immad

CEO @Mercury. Investor: @Etched, @Deel, @AppliedInt, @Stoke_Space, @DecagonAI, @Substack, 300+. Cohost of @FoundersInArms

[immad @immad]

Over the years, I have tried to share learnings from my startups and seed investing.

Decided to combine my startup tweets+tweetstorms into a tweethurricane.

Here are my learnings + advice, from pitching investors to getting through the journey:

[immad @immad]

We ran a full page New York Times ad to celebrate hitting $1B in revenue.

And to thank our customers for their trust in us.

[immad @immad]

@kasstawi Normal bank savings accounts don't have to go to MRGXX/MRCYX.

[immad @immad]

For customers what is the point of tokenized deposits, like SOFIE?

Savings accounts with high interest rates are strictly superior since they allow full banking features.

Even easy conversion to stablecoins can be solved with RTP or stablecoin on-ramps.

What am I missing?

[immad @immad]

@PavanKatta1998 Its elitist to want to use the correct definition of an acronym?

[immad @immad]

@SirvenJose @mercury Nice. Let me go up his comp right now :)

[immad @immad]

@_theopowers Are these tokenized deposits compostable or programmable? They don’t appear to be on a blockchain or give you direct wallet custody.

[immad @immad]

@patio11 I can’t tell whether you are being sarcastic or cynically realistic.

[Jude Gomila @judegomila]

I'd like to share a little about what I've been working on at my new company @ultrametricai with my cofounder @tylerlastovich. We have been exploring how we could automate the startup itself, leaving founders with more time to focus on their exact mission.

Enter our first release of the Open Startup Repo: https://t.co/ecZZRU9iX4

A common foundation for transparent automation of the startup.

After close to 20 years in silicon valley, backing hundreds of amazing founders & startups, being in the trenches of founding Heyzap (YC08), then solo founding @golden, going through 2 acquisitions and working behind the scenes with some of the iconic companies today, I'm witnessing the largest change to how we work I could have imagined - a truly monumental era of creative abundance.

I believe the next generation of companies will largely run themselves: from operations, code, product upgrades, growth, vendor control & selection, process execution, special situations, strategy etc etc. That leaves founder time for 'the art' at the very niche core: the (currently) unautomatable, the special leaps humans tend to make, and north star setting.

We want founders to go super deep into the main problem they are trying to solve and not get held up doing anything else, from searching for domain availability with trademark checks to setting their company up, to running their processes on autopilot.

So to help that broad foundational layer for starting and running a company, we have spent around a year exploring how to help founders focus on their mission across different verticals, geos, stages and initial starting conditions.

Our first few attempts at making something useful actually failed as the market and AI was moving so fast; it just got absorbed into the models or other product releases. We saw polsia happen, openclaw, then grokbot, muse, dots, etc era as the astras, fables, opuses, kimis and jevs rolled out. What seemed to have been missing along the way was a common repo to identify, unify, open and normalize all the lego bricks that startups have to interact with (vendors, processes, business logic, law, best practices, surface areas, art of the possible).

As the number of software vendors blew up, the interfaces to drive them multiplied, the international startup founder blew up as silicon valley moved from a specific location to a state of mind and global movement. Unlimited pre seed funding in unlimited vertical sub markets and permutations has brought us to the age of infinity but we have yet to achieve being able to type into an agent a very simple sentence with very complex implications 'just setup my company and make $1m/m'. We have ended up with a hybrid mismash of computer use, API calls, plugins, shifting surface areas (API/MCP/CLI/plugins/chats/musish futures), and changing model absorption to vendor balance making it an exciting and unstable time.

As our first step we started to rank all the vendors that startups interface to when going about their journey in terms of how agentically controllable they are via their APIs, MCPs, CLIs etc and computer use compatibility as we are largely switching from a UI driven world to the agentic control surfaces and onto full automation. We have 100 ranking areas you can check out with an overall open ranking here: https://t.co/V6XRMME0Ib

Then we looked at the processes that startups do and how the vendors rank for the sub steps or process as a whole and how this changes across geos. Open processes: https://t.co/iSQ90poYxq

Then we started to hack on an open repo for startups that would contain all the components we are going to need for a common foundation for founders across the globe even if our gov processes vary so much from Bengaluru to SF or Lisbon to Shenzhen. The founder spirit is geo-invariant.

We have looked at special founder/startup situations, the business logic that will make open modules for the startup that we can hack on together, ranked law firms, government services and interfaces, stacks that go well together. We have mapped the law and lore that maps to startups and the schemas that make up the data objects and documents. But also the open documents and the missing gaps. MUCH TO DO.

All the BS processes and fluff work that founders waste their time on needs to goto zero. I want to see more supersonic planes, cancer drugs, seemingly impossible missions done and increase the bang for buck founders have with their funding.

This is a work in progress and we are keen for the community to come hack on the repo with us here: https://t.co/ecZZRU9iX4

Lets get into the structure of the general repo and the visualizations we made on https://t.co/XEYK9ipnfI site with example links:

- Open rankings: https://t.co/V6XRMME0Ib

- Open rankings example (online payments): https://t.co/1kXHZCVfIi

- Open ranking example 2 (cap table): https://t.co/oqBjatGkfW

- Open processes: https://t.co/iSQ90poYxq

- Open process example (Incorporate C-Corp) https://t.co/pxKUXpW03D

- Open situations that founders face: https://t.co/AFzAp5FRPk

- Open startup simulator (you can test our different initial starting conditions): https://t.co/QqPek01J7K

- Open modules (e.g. cap table, payroll logic etc - we'd love help improving these) https://t.co/sfzIhgAJYS

- Open law (we are interested in how law changes the processes, situations and normalizing this over time) https://t.co/5yJnYbC0bk

- Open lore (we are interested in the historical lore of startups, the rules of thumb and heuristics that might guide your agent): https://t.co/gjliXoQwe1

- Open fields (we are interested in how the schema for the data connects to the open modules, business logic, open documents and artifacts of each process eg how is a EIN defined?) https://t.co/59rcEXhnCx

- Open documentation (eg SAFE notes and missing! docs) https://t.co/BbvBow2Olt

We have looked at YC companies as well in terms of which ones do well agentically: https://t.co/snnJ83r9ly

We are interested in stacks and how people are changing their work: https://t.co/wFHoew5V9I

We are interested in what is automatable and where the agentic ceiling is currently and how to push that up in all areas: https://t.co/WmTDjmNyV4

There is more for you to explore and a lot more coming in terms of how you will be able to navigate business in an optimal way in your chosen surface area; whether you are hanging in grokbot, dots, muse, claude, terminal, chat, or whatever is coming up in this exciting time.

We have a lot of data to collect, clean up and help agents navigate the vast landscape emerging functionality the entire startup ecosystem has to offer.

Come join us getting your vendor in, ranked or that access pattern you have wanted or getting the data more accurate in terms of which vendor is best for a process or steps. Or open a module of something that currently cost money that could be free.

Also come play in our discord for founders and join the chaos (we can solve each others issues including fund raising tips from me personally): https://t.co/AmBtzFy0Bz

It's time to lift all the boats in the harbor and I'm extremely excited as to what the community of hackers and painters will hack into the repo, what asks they will have and whether we can shift normalization of processes globally, gov agentic interfaces and have common repo for founders that grows over time. I expect a lot of experimentation along the way, bugs and upside...

I appreciate our backers having faith in us as well from @ycombinator with @garrytan to @immad doing a sizable check (congrats on $1bn rev homie) to @darbyw (congrats on Stripe buying @clerkyinc), @drewhouston form @Dropbox and also @pioneer_fund @tomerlondon cto @GustoHQ and hopefully this is 'boring' and complex enough for Charlie Songhurst :> @delingpole @Liquid2V @ivolo from @segment @ryanpowe @sonicaghi of @kong @DellyTamer+ other supporters (@michaelwfrank, Fundamental ventures and if I missed you sorry moving fast!).

[And don't worry, all vendor rankings are open scoring methods so no favors are being done if someone backed us and is a vendor they have to compete with how agentic and automatable they are just like anyone else.]

PS: we have bugs and many quality upgrades to make but thought better to go out early and fix as a community.

PPS: we have other stuff to launch we just thought this was a great place to start and have 200 PRs coming out pretty soon but I still want to know what is broken or doesnt make sense or inaccurate.

Special thanks to current and past team members for getting us here and all the experiments we did you know who you are.

[immad @immad]

@Alfred_Lin Annualized daily revenue! Might as well do hourly at that point

[immad @immad]

ARR = Annual Recurring Revenue

95% of the time I see ARR nowadays it’s non recurring revenue.

Recurring used to refer to sticky contracted revenue now it often refers to token or payments revenue

Should we redefine ARR as Annualized Revenue Rate rather than fight the usage?

[Mercury @mercury]

“Bump Priya’s salary to $120,000”

Mercury Command* reads the request, checks current compensation, requests the effective date of the change, and drafts the change for approval.

[immad @immad]

@CBeaty @mercury Yep

[immad @immad]

1/

Hiring your first employee is one of the biggest moments for a founder. But payroll, taxes, benefits, and compliance are far more complicated than they need to be.

Now with AI we can make the pain of payroll go away.

@Mercury Payroll* launches today!

[immad @immad]

@StrtupFounder @mercury Can’t fix that… yet

[immad @immad]

@ewadeloans @mercury @humaninteresthq Who do you like?

[immad @immad]

@ianhunter @mercury not yet.

[Kevin Galang @kevgumba]

(banking + cards + books + payroll) x agents = sick

[immad @immad]

4/

With payroll alongside banking**, cards, spend management, accounting and more, everything you need to run your business and truly understand your money is now in one place.

Get started now: https://t.co/MPAvvu6rVZ

*Mercury Payroll is offered by Mercury Technologies, Inc. Certain services are provided by Central Benefits and Insurance Services LLC, a Mercury affiliate, and by third-party partners, including Check Technologies, Inc. and Check Payments LLC. AI-generated information may be incomplete or inaccurate and should not be relied upon as legal, tax, or accounting advice. You are responsible for reviewing and confirming information before submitting or approving payroll actions.

**Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.

[immad @immad]

3/

Like the rest of Mercury’s products, Payroll works with our AI agent, Command.* Ask Command to update an employee’s salary and it checks current compensation, requests the effective date of the change, then prepares the changes for you to confirm.

Or ask Command to help set a new employee up on payroll and cards and it can get it started for you in the same conversation.