Founders in Arms
00:47:41 · Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri, Jean-Denis Greze
[00:47:41] S0: Yeah. Alright. Let's go to that. [00:47:44] S1: It feels worse than you've already seen. Mercury beats Silicon Valley Bank on software, disrupted that business. What company would you name today that you worry the most about doing the same to you, disrupting your business? Do you think your bank license will be a moat against disruption? [00:47:59] S0: Okay. So the question was, we beat SVB and, I guess, other banks by building amazing software. What am I most worried about and whether a banking license will be remote. I think the main thing I worry about is, like, you know, are we doing things good for customers? Are we still innovative? And, like, you know, have we built a good company culture and all that kind of stuff? I think as companies scale, like, those things tend to erode over time. I think if we can hold that bar, we obviously have all the advantages that we didn't have when we were tiny, and now we have a team of customers and and a product. So, yeah, I'm not, like, super worried about disruption. I'm I'm mostly worried about, like, making sure we're gonna still building a company that, like, I would enjoy working at. You know? And if that point got to the core of your question, but let's keep going. Yeah. I'm curious about [00:49:00] S1: the case. I wanna go back to it when you're, [00:49:02] S2: say, trying to find the right people who will hire, and everybody's using AI tools. But does... Can AI identify case? Like, how do you filter out the right people if AI is not good at case? Like
00:49:02 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri
[00:49:02] S2: say, trying to find the right people who will hire, and everybody's using AI tools. But does... Can AI identify case? Like, how do you filter out the right people if AI is not good at case? Like [00:49:16] S0: like, how would you solve for that? Because a lot [00:49:18] S2: of people can filter it out in the environment because AI can't identify taste. [00:49:22] S0: Mhmm. I see the question. So your so your question is that in recruiting pipelines, everyone's using AI to filter out candidates, but AI doesn't do a great job of filtering out candidates on... Based on taste. So it might be filtering out great candidates with good taste. Yeah. I don't know. Do you use AI to filter candidates? Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a step where AI looks at resumes first. Yeah. Just because we have, like, in... The problem is that is there's an infinite stream of resumes because, like, it's, you know, everyone is using AI to submit resumes. So, you know, [00:50:03] S1: it's like [00:50:04] S0: people don't apply for one... You know, 20 jobs. They apply for 10,000 jobs. Mhmm. So, yeah, there's definitely a filter, but I think it's more done on, like, here is the job profile, and this is the candidate we would be willing to look at. So it's like, you're... You know, if we're expecting a tech or banking background for, like, a compliance role, we will filter on that. I don't I don't think the filters are really making, like, like, case judgments. I should check that.
00:50:04 · Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri
[00:50:04] S0: people don't apply for one... You know, 20 jobs. They apply for 10,000 jobs. Mhmm. So, yeah, there's definitely a filter, but I think it's more done on, like, here is the job profile, and this is the candidate we would be willing to look at. So it's like, you're... You know, if we're expecting a tech or banking background for, like, a compliance role, we will filter on that. I don't I don't think the filters are really making, like, like, case judgments. I should check that. [00:50:34] S1: There's definitely an element of selecting talent that is taste based, but it's very hard to do in the resume stage. You know? It's more like when you know somebody's, like, you know, are they the right thing for you? [00:50:44] S0: Yeah. Only 60% of us is... Only about 30% of our job offers are to people who are inbound. Yeah. Most of it is referral and outbound. Yeah.
00:50:44 · Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze, Rajat Suri, S4
[00:50:44] S0: Yeah. Only 60% of us is... Only about 30% of our job offers are to people who are inbound. Yeah. Most of it is referral and outbound. Yeah. [00:50:57] S2: So just one more. People with Taste usually have built things with Taste before, even if it's just their personal website and whatnot. And so I like to, when I meet somebody, I like to ask, find something they've built and ask them why they built it, what choices they made. And sometimes people have really good answers about things that at first don't look like they have taste, but you realize they made some trade offs so that it is the way that it is, and there are good trade offs, and you're like, that person has a different kind of taste than just it looks good or whatnot. But I think asking people about their thought process behind it. And to your point about AI, it's somewhat AI just thought their way to something that looks really good. I mean, looking really good is not really taste, but I think some people sometimes are blind to that. You ask them questions about it, and they don't have any good answers, that you know they don't have the kind of thoughtfulness that you might want at your company. So I think it's, again, it's resume staff. But, you know, history is always a good indicator, I think, of future [00:52:00] S1: behavior. Yeah. [00:52:04] S4: Couple. Been Mercury customer for a few years. [00:52:26] S2: Yeah. So
00:52:26 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri
[00:52:26] S2: Yeah. So [00:52:30] S0: the question is, like, how do I think AI and agents will use cards to make payments? You know, I guess, like, one interesting thing, like, a newish behavior is everyone is using kind of Stripe link and doing payments with news and things like that where it's not even creating a virtual card. At least it does. [00:52:53] S1: I don't [00:52:53] S0: think it's creating a virtual card, but it is requiring someone to click a button. I think most people are still at the stage where they wanna click the button to verify a payment. And I think, yeah, [00:53:08] S2: most of
00:53:08 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri
[00:53:08] S2: most of [00:53:09] S0: the way people are thinking about building these agents is don't have, like, human in the loop on clicking the button. We have an agent account thing, which is a little bit more like you give the you give the card to an agent, but you set limits on, you know, where and how much you can spend, which is another mode to do it. I I really do think people want to spend with their agents. And so, like, I think there'll be... Both of those modes will exist, like, limited use, like, wallet cards or whatever, and, like, click to spend and buy. So probably one of those of either. I'm a little bit skeptical of stablecoin as, like, the way agents pay for things. I just think cards are pretty good. Like, that'll be the most big one. You know, there's, like, some world where, like, agents are spinning up lots of other agents that they need to then pay for, and maybe, like, the agent to agent payment and layer layer is stablecoin. I haven't seen too much of that. And even then, you know, both both those agents have, like, companies behind them, so they could probably just agree to each other with money instead of stablecoins. Yeah. I don't know. [00:54:24] S1: Do you need cards? Can you do, like, little bank transfers? [00:54:29] S0: These cards have, like, a lot of protection, though. Right? Like, the reason people use cards is you can [00:54:34] S2: you can dispute them. You can change card numbers. Like, I kind