I was using Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Google Docs at the same time. I was managing tools instead of managing work. That's broken.
I was losing hundreds of pounds a year on foreign exchange fees. Every bank was doing it. I thought — someone should fix this. Then I realized it would have to be me.
I walked into a Brazilian bank, waited two hours, and was treated like I was bothering them. That day I decided to build a bank that actually likes its customers.
My bank was charging me 5% on every transfer to Estonia. I did the math — I was losing thousands of pounds a year. That's not a fee, that's theft.
I got food poisoning and wanted to find a good doctor online. There was literally nothing useful. That frustration became a company worth billions. Food poisoning is underrated as a startup origin story.
I tried to open a business bank account at Chase. It took three weeks, four visits, and a fax machine. A fax machine. In 2019. That experience was the final push to build Mercury.
At my previous job I had to open 15 different tools to figure out why the site was down at 3 AM. I thought — this is insane. What if all of this was in one place? That became Datadog.
Setting up a development environment should not be harder than the actual development.
Cap tables should not live in spreadsheets. That's insane. They're legal documents worth billions.
I spent 30 minutes searching for a ballet class in New York City and gave up. That frustration became ClassPass.