Building a $5B company without 9-9-6 @Immad (Immad Akhund), Co-Founder & CEO, @Mercury, interviewed by @Nakul (Nakul Mandan) @KnuckleupHQ (Knuckle Up with Nakul) Summary: Akhund has built Mercury to 300,000 customers, a $650M annualized run rate and 4 straight profitable years while refusing almost every intensity norm Silicon Valley reverted to. He is anti-996, still remote-first at 1,200 people, and hires for curiosity and humility. His argument against the grind is arithmetic: 2 extra hours a day never bought him 20% more output, and a sixth employee on a team of 5 does. The line he keeps returning to is that he has engineered his own pressure to fall as the company succeeds, which he says is rare and should be normal. 1. The 9-9-6 Arithmetic. Working 9 to 9 does not make you 20% more productive than working 10 hours. Akhund runs the numbers out loud: the extra 2 hours might buy 5%, and throwing in Saturday might get you to 10%, while going from 5 employees to 6 buys a clean 20%. He also thinks the grind costs you the ideas, because his best ones arrive on a flight or while driving, and a different fork in the road can be worth 10 times more than a few extra hours at the desk. He is not prescriptive about it, and says the tradeoff is reasonable when you are young and cannot afford the extra hire. 2. Culture Is Personalities. Akhund hates the word culture because it is ill-defined, so he reduced it to something measurable: which personalities you hire, and which traits you encourage. Mercury's four founders wrote theirs down at the start, choosing product-minded, humble, helpful and curious, and then built interviews to test against each one. At his previous company he skipped this step, and the salespeople became the loudest voices and set the tone by default. He points at Uber as proof that a high-ego, competitive culture can also build something enormous, so the question is which one fits you and your product. 3. Recruiting Or Nothing. Recruiting only happens when it is the founder's number one priority, and Akhund puts it at about 50% of his time when he is in a hiring phase. He works in phases. He raised $6M from Andreessen Horowitz in 2017, recruited to a team of 8, then stopped hiring for roughly 18 months while they built. Five of those first 8 people had worked with him at his previous company, and all 5 are still at Mercury. After the Series A, advice from Josh at Gusto to hire an in-house recruiter changed the trajectory, and the recruiting team is now around 15 people. 4. The Presentation Interview. Candidates get 45 minutes to prepare a talk on any topic they choose, then present it and defend it. Akhund invented this about 12 years ago as the sales equivalent of an engineering coding challenge, after finding that great salespeople could ace every conventional interview question and then had nothing interesting to say. It grades several things at once: whether they have gone deep on anything, how they handle pushback, and how they respond to a product-thinking curveball like making pickleball popular in America. He says it is one of the best ego detectors he has, because high-ego people cannot take the challenge, and he will never make an exception for a sales hire. 5. No One-On-Ones. Akhund scrapped one-on-ones after hearing Jensen Huang describe running Nvidia without them, and found more CEOs had quietly done the same than he expected. Ten weekly one-on-ones consume a full day plus the head space around it, so he replaced them with group exec meetings: a weekly all-exec, then biweekly GTM, engineering-product-design, compliance and risk, and G&A. Fridays run a 3-hour exec workshop where teams bring work in progress and get decisions made in the room. He says one-on-ones are mostly an avenue for reports to sell themselves. Visibility comes from quarterly written reviews and from watching people perform in group settings. 6. Autonomous Eight-Person Teams. Mercury runs at least 15 product teams of roughly 8 people, typically 1 PM, 1 designer and 6 engineers. Each owns a product surface, a KPI and most of its own roadmap, talks to customers directly, and needs very little approval from Akhund. The friction shows up at the seams. The personal banking team still has to work with risk and disputes, and invoicing still has to work with mobile. With 400 engineers, the whole design is an attempt to recover the efficiency a seed-stage startup gets for free. 7. Metrics Make Local Maxima. Optimizing everything you can measure walks you into a local maximum. Akhund thinks growth teams should be metrics-driven, since sign-up to application conversion has many measurable steps worth grinding on. The counterexample he gives is collecting W-9s from contractors, which materially improves a customer's life and maps to no company-level metric he can name. He points at the Facebook app as a company that became metrics-driven enough to lose its heart. He says EBITDA is the number that finally matters, while most of the route to it resists measurement. 8. Complaining As A Skill. Akhund treats complaining about his own product as a core part of the job. He banks his own fund and his wife's business on Mercury, so he uses it as a customer and files the friction he hits. The skill is manufacturing the mindset of someone who knows nothing about Mercury and gets annoyed at an extra click or a step that makes no sense. He is explicit that product taste at this scale is mostly not his, because the designer on a feature has thought about it far longer than he has. 9. AI Enables The Rep. Mercury tried AI SDRs and Akhund says they were bad then and are probably still bad, because everyone deploying them floods the field and wrecks the signal-to-noise for everybody. What worked was arming human salespeople with context, so an email can open with a specific congratulations on a raise or a note that the company just hired its first finance person. Sales headcount has gone up, and they are hiring aggressively. On support, about 35% of tickets now get answered immediately through Fin, and Akhund expects to bring it in-house to push toward 70% because the next tier requires deep internal integration. 10. The TAM Miscalculation. AI founders keep sizing their market by the labor they replace, and Akhund thinks the number is badly wrong. Once 10 startups compete to automate the same job, the market is whatever the software can charge given that competition, which sits far below the salary line it replaced. The moat question decides where in that range you land. He says this changes how these companies should be valued, and calls it his most controversial view in the conversation. 11. A Regulated Bank That Ships. Mercury has conditional approval to become a chartered bank, and Akhund frames the whole exercise as a contrarian bet. He argues they are already regulated by proxy, running new products and marketing past partner banks, which means third parties dictate the program. The charter buys Zelle, real lending products, direct access to the Fed and later cut-off windows, and removes the disclaimers on mercury.com that cost them trust. He says he would be disappointed if in 5 years they operate exactly like a bank, because the opportunity is building a regulated institution that stays product-led and fast. 12. Bonus Levels. Akhund grew up with parents on welfare and spent his first 10 years as a founder trying to survive, which ended with a $45M exit. The unicorn valuation arrived in 2021, and he describes everything after it as the bonus levels of the game, where the goal turned open-ended and vaguer. Having no scarcity left is what let him commit 3 years to a new bank in 2017, a swing he could not have taken earlier. He has deliberately built things so pressure drops as success climbs, and thinks it is strange that the reverse is normal.