Why Does Immad Akhund Like Being Challenged?

Immad Akhund finds adversity fun and wants to be challenged. A normal week where nothing tricky is happening and everything is up and to the right feels boring. He wants to do hard things. People who play sports want to do things that might make them lose, even though they do not want to lose.

He plays tennis quite a bit, and always winning would not actually be a game. He often thinks of startups as a game, so he wants hard things there too. Every time Mercury solves something hard, the company has created value to some extent, assuming it was the right difficult thing. Mercury is going through a bank charter process that his previous software companies did not have to deal with. He treats the hard work as something competitors might not do, and as a way to build what he calls the most AI-pilled bank, or whatever else that work produces.