"I think just being annoyed about the world is quite a useful attribute as a CEO... why does it have to be like this?" @immad has built @mercury with extreme helpfulness and irrational effort at the core its product philosophy. Watch: Dialectic 57: The Art of Irrational Effort Immad Akhund is a 4x founder who decided banking didn't need to suck, especially given how central it is to every entrepreneur's journey. Nearly a decade in, he hopes to fight decay and build a company that gets better over time, not worse. 1-in-3 startups use Mercury, and he's betting that the next 10 years of entrepreneurship will be greater than the last. Timestamps: (0:00) Opening Highlights (1:50) Intro: Immad Akhund (4:16) Start: Banks and Why Immad Was Suited to Build One (20:30) What Traditional Banks Do Well & What Mercury Got Right (29:33) Why Mercury Wants a Bank Charter (35:57) What's Scarce When Software Is Easy (49:00) Becoming the Default for New Entrepreneurs (53:34) Product: 100 Little Things Better (1:06:51) The Right to Win (1:09:19) Brand as Care (1:15:19) Culture and Being Extremely Helpful (1:22:51) Command, Agents, and AI (1:34:26) Ambition, Investing, and Leading (1:46:54) Family, Pakistan, and America (1:52:56) Money, Freedom, and Energy Available below and all platforms.

Bankers are a lot friendlier when you want to borrow $10 million. @immad, CEO of @mercury, on why banks put more effort into winning your loan business than improving your deposit account: lending is where they make their money. “They need deposits to serve those loans, but it’s never been a place where they’re trying to differentiate or be competitive.”

54: Ian Rogers - Never a Spectator | @iancr

57: Immad Akhund - The Art of Irrational Effort

"I think just being annoyed about the world is quite a useful attribute as a CEO... why does it have to be like this?" @immad has built @mercury with extreme helpfulness and irrational effort at the core its product philosophy. Watch: Dialectic 57: The Art of Irrational Effort Immad Akhund is a 4x founder who decided banking didn't need to suck, especially given how central it is to every entrepreneur's journey. Nearly a decade in, he hopes to fight decay and build a company that gets better over time, not worse. 1-in-3 startups use Mercury, and he's betting that the next 10 years of entrepreneurship will be greater than the last. Timestamps: (0:00) Opening Highlights (1:50) Intro: Immad Akhund (4:16) Start: Banks and Why Immad Was Suited to Build One (20:30) What Traditional Banks Do Well & What Mercury Got Right (29:33) Why Mercury Wants a Bank Charter (35:57) What's Scarce When Software Is Easy (49:00) Becoming the Default for New Entrepreneurs (53:34) Product: 100 Little Things Better (1:06:51) The Right to Win (1:09:19) Brand as Care (1:15:19) Culture and Being Extremely Helpful (1:22:51) Command, Agents, and AI (1:34:26) Ambition, Investing, and Leading (1:46:54) Family, Pakistan, and America (1:52:56) Money, Freedom, and Energy Available below and all platforms.

mercury’s unfair advantage is that they just do the obvious things that every bank should have done 15 years ago

"I think just being annoyed about the world is quite a useful attribute as a CEO... why does it have to be like this?" @immad has built @mercury with extreme helpfulness and irrational effort at the core its product philosophy. Watch: Dialectic 57: The Art of Irrational Effort Immad Akhund is a 4x founder who decided banking didn't need to suck, especially given how central it is to every entrepreneur's journey. Nearly a decade in, he hopes to fight decay and build a company that gets better over time, not worse. 1-in-3 startups use Mercury, and he's betting that the next 10 years of entrepreneurship will be greater than the last. Timestamps: (0:00) Opening Highlights (1:50) Intro: Immad Akhund (4:16) Start: Banks and Why Immad Was Suited to Build One (20:30) What Traditional Banks Do Well & What Mercury Got Right (29:33) Why Mercury Wants a Bank Charter (35:57) What's Scarce When Software Is Easy (49:00) Becoming the Default for New Entrepreneurs (53:34) Product: 100 Little Things Better (1:06:51) The Right to Win (1:09:19) Brand as Care (1:15:19) Culture and Being Extremely Helpful (1:22:51) Command, Agents, and AI (1:34:26) Ambition, Investing, and Leading (1:46:54) Family, Pakistan, and America (1:52:56) Money, Freedom, and Energy Available below and all platforms.

"I think just being annoyed about the world is quite a useful attribute as a CEO... why does it have to be like this?" @immad has built @mercury with extreme helpfulness and irrational effort at the core its product philosophy. Watch: Dialectic 57: The Art of Irrational Effort Immad Akhund is a 4x founder who decided banking didn't need to suck, especially given how central it is to every entrepreneur's journey. Nearly a decade in, he hopes to fight decay and build a company that gets better over time, not worse. 1-in-3 startups use Mercury, and he's betting that the next 10 years of entrepreneurship will be greater than the last. Timestamps: (0:00) Opening Highlights (1:50) Intro: Immad Akhund (4:16) Start: Banks and Why Immad Was Suited to Build One (20:30) What Traditional Banks Do Well & What Mercury Got Right (29:33) Why Mercury Wants a Bank Charter (35:57) What's Scarce When Software Is Easy (49:00) Becoming the Default for New Entrepreneurs (53:34) Product: 100 Little Things Better (1:06:51) The Right to Win (1:09:19) Brand as Care (1:15:19) Culture and Being Extremely Helpful (1:22:51) Command, Agents, and AI (1:34:26) Ambition, Investing, and Leading (1:46:54) Family, Pakistan, and America (1:52:56) Money, Freedom, and Energy Available below and all platforms.

56: Miles Grimshaw - Back Down the Mountain

.@iancr on the delicate arithmetic of love (courtesy of Jimmy Iovine’s dad): “If the cat is bigger than the shit, keep the cat. If the shit gets bigger than the cat, get rid of the cat."

I have always said understanding accounting is underrated. I now realize understanding finance — specifically discount rates — is underrated as well. Long but excellent.

A new Independent Study on @DialecticPod's feed: "Art is For Seing Evil" by @AgnesCallard Agnes makes a provocative, but quickly compelling case that art helps us to see what we typically filter out in our daily lives. Independent Study is a bit like audiobooks for essays, read by me. If Dialectic is a curation of people I admire by way of conversation, I.S. is their ideas, direct from the source of writing. I discovered this essay in my prep for interviewing @nanransohoff; thank you to her! And thank you to @the_point_mag and of course Agnes. Please enjoy. Some highlights: "When the things around us make no practical contribution—affording no use or joy—they do not readily summon our attention; when harms refuse to take the friendly shape of surmountable obstacles, we endeavor to ignore them; when evils offer up no positive face, no compensatory pleasures, we command ourselves to turn away from them. We swim in an invisible sea composed of all that is irrelevant, unhelpful or downright wicked. Art suspends our practical projects, releasing the prohibition against attending to the bad. Our ravenous consumption of badness in art reveals just how much we standardly deprive ourselves of it. We commonly praise some piece of art for its “realism”; we could fault life for its lack thereof." "The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life." Available on audio podcast platforms.

52: Jack Conte - Draw the Next Page

One of the biggest lessons I learned working with Alex Hormozi: "Get off the X-axis." Here's what he meant... Around six months into working with the team, I’ll be honest… I got kinda restless. People from other companies were recruiting me, and initially I turned them all down, but then I started taking some of the calls. Alex found out. I remember one morning, we had just got done with working out, and he said, "Walk with me," and brought me into his office. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to expect. Did he find out I was talking to other companies? Was he mad at me? Was I about to get fired? He asked why I was looking elsewhere. I told him I was frustrated I wasn't working on big, meaty problems. He asked how long I'd been there. “About six months,” I said. He smirked. "That's nothing. 6 months to you feels huge, because it’s 15% of your entire working career. But in the grand scheme, it's nothing.” Then he said something that lives in my head rent free. He said, "If you keep chasing the new shiny thing, you'll never grow. To get good, you have to go deep." And then he drew two lines and explained the difference between: skill growth vs. the feeling of progress In the beginning, everything is new and exciting - so you’ll feel like you’re making a ton of progress. Then at some point, it will plateau and things will feel “normal” But that’s where you have to push through. Because true mastery is achieved not when you’re 80% of the way there, but when you push to 99%. Every extra percent you improve at nets exponential differences from a skill perspective. At the start of your career, you should say yes and experiment with a lot of things. That’s how you learn what you like (and don’t like). But once you find your thing, you have to say no and commit. The word "decide" comes from the Latin root cadere, meaning: to cut. To decide is to cut off all other other options. Because what's the alternative? A life hugging the x-axis because you were too scared or distracted is a life of little accomplishment. If you commit to nothing, you'll be distracted by everything. ~~ Ps. this is an excerpt of my first YouTube video about the top lessons I learned working with Alex Hormozi. You should probably watch it. Or don't. Either way, I'm rooting for you!

54: Ian Rogers - Never a Spectator | @iancr