Imad Rahimi, founder of Mercury (valued at $3.5B), joins Shaan to brainstorm startup ideas across space tech, defense tech, and AI. He shares the anticlimactic feeling of hitting unicorn status after 15 years of building, walks through the SVB crisis weekend when Mercury built “Mercury Vault” to build trust through product rather than words, and unpacks his philosophy of going all-in on asymmetric bets.
Speakers: Imad Rahimi (founder, Mercury), Shaan Puri (host)
Intro: The Anticlimactic Unicorn [00:00:00]
Shaan: What’s up — we got my buddy Imad here. He’s the founder of Mercury, an awesome company that I use and love. You’ve created a billion-dollar company, dude. You did it. You did the thing that all of us, when we were living in San Francisco in our 20s trying to build these companies — you finally did it. How does that feel?
Imad: It’s funny you say that. We raised our Series B in 2021, which was actually four months after we did our last podcast together on My First Million in January 2021. And then we’re just now announcing our Series C at a $3.5 billion valuation with Sequoia leading. But in 2021, when I raised my round — that was at a $1.6 billion valuation — and it was so weirdly anticlimactic. Because it’s like, I started as an entrepreneur in 2006. So 2021 — what is that, 15 years? I’d been working towards this objective of building a unicorn company. That’s what it was all about for me for a long time. And then you hit the objective — becoming a unicorn — and like, nothing changes.
I have this helmet behind me. It’s from Joe Montana — he’s an investor, he sent me the helmet. And that’s literally the only thing I got when I became a unicorn. I keep it there to show that these objectives don’t really matter. You have to enjoy the journey, because you hit the objective and then you’re like, okay, now what?
Shaan: Joe Montana should make that his thing. He should send a helmet to every founder who becomes a unicorn.
Imad: He sends it to the ones he funds. It says “Billion Dollar Club” on it. It’s kind of cool.
The 7 Business Ideas [00:04:00]
Shaan: All right. I told you I’d love to brainstorm with you. I thought you would come with a bunch of fintech ideas since you’re the bank guy — but you came with a list of bullet points, none of which sound like fintech. I’m excited. Give me some of these ideas. Things you think founders could be going and doing, or if you weren’t doing Mercury, you’d be interested in.
Imad: I had three trends that I think are interesting. Trend number one is space and space tech. A few reasons I like the trend. One, I’m just a sci-fi nerd. I love space. And it’s finally hit this point where there are all these enablement factors. A few years ago, getting anything to space was like a $100 million endeavor. Now SpaceX did eight flights in one week. It’s getting cheaper every month. People have these micro-satellite platforms where it’s basically a computer in space — you can build one for like $100,000 now.
I’ve invested in a company called Albedo that does very low-earth orbit pictures of things — like 10-centimeter resolution pictures from space. AI is heavily competed right now, but space is still super open. Not that many people are attempting things there.
The crazy idea I sent you — which I don’t fully love but think is interesting conceptually — is a nuclear power plant in space. Put it on the moon. You can mine water from the moon, split it to get hydrogen and oxygen, and those together make rocket fuel. Also breathable oxygen. Having power in space is useful, and there are lots of interesting things on the moon.
Shaan: What I like about what you said is that there are probably three core things I think about when it comes to great ideas. A great idea — as opposed to a good idea — has three tests. The first is the Peter Thiel test. He went to YC and drew two overlapping circles on a whiteboard: one labeled “sounds like a bad idea,” one labeled “actually a good idea.” You’re looking for the overlap. The best ideas come disguised as bad ideas. Second is an inflection point. You talked about SpaceX doing eight trips a week — that’s an inflection. And third is something that scares everyone off, so there’s less competition. Space hits all three.
Defense Tech [00:10:00]
Imad: The second theme is defense tech in general. Three trends there. One, we’re moving into a multipolar world — India, China, America — and America is no longer the only policeman. So it’s not just the US rearming, it’s all of Europe, India, everyone. Two, autonomous vehicles have changed the game. Drones, AI applied to all of this. Three, it’s not just billion-dollar fighter planes anymore. It’s going to be a million tiny drones that are easy to manufacture.
So there are two types of ideas that interest me. One: how do you make more things autonomous? Autonomous drones, but also subs, boats, tanks. When you make them autonomous you can also change the form factor — smaller, thousands of them. Two: how do you build defensive autonomous things? In the Ukraine-Russia war, they’re literally digging trenches — we haven’t had that since World War I — because neither side has air superiority. Tiny drones can knock out million-dollar planes.
And tying back to space: in the next war, space warfare will be a big part of it. If you can knock out satellites, you cut down communications, remove visual surveillance, knock out GPS. The counter is how do you build defense around satellites — stealth satellites, moving them when they can’t be seen.
AI Ideas: Intelligence as a Service [00:18:00]
Imad: The third theme is what I call intelligence as a service. AI is heavily competed, but if you pick a more niche idea — AI SAT tutor, AI bar exam prep — I think you can completely nail it and expand from there.
I’m an investor in 11x, which does AI SDRs, and Decagon, which does AI customer support agents. These companies are going from 0 to 100 million in two or three years. The equation is simple: I’m paying a ton of money for customer support or SDRs — if you can do the same task at half the price, with some fallback to humans, I’ll take that.
What’s interesting is Enterprise sales normally takes 9 to 12 months. But when buyers are just like “I need to deploy something to show I’m doing stuff in AI,” you get this rare moment of really fast enterprise sales growth. That only happens in these rare trend moments.
Shaan: If you weren’t doing Mercury and wanted to find a winning AI idea — what would your process be?
Imad: I approach things both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down: I went to ChatGPT and said, “Give me every human knowledge worker in the US and the labor cost across each of them.” Education, medical, lawyer, accounting, design, coding — and then you map out where there are companies and where there are gaps. Maybe you want to avoid regulated spaces, maybe you want to go all in — like, nobody’s building AI doctors because everyone’s scared of doctors. But maybe you do it for a market with less regulation first and prove it out.
Bottom-up: what gets me excited? I love serving entrepreneurs. What do entrepreneurs struggle with? One thing I still don’t have a great solution for is the CEO knowledge problem — as a CEO there’s so much knowledge across the company. I’d love an AI twin that’s continuously absorbing all the knowledge, seeing everything in Slack, the documents, the CRM, the dashboards — and just proactively tells me stuff I should pay attention to.
Vetting Ideas: The Mercury Story [00:26:00]
Shaan: Let’s role-play an idea. Take the digital twin CEO thing. First few weeks — what are you doing? Do you trust five people and bounce it off them, make a deck, build a prototype, look at competition?
Imad: With Mercury, I talked to a hundred potential customers. And I remember getting kind of depressed after, because most of them were lukewarm. Only two out of the hundred were like, “Give it to me right now.” That was one year into building — after a year and a half to build the thing, almost running out of momentum, and then talking to a hundred people and most are lukewarm.
But I was like, I would really want this. So I powered through. And it turned out that if 2% of people want something and the market’s big enough, that’s probably enough for an early adopter base. But it’s surprisingly hard to vet an idea against humans. People just don’t know. It’s hard to imagine an idea.
What I’d do now: talk to some users, talk to some VCs, get a feel for reception. But then spend a lot of time thinking about the forks. With Mercury, I ask: what are all the ways this becomes even more interesting as we grow? Banking is a platform — it has all your money, all your finance team — so you can build a lot on top of it.
With the digital twin: everyone at the company has a twin. Maybe some don’t even exist at the company — they’re just AI. Maybe your AI twin shows up on Zoom calls. Maybe it becomes your coach. It has all the knowledge, learns a lot about you, lives in your communication channels.
Shaan: You built Mercury for yourself. As a founder who hated calling banks, who couldn’t wire money without driving to a Wells Fargo — you just built the product you wanted. And the bet was that other founders think like you. Is that fair?
Imad: One hundred percent. I get so annoyed if I have to call someone to do something. I would delay for weeks. And that’s exactly how banks were — except for Mercury. First Republic: if you wanted to send a wire, you’d hit a limit, call to raise it, then it goes to the next phase, then someone calls you to authorize it. It was a multi-step process just to wire money.
Why Founder Speed Matters [00:34:00]
Imad: When you’re sponsoring me I was like, I’ve got six Mercury accounts myself — trust me, I don’t need the talking points. I know why I use it.
As a founder, your pace is the one thing you have that big companies don’t. You don’t have the biggest team, the most money, the most experience, or the brand. But your pace is your advantage. The problem is if you start hitting walls because you can’t move fast, that becomes very problematic.
I like to have an idea and buy the domain in two seconds. File the trademark online. Schedule a call with a lawyer. And those little things sound like one-offs, but they add up. They create momentum and momentum begs momentum.
I also took that to hiring. My best hiring heuristic became: did this person speed up the pace, keep pace, or slow it down? Anybody who slows down pace — even if they have other strengths — it rarely works out.
Imad: I came from the UK where banking software was a bit better. I think part of my perspective was that immigrant outsider lens — people in America were just okay with driving to Wells Fargo once a month to do something basic. Begging to do something with their own money, and sometimes being told no.
Your word “abuse” is so good. That’s going to be a new filter for me on ideas — can I describe the current abuse that the existing product is doing to customers?
The SVB Crisis Weekend [00:42:00]
Shaan: You guys had this crazy situation when Silicon Valley Bank went through its crisis. Where were you when that happened? What did the next 24-48 hours look like? Because it seems like Mercury was a big beneficiary in terms of customer adoption.
Imad: SVB had been around one year longer than I’d been alive — started in 1983. When I was working on Mercury, SVB was part of the competitive landscape in every deck. The 800-pound gorilla. At that point they were worth $16 billion, at peak something like $40 billion.
I didn’t feel anything bad about them — I liked those guys. They cared about startups. The software wasn’t great, but no bank had great software. I felt really bad for the people there.
In December 2022, there were some rumors about their mortgage-backed securities being underwater. Some VCs had pulled their portfolio companies out. My default is to ignore those kinds of things. Then on Wednesday it kicked off and people started panicking.
Our initial reaction was: we don’t say a word publicly. We don’t want to jump on their misfortune. But anyone who comes to Mercury — let’s support them. We changed the product so that for non-SVB customers, we’d onboard you next week. For SVB customers, we can do it in a half hour. We put that right at the top — “SVB customer? Connect your SVB account and we’ll prioritize you.”
SVB customers were easy to prioritize. They tended to have more money, they were already vetted by a bank, they weren’t new customers.
Shaan: What did that do to your numbers?
Imad: Mercury had about 100,000 customers at the time. SVB had a lot of money but not a huge number of customers — maybe 30,000 to 40,000 total. We published that around 8,000 customers moved over to us in a two-week period, which is significant but not crazy compared to our normal monthly growth. The volume was big in terms of dollars.
Building Trust Through Product [00:50:00]
Imad: The other thing was everyone was saying, “SVB failed — why won’t Mercury fail?” I’d say verbally: we’re not a bank ourselves, we work with partner banks, your money has extra FDIC insurance — at that time we had $1 million in FDIC coverage.
But the SVB CEO was also saying “your money is safe.” So I was like, I cannot just say that online. Instead, over that weekend, we built a product called Mercury Vault. It visualized where your money is: this much is in FDIC-insured accounts up to this amount. We also worked with our partner banks to extend FDIC insurance from $1 million to $5 million that week. So if you had $6 million in your Mercury checking account, we’d show you: $1 million is FDIC-insured, $5 million is through the sweep network, and here’s how to set up your Treasury system with US government T-bill money markets.
We used product to build trust instead of words.
Shaan: Exactly.
Imad: It’s so much more powerful. It’s tangible. People could see it. And it spoke to the moment — instead of hiding from the question, we answered it in the product.
As an entrepreneur, it gave me something real to do. Everyone went all-in building over that weekend, and two years later the team still talks about it as one of their best moments. You got the adrenaline rush, but stayed in character.
Going All-In on Asymmetric Bets [00:58:00]
Shaan: You sent over some philosophies. One of them: “go all-in on asymmetric upside bets.” Can you unpack that?
Imad: I started my first startup for seven months in the UK. That was the first time I did something where I was like, “This is what life is about for me.” The startup went nowhere, but just the idea of working 9 a.m. to midnight, building something, launching it — there’s something about it that speaks to my core.
So I was like, where can I do this the best? At the time, that was San Francisco. I had basically no money, packed up my stuff, got into Y Combinator with my second startup, and moved. And even in those seven months in London, I was all-in. I’d code all day and then go to every single event possible. Half of them were probably a waste of time, but if you work really really hard and do all the things, you eventually build up a network.
The asymmetric part: the worst thing that could happen if my startup didn’t work was I’d have to go get another job. I was making £40,000 a year. So I was losing £40,000 a year in salary. The upside was a million — or whatever. And it’s also asymmetric life-better. My downside was a shitty life I didn’t enjoy. My upside was a great life I’m extremely motivated about. That to me is extremely asymmetric.
Shaan: Going all-in is a skill. I had a startup straight out of school, and I got this job offer — $120,000, move to Indonesia. My co-founders and I told ourselves a story: the lessons I’m going to learn there will be so useful for us later. Within two months I was like, “This was a mistake.” I quit and flew back.
What I noticed is that the muscle of going all-in — once you work it, once you develop it — you see the friends who went the safe route five years later and that muscle has atrophied. Whatever the winning idea turns out to be, you’re going to need that muscle to make it work.
There Are No Rules [01:06:00]
Imad: The last philosophy is: there are no rules — just construct your work and life the way you want.
In Silicon Valley, everyone has these ideas. I remember in 2011 when I had my first kid, it was very unfashionable to have a kid and have a startup. People were literally like, “What are you doing?” But the only way you succeed is by doing things that are unusual — if you’re doing the normal things, how can you succeed? Everyone’s doing those things.
Don’t do consumer startups — that’s a common wisdom in the Valley. But Amazon, Facebook, Google are the three trillion-dollar companies, and they’re all consumer startups. So why are we telling everyone not to do them?
Most knowledge has a reason behind it. You have to understand where it comes from and why — and why you might be the exception. But the best things I’ve ever done have been ignoring the rules and doing things my own way.
Shaan: Experts know all the rules. Masters know when to break them. My piano teacher specifically points out when Bach broke a rule — “normally you wouldn’t do this, but it works because of this.” The best composers make up the reason after.
Imad: Right — and when you break the rule, you have to go out of your way to mitigate the downsides. The rule you broke building Mercury was: in San Francisco startup culture, you don’t build a highly regulated, compliance-heavy, “build for a year and a half before you launch” product. That’s not the quick-prototype playbook. But you chose to break that norm. And you spent three months just researching compliance and regulations first. It wasn’t blind.
Shaan: All right, Imad — where should people find you, and who should reach out?
Imad: Easiest way is on X, just @imad. I’m always willing to try to be helpful to entrepreneurs — if you have an idea or want to pitch something, reach out. I’ll say yes or no quickly. And if you’re interested in Mercury, go to mercury.com and sign up.
Shaan: Love it. Thanks for coming on, dude.
Imad: Thanks for having me.