00:56:05 · Immad Akhund
[00:56:05] S0: I actually think it's hell... I I have a slightly funny answer. I think it's good to wait too long for the following reasons. Number one, I think you should try to do the job yourself, even if it's like something you don't really understand very well. Just to know what you really need for it. I think it's it's easy to like think you know what you need for something, and then you go hire someone, and you're like, yeah. How will you know if that person's doing a good job if you don't... You haven't at least failed at doing their job? So that's one thing. And then number two, to go back to this other point about not spending too much money, I think one of the good ways of spending too much money is to go hire for a bunch of things that you think you want. And I can give you a little rant about hiring execs too early in a second, I think generally speaking, like, try to do the job yourself, and wait until it's painful, and then hire is like a good general methodology. But places where we did this, we didn't hire our first finance team person, like, literally our first finance team person, like no CFO, no nothing like that, until we were about 200 people. And that was a little too long. We probably should have hired around 80, because it was quite useful. But, you know, I I could get my way around spreadsheets and things like that. So I was like, do we really need a finance person? And we had an accountant and all that kind of stuff, but no one internal. But, yeah, that was too long. I mean, what other roles have we waited too long for? One thing that we did really well, actually, I think about the right time, was hiring a recruiter. And I think people wait too long for this one, generally. We hired our first recruiter when we raised... We're about 20 people, and we'd raised $20,000,000. Think generally speaking, if you're if you're looking to hire more than three people per month, you should have an internal recruiter. And the quality and speed, and almost every element of our hiring process improved a ton after we hired our first recruiter. But that one we did well. What else has been good? Oh, actually this is a generally funny one. So I was really against hiring PMs, We didn't we didn't really, really hire our first PM until we were like 120 people or something like that.
00:58:15 · Immad Akhund, Joubin Mirzadegan
So I think generally speaking, when you're really small, sub, let's say sub 30 people, the founders should be the PMs. And the engineers should be PMs. Like, whoever else you have should be a PM. I think you wanna keep everyone really close to the product, and the founder should be the primary product owner. There's just a certain point where like, you know, you have enough teams and they need to coordinate with each other, and like they need to like keep moving and the founder can't like touch all of them enough that like that's when you need a PM. And we ended up like... We were like a little bit like religious about not wanting PMs for for too long, and then it took us a really long time to kinda get a world class like product team, which I think we have now. [00:58:59] S1: What's your rant on execs?
00:59:01 · Immad Akhund
[00:59:01] S0: Oh, rant on execs. Oh my god. So, alright. You're not an exec if you're managing less than 30 people at a small company. Right? Like, so I think all of the... Probably you should almost never have titles, but that's kind of tricky. But I think in general, what you... You don't wanna hire someone who thinks of themselves as an exec and is really excited about being an exec at a company that's like a startup. Like, at some point, need real execs. Like, if you have a 50 plus person engineering team or whatever, or sales team, etcetera, like, you need execs at some point. Before that point, you hire people that are like... You can give them a head off title if they... And, like, don't go through exec recruiting. Like, you know, you want, like, early managers, like early IC types to to be in those like small startup environments. Like, you know, they're used to doing zero to one. Like, they're not... Like, execs at bigger companies have infrastructure that supports them. And it's just a very different thing, like they're managing managers, right? Like it's just a different mindset. Most execs have never had to like do something from scratch, and it's just like so different. Like one of the earliest ones that most people hire is like a VP of sales, right? But like, doing a sales system from zero to one, it's just a completely different skill set than like, have, you know, I joined a big sales team, and I iterated their process, they already had product market fit, etcetera. So yeah, generally speaking, I'm like, you know, I often talk to small startups that are like, oh yeah, I'm hiring an exec full x. And I'm like, well, what's your actual problem? Like, I'm like, at the end of the like, I don't think like exec is gonna solve that problem.
01:00:46 · Joubin Mirzadegan
[01:00:46] S1: I agree with that. I agree with that. Are things keeping you up right now? Like, what are the things that keep you up?
01:00:55 · Immad Akhund
[01:00:55] S0: I mean, I'm a big believer in like getting your sleep in, so not too much. I think the thing that I I always worry about, and it requires like a lot of like continuous effort is, you know, as a company scales, like, there's a general kind of entropic force to becoming like, kind of lame over time, right? On almost every dimension. It's like, you know, you're willing to hire worse people, like, 're willing to be okay with worse customer experiences because you're optimizing for something else. Or, yeah, the culture kind of degrades over time. Or like you innovate less, right? Like almost everything about like what makes a startup, Why do start ups outcompete big companies? It's because big companies have these kind of natural things that kind of make them crappy over time. And I think that's especially hard in a regulated industry where, we're getting a bank charter right now, and the default path is definitely, you take a bunch of things that banks do, and you copy paste them into a fintech, right? Whereas, how I think about it is, yes, almost everything regulations and regulators and all the guides and things like that, they make sense, right? It's like, yes, like, we will will be in a very entrusted position to, like, hold customer funds, you know, like, the set of rules makes sense. But you really have to go, like, okay, you know, how do you implement these in a way that you don't forsake your kind of culture, and you still stay innovative, and you still stay customer aligned, and you still hire great people and all that stuff. And I think it's very doable, and that's kinda like the hard challenge for us to do, if we can figure it out and we actually... The two parts that we don't figure out, and we end up being a lame bank like every other bank, or we figure it out, and we become a really interesting company that's innovative, and a fintech, and all those things that has a bank charter. And I think the second is gonna be better for the world, and our customers, and people that work at Mercury. But it requires like a lot of effort. It's not a... You know, it's not like the default process isn't there. If you're growing about 40% head count a year Mhmm.
01:03:11 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Immad Akhund
[01:03:11] S1: What percentage are you churning out? That's like net, like net growth. [01:03:19] S0: Attrition in general has been pretty low, 10 ish percent. [01:03:24] S1: And then what about that [01:03:25] S0: you're managing out of the business yourself? So that's like total attrition is 10 ish percent, I think. I'm getting like rough last year numbers. I wanna say like 6% were managed out and 4% left. Okay. That's very low attrition, partly because we've grown every year quite a bit, so. But also because we try to hire people that think a little bit more long term. I have a hard time imagining how you build a company where everyone's leaving after two years, which is actually the default in Silicon Valley. And with execs. A lot of my exec recruiting is around making sure, obviously we make mistakes, but my default is to make sure people are excited about sticking around for like five plus years. [01:04:08] S1: Mhmm. Fascinating. I appreciate you doing this. No. This was fun. This is so fun. [01:04:15] S0: Yeah. You kinda fire straight into it. I thought we were like still just sitting down when you started out. No. I [01:04:20] S1: just I just let it rip. [01:04:21] S0: Yeah. [01:04:23] S1: Are you hiring?