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?
01:04:23 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Immad Akhund
[01:04:23] S1: Are you hiring? [01:04:24] S0: Yeah. We're always hiring. Roles in Yeah. Tons of roles. Let's see. I'm currently the acting CTO. So... Yeah. That's that's a role I'm hiring for. That's a thing. Yeah. If you've previously managed like a 400 plus engineering company and you're like, you know, excited about Mercury, definitely relevant. We're hiring a ton of roles around kind of this AI agent that we're building, So... Yeah. Especially like founder type people who've kinda done it before. And then... Yeah. I know. Almost every every role in Mercury we're hiring for, so it would be anyone listening. Check it out. Mercury.com/jobs. [01:05:04] S1: And I I ask everybody the same question when you hear the word grit. What do you think of? [01:05:09] S0: I feel like you kinda answered that. Yeah. I feel like I answered it. But, yeah, I like perseverance as a word. I think it's like just just sticking with it no matter what kind of thing. [01:05:20] S1: Man, thank you for doing this. [01:05:21] S0: This is so fun. Thanks for having me. [01:05:24] S1: That's it for now. If you like the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production, and I'm Joubin. Thanks for listening.