We started Mercury because working with incumbent banks at my last startup was really painful. The products suck, you often have to call people to get things done, they charge you random fees in…

The trend is definitely downhill for .com. Zoom is still Zoom.us (even though they own the .com).

I think there will always be a premium for .com as long as people still get to website via URLs.

We moved from Sketch to Figma and from Asana to Linear.

We don't have an active schedule but are often trying to optimize what tools we use.

Tools like marqeta.com reduced the barrier to entry in the credit card space far enough that you could launch a credit card startup with <$2m of funding.

Once you get the barrier to entry low enough…

We spend 1.5 years building the product and it helped that I knew exactly what my pain points were at previous banks and what we wanted to build.

The growth really kicked off when we launched on…

It was important for us to pick a name that both shower longevity and innovation. Roman gods are great for that.

Mercury is the Roman god of financial gain so that was an easy choice (it was my…

The biggest ongoing shift in business spending is the continued shift to SaaS. Almost everything we spend money on now is SaaS based.

Part of the reason we started Mercury is to help businesses…

Financial services and regulation can seem intimidating initially. I think the key to success is to not be scared and dive in to understanding them deeply.

Often those that are best situated to…

I owe a lot to Y Combinator and giving me a path to emigrate from London to San Francisco.

At least in 2007 the silicon valley/SF scene for entrepreneurship was a lot better than in London and its…

iOS app is our most requested feature. We are going to have that live soon!

We are also close to launching virtual debit cards. So you don't have to wait for the physical card to arrive and can make…

I believe it has good Typescript support.

We don't dictate that you have to use VSCode so some engineers use other IDEs

We only have remotes in the US at the moment. So the 3 hour timezone hasn't been a big deal. Most of the conversation in Slack dies down around 4pm PT so people have time to focus.

Apart from direct…

He was a legend.

Yeah. Also from an investor perspective the cost of the .com is an asset on the books which changes the ROI argument.

To be clear thats how most banks make their money.

The only places where fees make banks money is smaller customers. And for smaller customers the fees are extortionate as compared to their deposits.

A few types of business model have delayed revenue and venture debt (or any sort of debt) can make a lot of sense.

For example if you make a lot of revenue but most of your customers pay you after 90…

Many challenger banks and fin-tech companies are finally reaching the scale where they can do interesting products that were only available with scale.

This has already led to a large consumer…

I am really impressed when big companies can innovate at scale.

The most recent example of that is Tesla's Cybertruck launch. But Apple launching iPhone and Amazon launching AWS were equally…

And of course Mercury for all things banking :)