00:46:47 · Immad Akhund
[00:46:47] S0: There's a statement that, like, VCs like saying, that, like, founders or CEOs have to be good capital allocators. And, this is just, like, a co part of that. Like, how do you spend money? And, like, let's just take sales and marketing, or let's just take sales, I think it's easier to do that, right? You just have to understand, if you hire five salespeople, how quickly will they pay back their salary? Right? I think that's the math equation, in my opinion. And like, you pick the right target, and to me, if you have product market fit and it's a good target, it should be around one year. So if you are spending money, and you're growing the sales team and they're keeping to that kind of one year target, you're like pretty good. Like, it basically means you, you know, if you spend 10,000,000 on sales, you have 10,000,000 more in revenue. If you spend 50,000,000 sales, you have 50,000,000 in ARR or whatever, which I think is a pretty good math equation. Like, you'll have... I would be shocked if you can't raise a future round, that's your math equation. Now, what happens in these frothy markets is people like go way too heavy in sales and marketing, their payback ends up being three years or five years, and no one's going to fund something with like a three to five year payback on spend. Or like, yeah, whatever. Some negative thing happens there. But like, you just have to have like some discipline about it. It's not like you know, if you have, like, zero salespeople, you don't hire 50 salespeople. You hire two people, and then you hire five, and then you, like, make sure you're managing against that payback. But, yeah, it's not... And again, if you went to any investor and any board meeting and you're like, hey, this is how we're thinking about sales. This is the payback we're targeting. This is how we're gonna ramp up, and we're gonna measure the payback every month, and we're report that to you. You know, no one's gonna be like, are you crazy? Why aren't you spending all this money? Like, I just don't understand the situation where, like, someone's just like, I raise more, therefore, I burn more. Like, I don't know. Like, what are they doing? Like, that's not the job. Like, the job is like going, like, every dollar you spend, you should be getting ROI from it. And if you can't justify ROI, don't spend the money. Yeah. I just...
00:48:50 · Immad Akhund, Joubin Mirzadegan
I think whether you raise more or less, you're gonna have to have a math equation that makes sense. Whether it's sales, performance marketing, partnerships, whatever. On the GTM side, you're gonna have to have a math equation that makes sense. And then on the engineering side, I think we've proven over time that more engineers does not mean more productivity. Right? Like, think that's... AI helps even more with that. But but, yeah, it's... I don't think it's ever been the case that, you know, 10 x more engineers means 10 x more productivity. [00:49:19] S1: What was your... Maybe can you do a year by year roughly head count from founding to year one, year two? [00:49:27] S0: We had like one year where it was three x, but most of the time it's been about 40% more. So it's like, you know, we started with eight... We launched with nine employees actually in 2019, and then when COVID happened, we were about 30 ish. [00:49:39] S1: So a year from nine to 30?
00:49:39 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Immad Akhund
[00:49:39] S1: So a year from nine to 30? [00:49:41] S0: Nine to 30. I wanna say like maybe 60, and then one forty. That was like a big year, like 2021. We also grew more than four x. And then after that, I think it was about 40% every year. We're about 1,300 now. We actually found that that year where we went like three x or four x was like one of the worst years in terms of like, just like a very painful year in terms of scaling. And actually, you know, when you grow that fast, you don't actually get much more productive because, like, all your good people are like spending all their time on engineering, hiring or or training, and obviously you make some mishires and that kind of stuff. But 40% is what we've grown at fairly consistently, I think, for the last three, four years. And that's a fairly sustainable pace of headcount growth, at least. [00:50:29] S1: Yeah. That feels good to you. Yeah. When founders come to you, like you said, you've done 300 plus investments and all your friends are founders and you spend a lot of time with people in the in the trenches. What are they generally worried about, struggling with? What are the things that you're like, dad, that they wanna pick your brain on?
00:50:51 · Immad Akhund
[00:50:51] S0: I mean, right now... I mean, you know, for founders, it's often about money. Right? Like, it's like you're running out of money and you're thinking about that. There's definitely... I would say, there's this kind of really strong separation of haves and have nots in the in the market for the last year or so, where, you know, if you're... If you fit in the AI thesis, you know, I guess anything to do with Foundation Lab or data company or, like, you know, some of these kinda 0 to 5,000,000 in three months kinda AI companies, it's like super easy, and like it's much more this kind of conversation of like, am I raising too much money? And like, who do I raise from? All that kind of stuff. But then there's everyone else, which is actually like a pretty large set of people. Like It's just who we don't hear about. Yeah. I mean, they're not like hot companies, but but many of them are like pretty reasonable companies. I mean, were like, at this point, like everything is like somewhat AI native, but like, that's just not by itself sufficient. I think there's there's Thesis, and like, you know, this AI wave is moving so quickly, like, you could be you could be on Thesis like six months ago, and like now you're not cool anymore. Mhmm. And, you know, they still get it done, but it's much harder to get brands done. Like, you have to... It used to be, you could get a series a done with 1,000,000 in revenue if you're growing three x a year. That was like kind of the rough benchmark, and most of the time it was doable. Now that's not good enough if you're not... Like, if you're on, yeah, if you're on brand on Thesis and Hot, you can have zero revenue and get a series A done. But I think, at least what I'm seeing is like, if you're not in one of those things, need like the same three x growth, but probably 3,000,000 a year in revenue to get like a reasonable series A done. Yeah, often conversations like that. Yeah, there's definitely like... There's a lot of AI kinda anxiousness right now, almost at every level. There's like... You know, the companies that think they'll get disrupted by AI. There's companies that are like, even hot AI companies going like, oh my god, it's so competitive, like, you know, is Anthropic and OpenAI gonna copy me?
00:53:02 · Immad Akhund
Like, there's just like this insane kinda, I've never felt like the level of like, kinda, almost everyone in business is like really anxious. Have you noticed that? Mhmm. It's just like, there's no one is calm and going like, okay, you know, I'm having a normal day, and I'm having a good time, or whatever. So it's a really interesting time. Like, it should be like a really fun, exciting time, and like, you know, Silicon Valley was like... Yeah. 2016, 2019 was pretty boring. I don't know if you were here, but, yeah, everyone was doing kinda b to b SaaS, and there was like these formulas, and it was kinda... You know, there's just so... Only so many, like, b to b sales, SaaS companies I could, like, get pitches from. But now it's, like, a really fun time, like, people are doing, like, really transformative things with, like, AI and defense tech and all this stuff, but it's also, like, a really anxious time, because it's, no one knows what the what the ground will be, and what will be required in the future. You know, one thing that really helped me with that is, like even a year ago, was feeling like some of this, like, you know, we were doing really well, and we've been profitable, but there was definitely like, know, oh my god, what does all of this mean? And actually this year, and especially in the last few months, I feel like much better about that. And part of it was like, launched our own kind of AI product, Mercury Command. But we came up with this idea of where do we fit in the future, which I think banks will probably exist even in any kind of future super AI built world, but I still wanted to have like a really good answer to like, you know, what does that mean for Mercury? Like, what would make me feel like ten years from now, like we would be the best bank people should use. And for me, the answer was like, most entrepreneurs don't like dealing with kinda finance and operational and HR things. And actually, of the nice things about having a bigger company is I don't have to deal with it either, right? When I interview someone, I'm like, yeah, someone send them a job offer, and this is roughly what we should pay them, etcetera. I and I have to do the next part, right? Like sending them a job offer, getting them to sign it, them set up on our payroll system and benefits and all this kind of stuff.
00:55:18 · Immad Akhund, Joubin Mirzadegan
So, yeah, that's kind of what I thought about as our AI vision to like really make it so anyone can have like finance ops and HR ops in their pocket. And because Mercury does a bunch of these things already, and we're gonna add more of those, we have a kind of a nice path to that. But that's definitely made me feel like, you know, because I feel like we have a good path of how we fit in the future, it's made me less like kinda worried about like, where do we fit in the future? I don't know if this is like a formula other people can do though. [00:55:50] S1: Is there a job that you... Or role that you felt like you waited too long to hire? [00:55:58] S0: I mean, almost all of them. [00:56:00] S1: I actually Well, with Yeah. Twenty twenty hindsight Yeah. Yeah. If you knew you were gonna grow No.