Mercury

A haunted house, but every door leads to “we love the vision, let’s stay in touch.” Play Founder Frights: mercury.com/haunted

We made a haunted house filled with cursed artifacts of startup life. 👻 Enter if you dare: https://lnkd.in/gPr7ctzV

This is the story of two startups who tried to map the world. 🌎 One got there first. The other got it right. In the 1990s, MapQuest brought digital directions to our desktops. A decade later, Google Maps turned that same idea into something we could hold in our hands — the pulsing blue dot we all know today. In the process, they changed more than how we travel. They changed how we see the world: shrinking it to a screen small enough to fit in our palms. Now, a new question emerges: can the maps of the future help us stay connected to where we are, not just show us where to go? ✍️ Written by Rhea Purohit. Full story on Meridian ⤵️

Say hello to receipts that file themselves. 🧾 You can now set up Gmail rules to auto-forward merchant emails to receipts@mercury.com, and Mercury will match them to the right transaction — no uploads required.

ICYMI: our CEO and co-founder Immad Akhund is hosting an interactive session about crafting a two sentence framework to pitch your company story. 📍TechCrunch Disrupt, Level 2

After nearly two decades and three startups, serial founder Immad Akhund built a $3.5B fintech juggernaut in Mercury. If you ask him why his previous companies never reached similar success, he’d point to the trap of the bullish founder. “If you're a strong founder, you can sell anything. You can get weak product-market fit out of almost any idea, and that's a problem,” he says. He tried the ship-and-iterate approach for his earlier startups. Two never found PMF, and one did only after lots of pivots. For Mercury, he took his time to fully bake the idea upfront — and it paid off. On The Review, he shares the lessons he wishes he could tell his twenty-something founder self brute-forcing his way to PMF, including: -The value of picking — and sticking with — the right idea -Why founders should prove they can do the hard part before building anything else -The merits of taking your time before launch -Culture lessons from a first-time scale-up CEO And much more. Read the full essay here: https://lnkd.in/dcCAxARC

And it's officially day 2️⃣ of TechCrunch Disrupt! We've got two more Expert Sessions on the docket today with Anarghya Vardhana at 11am and Immad Akhund at 1pm. Drop by our booth on Level 2 to say hi to the team, grab some merch, and hear from some of the sharpest minds in tech.

Lovable moves fast — and they’re showing founders how to do the same. The AI-Native Startup Playbook for Founders is the ultimate startup guide for using AI to go from idea → launch → scale, faster than ever. Always a good time collaborating with our customers and partners like Lovable, Stripe Atlas, and Supabase. Check out the guide below ⤵️

Come for the merch, stay for sessions with the sharpest minds in company-building 😌

Every startup needs a nucleus of a story that convinces investors, team and customers to join. At TechCrunch Disrupt, I’ll share my framework for writing 2 sentences that can best explain your startup – and help as many founders as I can shape their stories. Come by Mercury’s booth on Oct. 28, 2nd floor, 1-1:30pm PT. Should be fun!