feel like for them?

1:00:23

Yeah, I mean as I said, AI is moving so far, so it's hard to like predict. Like where's the leverage? I mean right now I think humans are the main place where you get judgment and creativity and AI is much more like even I used to be an engineer, right? I think I'm a pretty good engineer. But 90% of the time when you're engineering, you're just writing the road things. You're like, oh, I have to create this file and I have to create this function and this function has to do this and it's just very basic stuff. And actually if you're a better engineer, you can just type a little faster and do it a little faster, but it's not like you're like adding that much creativity to the thing that's going to do the basic thing that every engineer knows that you have to do when a web page is hit or something like that. So when I look at engineering today, it's like, yeah, the basic stuff that everyone could do anyway. And it was just a race of who could do it faster. The AI could just do it for you and very fast, and all the actual workers and thinking about the problem, thinking about customers, thinking about the architecture and kind of guiding the AI. So, yeah, I think the same thing applies to lots of different functions. Right. I don't think the AI is going to come up with the PB and Jelly idea, but it can probably write the spec and eventually go find the truck and all that kind of stuff.

1:00:35

And I do think this is a very important conversation that I personally feel like working with founders all day, that one of the main jobs I feel like I'm doing with storytelling with a lot of these companies I work with is trying to get specific about this future. And I think one of the things that, I don't know, maybe could be an interesting thing to think about. I know you talk about your criteria not being a minimum viable product, but being minimum delightful product. And I think delight is kind of something that only a human is able to evaluate. Unless we evaluate delight as nice, juicy buttons, which I think are just a subset of Delight. I don't know. Is that something that only humans can do in your mind for now,

1:01:54

I think for. I would say that human touch and delight in creativity, all of that, it is for now, a domain of humans. It's really hard to tell where the technology goes in the next few years. But I mean, even as the technology is super powerful, right. I think there's. There's a ton of work that doesn't involve the delight part of life. And there's just a lot of stuff out there and that by itself will be disruptive. Right. Like mercury is growing really fast and we're doing a lot of stuff, so I think we'll continue needing humans. But we saw block, which they weren't growing very fast. And they were like, hey, actually we just don't need 40% of people that worker anymore. I'm sure it's not just AI, but that's kind of scary, I think.

1:02:40

Thank you for saying that. They weren't growing very fast. I mean, so many people just, I think took Dorsey's framing of this is to get ahead of what's coming with AI and it's like, no Block had more employees than its competitors, and it was growing slower. And I think a lot of companies are kind of like, whitewashing their layoffs with AI. AI, when in reality they overhired in the pandemic or they're just not structurally doing well, regardless of what's happening with AI. And I wish more people just said that.

1:03:30

I think there's an enablement factor to it, though. I think there is a element of you can do more with AI and that does enable people who aren't growing, they need to reduce costs to go, like, okay, we'll use AI more aggressively to add some of this work that humans were doing.

1:04:02

But you in your position, like, Mercury's growing very fast, like you said, you're constantly expanding. I'm sure you're hiring a ton. It's not rational for you to just go. And you're very plugged in on AI, but you're not going to just go, I'm just going to preemptively lay off half my.

1:04:21

No. That would be insane. Yeah. Yeah. And it really does come down to, like, we're profitable as well. There's. There's so much work to do across almost every role we're actively hiring. Right. We're going to grow the team by, like, 20, 25% this year, but at the same time, we will try to automate as much as possible. And it's actually hard to keep up with all of our growth, even with the people we have. So if we can make their lives a little easier, that'll be good.

1:04:36

I was talking to Gustav, the COSI of Spotify, the other day, and he framed it in a way that I thought was good, which was our roadmap is. Is always longer than what we're able to get done at any given moment. And until that gap has fully collapsed, there's going to always be opportunity to do more with AI. Like, AI is not replacing things, it's not replacing humans. If anything, we're just going to add more to get our roadmap done. Because, yeah, like, that. That gap is still there. And maybe we'll get to a point where AI can just fill that roadmap in for you, but it doesn't seem like we're getting there anytime soon.

1:05:04

Yeah. Actually feel like product builders, whether it's engineers or designers or PMs, you actually need even more off with AI, which is, like, a little ironic because I'm like, I look at our sales team and I'm like, oh, my God. If I just had two engineers that could just work alongside the sales team. They could deploy so much AI to speed them up, get leads better. There's just so much you can do with AI that you actually need more engineers and more people who can use it actively to be deployed across the rest of the company, which I think is also a little ironic.

1:05:42

So you have kids, right Imad?

1:06:14

Yeah, three 14, eight and one years old. So full spectrum.

1:06:16

Oh wow. So you're back at square one a little bit. I have a 2 year old and a 5 year old and I think we all know that it's a good thing to do to teach financial responsibility literacy. How are you thinking about that? I feel like even the age old example of something like allowance I think was so powerful for me to start thinking about earning or having some scarcity with my money and being even more deliberate about it. I remember having a Visa Bucks card. Do you remember what that was?

1:06:20

No. I wasn't born, I didn't grow up in the us.

1:06:55

It was something that your parents could load money onto and it was like my favorite thing ever and I would know exactly how much I had and I would go buy video games and then sell my old video games. And to some extent you could spin up cards now with Mercury and give your kids specific amount of money or whatever. How do you feel like that's going to look for kids growing up? How are you doing it?

1:06:59

Yeah, I'm a really big fan of giving kids access to real money. So with my younger kid, my 8 year old, I try to do with cash because digital money is a little abstract for her. So give her physical pocket money and if she wants, like spend something, I'm like okay, you know, you can pay for it. It's actually kind of funny like as soon as I introduced that this is about like a year and a bit ago, like she stopped spending money. I was like, like she, you know, before she'd always ask me to buy her things and then when I was like okay, you know, now you have your pocket money, like you can buy your own things. And she was just like doesn't ask for things anymore. Which I thought was like hilarious. With my older one, yeah, she has a, you know, one of my, in my personal bank that like for Mercury personal, I have a account for her and I load it up with, with money. And one thing that I did that I thought was really good for her and I haven't done it with my younger one yet because she's a bit too young for her but I set up. I used E Trade for this because Mercury doesn't have it yet. But I set up like a custodial account for her and then I gave her some starting money. I'm like, hey, you know, what are your favorite products? Like, what should you invest in? And, you know, she did invest in, like, a bunch. And then I actually, I told her to invest in Coinbase, which is the best stock she's. She invested in because we did it like right at the bottom of the 22 kind of Coinbase stock. But, like, I think that's been really good for her to, like, you know, see it. And it's already been in there for a few years. So she's seen like, the value of compounding and stuff like that. But yeah, giving, you know, real access to money and like getting them, like, you know, I've tried to explain compounding to her, like, lots of ways, but,

1:07:20

you know, I still don't understand it. Ahmad, can you break it down for us?

1:08:54

If something goes up by 10% every year, then in 100 years you could have a shit ton of money. That's the pitch.

1:08:58

Claude can do this now. It can visualize. It was one of the examples that they gave. Cloud recently added the ability to do, like, visual generative responses, like charts and diagrams. And one of the examples.

1:09:07

You're a real Claude person.

1:09:19

I'm very close. I mean, I use both, I use it all, but I've just, just. It's really started to hook in for me. But. But Compound Interest was one of the, the top examples they had in the blog posts, like a visual diagram. So Alice, just prompt it.

1:09:21

Well, I think the, I mean, the thing that just kind of breaks my heart is that there is so much we could do to make financial and like, investment literacy more accessible. But that still doesn't change the fact that just so many people these days don't even have the money to invest. They're just living paycheck to paycheck, you

1:09:35

know, I mean, I did, you know, it's, it's not the best name, but like, Trump accounts are like, kind of a good idea, I think, right? Like every kid. Yeah, every kid born 20, 25 and after starts with $1,000 in investment account and that, like, you know, by the time they're 18, they've like, seen this, like, hopefully grow over time and they've, they've been part of that journey and like, yeah, it gives them a lump sum, but also, like, gets them into investing early. So. So, yeah, I think that's big.

1:09:52

Do you see it as part of your role, building these products as they expand to investing and maybe eventually thinking about helping you get a picture of your future to try and help people make what you believe are good decisions. Like, for example, hey, you've been day trading a lot, and I know that's fine, but the S and p is up 17% this year, and that's pretty hard to beat.

1:10:21

Yeah, I mean, really, even buying individual stocks is mostly a bad idea. You know, every now and then I talk to someone who's like, that's what I'm saying.

1:10:41

Can you turn that into a tool tip?

1:10:49

Yeah, I think we can. But at the end of the day, people are people and they do have fun investing and they have these ideas around it. So, yeah, I think overall, the product will always treat them as adults and give them information and let them do what they want to do. I don't know if I'd want to be like, oh, you're moving money into DraftKings. Are you sure that's a good financial decision? I feel like that might be a bit little. So a little frustrating, but I think there is like, the other side of it is like, yeah, make it super easy to make the right choice and your paycheck comes in. It automatically gets distributed to the Mercury. The personal banking side already has this Mercury Invest product that just like, it's very simple. It's just like put in S and P or government T bills and don't overthink it. Which honestly is like what 99% of people should probably be doing. And everything else is like, like not. Not the correct thing to do.

1:10:51

Alex's open claw instance is going to say, alex, I see you betting money on the Lakers, but according to your chat transcripts, you've done 86% less research than the average Lakers Better. So maybe bad idea.

1:11:46

Yeah, no, that. That would definitely be the case considering I know nothing about basketball. But yeah. Where should we land this? Ellis, do you have any zingers to land us?

1:12:01

We can always just ask him out to ask us some questions with the

1:12:11

three minutes we have left.

1:12:15

You got any feature requests, Alex?

1:12:16

Well, knowing that I can already connect to Claude is great. Not really. I mean, I think you guys have done such a good job with the simplicity of the interface, I think. Yeah, I actually haven't turned on the personal yet, but I'm going to. I think, you know the direction you have to go, which is like the charter and building all the full lending capabilities and Zelle and all those features.

1:12:18

Don't let PMs destroy your product. IMOD. Because there's so many opportunities for incremental growth in a financial product. Right? You could add 100 buttons.

1:12:43

Yeah, yeah. Well, actually that's one of the benefits of AI interfaces. Right. There's no buttons and you can actually have a lot of products behind the scene, which I think is kind of an interesting world to think about when it comes to interfaces that you could have like way more features, but they're like going to show up at the right time and they're like kind of automated rather than like you have to click buttons for it. But yes, I used to be very anti PMs. Actually. For the first, basically 80 people, we had no PMs and then we wouldn't call them PMs for the next 180, like, until we get to 180 people. We'd call them like business leads or like some other term. But eventually I came to love PMs. I think there's just the right way to do PMs, which is like, you know, very kind of customs customer centric. And they're part of the team and they're not like kind of dictators running the show. But yeah, it is dangerous to have the wrong kind of pm.

1:12:53

Awesome. I think we're at time. Thank you so much for joining us. This was a ton of fun.

1:13:47

Yeah, this was really fun. Yeah. I didn't know what to expect. We just did it. So we did it.

1:13:52

Thank you.

1:13:59