Pod Insights Equity Podcast Hey, stuck startups, reducing growth could make you less fundable About this episode We're switching things up and bringing you two interviews this week, so let's niche down to a single person, think about their work and unpack the rest.
Mary Ann took the lead this time, and she sat down (virtually) with Immad Akhund, the CEO and co-founder of Mercury. For those who are unfamiliar, the fintech made headlines earlier this year for how it stepped in to help fill the business banking void left in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse.
Here's what the pair caught up on:
Mercury's impressive growth in the months since SVB crashed
Lessons learned from Immad's angel investing experience
What Immad calls the "Startup Death Spiral" and how to escape it
As always, Equity will be back for you bright an early Monday morning. Talk soon!
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
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Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:10 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I'm Mary Ann Azevedo. This is our interview show where we niche down to a single person, think about their work, and unpack the rest. Today, we're talking to Ahmad Akun, the CEO and co-founder of Mercury, a startup that provides banking services for other startups and made headlines earlier this year for how it stepped in to help fill the business banking void left in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Ahmad, welcome to the show. Very happy to have you here. How are you?
0:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm good. I'm excited to be here.
0:44 Speaker 00 Let's jump in. So you co-founded Mercury in 2017, launched banking services for startups in 2019, and have raised over $163 million from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, CRV, and Co2. But many might say a turning point in your company took place earlier this year when Silicon Valley Bank essentially imploded. I know that was a crazy time for you. A lot was going on. Tell us what it was like that first week. It must have been chaotic.
1:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was a really intense time. It kind of started on that Wednesday night when there was lots of rumors. Every day was basically had a different shape to it for us. Thursday, you know, at that point, we kind of felt that SVB would be fine, but it was a good growth opportunity for us. You know, there was a lot of people moving funds to us, wanting to sign up. So, you know, we were trying to not make much noise about it. Like, I felt bad for SVB, but from our perspective, it was a good, good opportunity. On Friday, you know, the feeling was very different. Like, the FDIC had come in, all the wires had stopped. There was definitely like a kind of like a doom feeling around Silicon Valley.
1:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, it felt very somber, right?
1:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, very. Not just somber, like panicky. You know, people were worried that they're not going to make payroll. Like, the timing worked out that you literally had to send payroll on the Friday. And it's, you know, in California and other states as well, it's completely illegal to miss a payroll. So people were really worried about it. And it wasn't clear that- That you know, when they would get their money if and what percentage of money they would even get. And I try to be available to our customers. So, you know, I was, I was dealing with a lot of these like questions, you know, both around whether they could get a bank account, whether they could get their money out. There was a lot of ACH were like kind of midway and frozen and it wasn't clear whether they would be released. And then we were getting a lot of questions as well around if SVB wasn't safe, why is Mercury safe?
2:35 Speaker 00 Right. Good question though, right?
2:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, and we're, we've scaled fairly well, but we're still a startup. So, you know, it was a fair question. And the way I would answer it was, you know, hey, we have one million in FDIC insurance and the rest of the money you can put into US government T bills through our treasury product. But, you know, it was kind of this like repeated conversation I would have over and over again. So on the Saturday, we had this idea to start working on a product that made that more kind of visible and easy to understand. So we did two pieces and we called the product Mercury Vault, where we did two pieces. We increased the FDIC insurance from one million to three million and then a week later to five million. And then we also made a kind of a visual dashboard that you could see where your money is and make sure it's all set up correctly.
3:21 Speaker 01 And we launched that on Monday morning. So that weekend was super intense. Like we had the kind of product team uh and me working on the FDIC insurance and this thing. And then we had most of the onboarding and support team kind of in, in well, not in the office, in their homes, uh kind of making sure we answer all these tickets and get customers' accounts and things like that. So but everything was still kind of quite stressful, I would say. Uh it wasn't until the Monday after, you know, on Sunday evening FDIC announced that they would back all the deposits and Monday morning, you know, people were finally getting access to their bank accounts and, and that's when things kind of calmed down. So it was five days of like
4:00 Speaker 01 a lot of kind of dealing with customers freaking out and a lot of uncertainty in the air. And then from then on, it was kind of. Yeah, we had increased demand and things like that, but it was mostly business as usual.
4:11 Speaker 00 Right. Well, speaking of that increased demand, how many customers did you see depositing funds in March? Were they mostly startups?
4:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, we had a massive spike in people moving over. So much more mature companies that were SVB customers over to us. So we had about eight thousand seven hundred new customers in March, which is the biggest month we've ever had. And a lot of them were ex SVB. There was also actually a lot of First Republic customers that also also moved over. And for us, it was really important to give them a great experience. So we we didn't just want them to move over. Yeah, Mercury was the easiest place to set up a new bank account. So obviously, we were the most likely to get an inflow. But it was also important for us to make sure that they had a good experience. And we've been monitoring that closely. We have about ninety five percent of these kind of new customers have retained ninety days out.
5:00 Speaker 01 So we're happy with about that. And, you know, obviously, we want to continue to kind of service them and and make sure we're doing a good job.
5:07 Speaker 00 So ninety five percent retention is is actually really good. I mean, I can imagine at first you were like, are these people coming just for the short term to have somewhere to park their cash and then they might move elsewhere? So the fact that they're still with you ninety days later, does that feel like a good sign?
5:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, the I think the bigger worry for us was like, hey, does everyone just end up on the big banks, like the too big to fail banks? Right? Like, that was definitely a worry. I think us moving quickly on FDIC insurance made people feel like more secure about putting money at Mercury. And I mean, I would say Mercury is a better, much better experience than SVB or the big banks. There's a reason SVB and Mercury exist. Startups have like these unique banking needs. You know, they tend to have a fairly international exposure. They tend to deal with like a lot of money coming in from investors and they tend to be burning money. Like a normal SMB doesn't really behave like that. So if you go sign up to a a normal big bank,
6:05 Speaker 01 you just, you know, just basic things don't work. It's like surprising. Like we, when we started Mercury, we signed up to all the banks. And it was like, you get a bank account and you walk away from the bank branch, like firstly, it takes three hours to get it in the first place. And then you can't do wires. And then you have to go back to the bank and go, hey, can I do wires? And it's just like a very cumbersome experience. And SVB did do, the technology wasn't necessarily modern, but they did understand startups. And they did a good job on servicing kind of the startup need. And, you know, we feel like we fill that gap.
6:34 Speaker 00 Now, last week, another fintech startup, Brex, announced kind of its new renewed focus on startups, which, as we all know, last year, it kind of backed away from to some degree. So how do you view Brex in the context of this competitive landscape?
6:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, the box that we try to fill in our customers' heads and in the market is, you know, we really want to be your primary bank account. And in that, I would say, most of the time, people are really, you know, previously, most of the time, people would consider SVB versus Mercury. If you're a startup, especially early-stage startup. Now, I would say SVB is not really in the picture under First Citizen, and it's mostly either Mercury or a big bank. Like, those are kind of the two alternatives that people consider when they are looking for a bank account. You know, we do have a corporate card, and we're investing in that more. We started, we launched that in September. So in that way, we kind of are competitive with those other kind of corporate card companies.
7:32 Speaker 01 But we focus on the bank account, and, you know, bank accounts are things that people set up really early on. You need a bank account straight after you incorporate. Like, you basically can't do anything as a business without a bank account. And at that point, you know, if you're not a very ex-founder or like ex-Google employee or something, most of the time, you're not funded right at the start, right? You have a, you have a longish journey from like, you start a company, you make a product, you get some users, and maybe you have like some friends or family.
8:00 Speaker 00 It takes time.
8:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. So it's very much like an SMB, right? The, the early stage of the startup lifecycle is not very different from what a small business would look like. And we really have, you know, it's a tricky job for us. We have to, we have some thousands of customers that are these tiny small businesses. And then we have another thousand or so customers that have like more than five million. We have a few customers with more than 200 million in their bank accounts. So we have to build a product that like actually serves these tiny customers really well. And it is like good unit economics on those, that side, and then also serves these huge customers really well. So that's a balance that we always have to set.
8:35 Speaker 00 What percentage of your customers are startups? And also, I want to clarify, you are not actually a bank, right? You provide banking services through partnerships?
8:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. The way it works is we have two partner banks, Choice Financial and Evolve Bank and Trust. And they actually have, both have sweep networks. So that's how we get to 5 million in FDIC insurances. If you have 5 million on Mercury, your money is swept to 20 different banks and that gets you 250K each. And about 40% of our customers classify themselves as like startups or bootstrapped kind of tech companies. 30% are e-commerce, then it's 20% consulting services, 5% investors. We open to every US business, but that's just like, kind of who we target. And I would say we do a great job with those kind of tech-enabled businesses.
9:25 Speaker 00 Let's talk revenue for a minute. I'm sure what happened this year helped boost your revenue. So your total annualized revenue run rate, how much has that grown in the past year or so?
9:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, we've had a really good year. We actually grew by 4X. May 2022 versus May 2023 was 4X bigger in terms of net revenue. And we became profitable about a year ago as well. Yeah, this SVB kind of change, both had an increase in that kind of one or two week period where there was a bump of about 20% in terms of revenue and deposit base. But, you know, we've grown since then as well, and we were already growing fairly consistently. We've also seen, you know, even, I guess we had about three months out since that happened. And we're still seeing, especially in the startup segment, we're seeing almost 2X more signups than we were pre SVB. So it's been a kind of a prolonged inflection point for us.
10:17 Speaker 00 So in the first half of 2023, what volume of transactions did you process compared to last year?
10:24 Speaker 01 So last year, in all of 2022, we did about 50 billion in transactions. And in 2023, so far, we've done about 42 billion. So, you know, we are on pace to almost double. Obviously, this is total transactions. To put it in context, you know, Q1 VC funding was 45 billion. In some ways, that's like the, obviously startups also make revenue, but that's like a big kind of bunch of the money that goes in the startup ecosystem.
10:49 Speaker 00 Do you mostly make money off of interchange? Or what's your biggest revenue driver?
10:55 Speaker 01 Four main drivers for us. Number one is for the deposits that sit with us. Our partner banks give us a rev share on the interest rate they make. Then we have interchange on both our credit card and our debit card. We also do FX. So if you're sending money internationally, we charge like 1% or so on that. And then we also have a business around venture debt, which we launched March last year. And, you know, we make money on the kind of loan book there.
11:21 Speaker 00 Okay, so a few different revenue sources. And when you mentioned profitability, how do you define that? I have to ask, because I think sometimes there are different definitions of what profitable means.
11:32 Speaker 01 I mean, like the EBITDA, like strict, you know, profitability that like a public market company would consider profitable. Yeah, that one's, I guess, the super set. We're profitable on cash flow and all of that level as well.
11:44 Speaker 00 So I know you mentioned earlier about the very specific needs that the startup community has and how a lot of the larger banks just aren't necessarily, I don't want to say best position, but many feel that they don't necessarily cater to the startup community in the, in the way that that community would like. So overall, like besides the impact on Mercury itself, how do you believe this Silicon Valley bank explosion and the First Republic meltdown, how has all that affected the startup and investor community overall?
12:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a good question. You know, the first order effect is people are definitely a lot more concerned about where their money is and thinking about it more actively than, you know, I've been doing startups in Silicon Valley since 2007, you know, no investor would really say, where's your bank, what's your bank account? Like, that was just like a given that like founder would take care of it. Now people are a lot more thoughtful about it and they, they're thinking about it actively, which I think is a healthy thing. You know, I think 2021, there was a lot of DeFi yield and other things where people were not being careful where their money was and a lot of people got burnt by that. So that's kind of this kind of initial first order effect. You know, in terms of lending products, like
12:56 Speaker 01 the two things that SVB and First Republic kind of did that were unique were, you know, number one venture debt, there's definitely a A big liquidity crunch in venture debt. Thankfully, most startups don't like rely on it as you know, they're not like the existence is not impaired by it. But there's definitely some startups where like they really do rely on venture debt. Like that's a big part of their capital needs.
13:20 Speaker 00 Especially as funding has kind of slowed down.
13:22 Speaker 01 Exactly, especially. And like, you know, if you imagine you're a startup that has a lot of inventory or you have, you know, some other capital that gets locked up. Venture debt was one of the main ways to kind of get lending against it. So that's been a big kind of liquidity crunch. And the other one that's just kind of interesting, I don't know how this plays out is mortgages for founders. You know, both SVB and First Republic was willing to get creative, look at your startup equity and think about, you know, those people tend to be reasonable to lend to, but they don't look like normal consumers. They don't have as consistent revenue and income and things like that. So that's a space that like no one is filling in right now.
14:02 Speaker 00 Interesting, yes. I wonder how that's going to impact the real estate market, especially in areas like in the Bay Area. Correct. Well, Emma, we've got to take a quick break, but when we get back, I want to talk a little bit about your experience as an investor.
14:21 Speaker 00 Besides being a founder, because I think this is your fourth, fourth company, right? I know you're also an angel investor. I was surprised to hear that you've backed over 300 seed stage startups, including, let's see, Airtable, Substack, Deal and Jasper dot A. Rappy.
14:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:37 Speaker 00 That's a lot, a whole lot.
14:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I, I love, I love talking to founders and I love the startup ecosystem. So it's always kind of fun to support it. For a while I was thinking of becoming a VC, so I started investing in 2016 and I was like, oh, maybe I want to be a VC. And then I decided to start Mercury instead, but you know, I still do it on the side and I, and I try to be helpful to people.
14:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, really active. I mean, has that continued even through this venture slowdown that we've seen over the past year and a half? Are you still investing at the same pace?
15:07 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, I think it's so, oh my God, it just kills me that, you know, people were investing so much in 2021 and like it was hard to get into good deals. Valuations were high and I'm like, why, why are people slowing down now? This is the best time to be investing. Like you can pretty much get into anything, valuations are reasonable and it's, I mean, it's not like the world changed. I mean, if. All the things I were working in 2021 will also work in 2023. And now you just can be more selective. I think it's crazy people who invest less right now. Like I'm trying to invest at a similar pace. Obviously Mercury keeps me busy, so I can't always do the same amount of investing, but I've still been pretty active. I did probably 10 deals last quarter.
15:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think things obviously have come back down to earth. So it's definitely different for investors because I know many that I've talked to or commented on having feeling that pressure, especially during 2021. I have a day or two to offer a term sheet, like crazy stuff like that. And I think unfortunately, that sort of frenzy is what led to a lot of these overvalued companies and and things getting a bit out of control. So I think it's actually very healthy and I'm glad things have calmed down some, especially as someone covering startups raising money. But recently you tweeted about something that I believe you described it as a startup death cycle theory. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
16:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, I call it the startup death spiral. I think that as a startup has to grow in order to attract new investors, right? Like I think most VCs and most investors are looking for growth as well as like reasonable unit economics. But, you know, in 2021, it was all about growth, right? Like your unit economics almost didn't matter as long as you were growing. People gave you kind of the benefit of the doubt that you'll figure out the cost side. There's been a shift in the last year where people have been thinking about, oh, actually, it's not just about growth. It's about healthy unit economics as well. But there's a, there's kind of a danger in that as well, that, you know, people look at the investor environment and they're like, hey, you know, let me save costs instead of going out there and raising a new round, especially if you have a high valuation.
17:11 Speaker 01 The problem is the often the easiest way to cut costs is by cutting your ad spend or your sales budget or your marketing budget, right? Those are the, those are often the easiest variable cost levers for most companies. But obviously that, you know, the hopefully the reason you were spending that money was to grow. So you can end up reducing your growth in order to save money, but then that makes you even less fundable. It's hard to go back to the ecosystem, uh, investor ecosystem and say, hey, actually, you know, I need more money. And people will be like, well, you're not growing. Why should we invest in this? And then, then you end up cutting costs again in order to, because you don't have the investment dollars available. So this can be a bit of a spiral where like, you know, there's several companies that I've invested in that are like literally stuck. They're like, hey,
17:56 Speaker 01 You know, we know how to grow, but we don't have any money to spend to grow. And maybe they have like enough runway left, but you know, it gets, it gets pretty depressing as a startup when you're not growing. Like startups are all about momentum. There are some of these that can become profitable, but that's often hard for companies as well, like especially when they're earlier on. Just to give you like an example, I thought it would be fun to like do a little bit of math. So, yeah, let's say you have about a hundred K in monthly costs. I've, I've simplified this and you have about a hundred K in revenue, right? So a hundred K monthly cost, a hundred K in revenue, that's your baseline. So those two about match and you're like, you know, not profitable necessarily, but not burning money. But if you had a two-year payback on spending money, so either through sales or ads.
18:41 Speaker 01 You know, if you acquire a customer, it takes you about two years to pay back, which, you know, was a relative, especially in twenty twenty one, was a relatively normal payback period. In that situation, if you were trying to grow two X, which is basically, I would say the minimum growth required to raise a new round. You'd have to spend two hundred K extra per month. So now you'd have three hundred K in monthly costs and a hundred K in revenue, which means you're burning about two point four million a year. And that's kind of the equation for a lot of startups out there, like they need to burn, you know, about two X their revenue in order to grow two X. If you go below that, like you start burning less, you are potentially unfundable. But if you continue burning that, like you may be still unfundable because like people would look at two X.
19:26 Speaker 00 Cause you're burning too much cash, right? So it's like, seems like a very delicate, tight rope walk, right?
19:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's much easier if your payback is one year. And I think that's like the healthier one to plan for right now. You know, obviously that's not necessarily easy. If you've, if you've built your whole strategy around the two X, the two-year payback, trying to shift it to one year is not trivial. But it's also very risky to try to save that money and be uninvestable because it's hard to get out of that hole as well. So I think the strategies that I, you know, I wrote down as like things that you could try to do. So number one, uh, you know, try to come up with organic and free kind of. Distribution channels. So about half Mercury's customers are free and organic. And you really have to build a product where like people really love it. They're willing to share with their community. And I think that's, that is a good strategy.
20:17 Speaker 01 Obviously, it's not a shift you can make instantaneously, but if you really focus on your customers and the product like, and maybe make some tweaks to virality and things like that, depending on what your product is, you can improve that. So that's one thing. I think the second thing is people were, you know, when it came to the cost of user acquisition, whether it was like, you know, is your sales machine like actually efficient? Are you overpaying your employees there? Are you spending money efficiently on ads? I think there's things people can do that are like, you know, sometimes low hanging fruit, sometimes a bit of work to change how they acquire customers to make their CAC cheaper. And then the last one, which is, you know, almost a given is like, can you improve the revenue you make from customers? So one, obviously you can charge them more money.
21:02 Speaker 01 The second one, which is also really important is like improving retention. Which actually ties in well with kind of product and organic growth. Like, again, if people really like you, they'll stick with you and
21:13 Speaker 00 More likely to spread the word.
21:14 Speaker 01 Exactly. So, yeah. A lot of the time, people actually skip retention and go straight to growth. Uh, I think most startups should really, for a long time and almost always be really like laser tuned on retention because, you know, if you have even a 10% per month like churn, like that will destroy your startup, right? That, that compounds and it becomes like a 50% kind of yearly kind of replacement rate you need.
21:42 Speaker 00 That makes sense.
21:43 Speaker 01 Some consumer companies are pretty bad in that regard.
21:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. And something this actually reminds me that I meant to ask you earlier, speaking of retention. Over time, Mercury's market share has obviously grown. I think you have some recent data that you can share with us, pre SVB and post SVB.
22:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, we were talking to a CFO, external CFO of a firm called Cruise Consulting. They did this like chart about like where their customers went post SVB. So I thought it'd be interesting to kind of get an update from them 90 days out. And they said now 30% of their customers use Mercury. And before kind of the SVB implosion, it was more like 17%. So according to their customers said, it's about a 2X increase in about 30% market share. And they said Mercury was the biggest, well, the bank that was used by the most of their customers. So it's kind of cool to see kind of these external market share numbers. It's always hard to get a good number for that.
22:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a big jump.
22:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think our market share, especially among kind of software startups is probably even higher at the earlier stage. You know, by the time you're using someone like Cruise, you're a little bit more established as a company. And our aim is to really get the next generation of startups using Mercury and scale with them.
22:57 Speaker 00 So with the second quarter just ended, here we are already in the third quarter of 2023, which is a little bit hard to believe.
23:05 Speaker 01 Yeah.
23:06 Speaker 00 I feel like the first half of the year was was a mixed bag, just in general. Obviously, the bank meltdowns had a huge impact in the fintech space in particular. I did see some rebounds with, I felt like more funding rounds, but but still overall slower, a lot of M and A happening. What do you see happening in the second half of this year?
23:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, if you look at Q1 and Q2 funding stats, now all of the Q2 ones are out yet. But I think there was one that TechCrunch covered from Crunchbase, but it showed that funding is down even further. It's just kind of funny, I would say, like the the peak pessimism was probably end of last year. But funding stats were still actually higher than they are Q2. Like, I do feel like there's a general pickup and optimism a little bit. I think the two things to be optimistic about is like public markets have done pretty well, especially this year. Like, if you look especially the top tech companies. And, you know, we haven't ended up in a recession at all, which is, I think, surprised everyone. Everyone was expecting a recession by now. So the US economy is actually like fairly resilient and inflation is mostly.
24:12 Speaker 01 Under control. So so those are like some things to be optimistic about. I still think there's just, you know, we were in a really big twenty twenty one bubble.
24:20 Speaker 00 Mm hmm.
24:21 Speaker 01 I've been doing startups since I remember since like basically two thousand and eleven onwards, but as someone said, there's a bubble almost every year. And it got bigger and bigger. I mean, it wasn't always a bubble, but you know, twenty twenty one, I think everyone agrees was a bubble.
24:33 Speaker 00 That was just crazy. I mean, everyone knew that wasn't sustainable.
24:37 Speaker 01 Yeah. So I I think we're still paying the price for that, right? Like, there's a lot of companies out there that are still gonna fail or like that they'll have to do big down rounds or they'll do fire sales and things like that. The number of companies that should have failed didn't fail and a lot of the companies just raised too much money at hyped up valuation. So I think there's still a lot to be worked through the system. Yes, seed and early stage investing has kind of been fairly resilient through this. The bit that's been hurt the most is kind of growth stage investing, and that was actually the fraughtiest bit as well, right?
25:08 Speaker 00 Right.
25:09 Speaker 01 Tiger was doing like a hundred million round like every three days or something like that. So I think there's there's definitely gonna be, you know, more failures and more layoffs and all of that in the next twelve months. When we have a good idea on like what's gonna happen with the US economy, I think things will pick up. Like, I think at this stage, even if there was a recession, at least we will know how deep it is. I think everyone's just there's all this uncertainty kind of overhanging things. So, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to be like too pessimistic, I think, but it's also hard to be too optimistic. So we're in this kind of middle ground right now, which is everyone's kind of holding their breath a little bit.
25:43 Speaker 00 Right. Yeah, no, I would agree with that. Is there anything we haven't covered that you feel is important to note or mention?
25:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, even whether it's what happens with the economy or like the startup death spiral or whatever, I think the most important thing for like most founders is just to like keep your head down, listen to customers and go go build something. And I think one of the things that's a bit weird about the startup space is, you know, we have these like tiny companies that You know, really a world nothing that have this like crazy vision of being like these billion dollar companies, right? And I think in order to actually achieve that, you really have to grow pretty fast. And I think it's important to like really be focused on that growth. You know, if you look at Mercury, we've grown a lot in the last four years. We only launched four years ago, but
26:31 Speaker 01 every year was this like, kind of a crazy event to help us grow in some ways. Like, I think actually AI has been a pretty big boon to a lot of companies. If you're out there and now you can apply AI to make yourself more efficient, or to add an interesting kind of product feature, that's going to help a lot of people attract customers as well.
26:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. I mean, obviously, this is the year of AI. That's all I feel like all you keep hearing everyone talk about and everyone's trying to get in on it somehow. I guess, though, do you feel like we need to be a little bit careful, though, not to to get overly hype here and proceed with caution in this AI craze?
27:11 Speaker 01 I mean, I think as an investor, you should just apply your normal brain and not get stuck into like, fomowing in deals and going into crazy valuations. Like, I just think those are lessons we hopefully should have learned from 2021. But as a founder, I think, and as a consumer, there's lots to be excited about. And, you know, we should, I don't think people should do it like cynically and just go, oh, I just want to be on this AI bandwagon and I'm just going to copy this idea kind of thing. But if you have a good insight and you can apply the LLMs or these image diffusion things, you know, I think there's lots of opportunities and ideas out there. And this, you know, people should take advantage of that.
27:51 Speaker 00 Well, this has been a lot of fun, Ahmad. I'm so glad that we've connected and I got to hear more details about exactly what happened internally and externally, too, I guess, at Mercury in the wake of the SVB collapse. So thank you so much for coming on the show, giving us your insight. This has been great fun.
28:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, this is a fun chat. Thanks for having me.
28:08 Speaker 00 Thanks again to Ahmad. If you want to follow him on Twitter, you can find him at Ahmad, which is I M M A D, and his company Mercury, at Mercury. And next week, Alex will be back on Monday with his usual news rundown. And in the meantime, you can find us on Twitter at EquityPod, also on Threads, at EquityPod, and on Blue Sky at Equity. Bye, everyone.
28:34 Speaker 02 Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter Mary Ann Azvedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
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