Why Does Mercury Keep Launching Products Beyond Banking?

Immad Akhund feels some companies get interesting at scale, where you can do more, while other companies converge, and in his view most companies tend to do one thing and then improve that for the rest of their life. Banking is different: a Mercury account holds all of a business's money, it is the first thing a founder sets up, and it is a universal product because every single business needs a bank account.

Mercury Books launched three weeks ago. A founder already signs up for a bank account before an accounting system, and the bank account already has most of the data, so he calls Mercury Books an easy, natural expansion. Mercury Personal, the personal product, just launched as well. Banking still has many expansions of the same kind, so Mercury has almost endless forms of expansion and stays a fun startup to work on.

If Mercury reached a stage with little new work and mostly incremental optimization, he would be more bored, and he is probably not the best leader for incremental optimization. As long as he has energy, he will probably still be doing startups, and he is enjoying Mercury.