In 2022, Brex shifted away from SMB to refocus their offering. They cut "tens of thousands" of SMB customers who didn't fit their new ICP. They announced this in June 2022 and gave all of those customers 2mo to find a new provider and move their funds.
The new qualifications to be a Brex customer at that time were:
> Received an equity investment of any amount (accelerator, angel, VC or web3 token);
> More than $1 million a year in revenue;
> More than 50 employees;
> More than $500k in cash;
> Tech startups who are on a path to meeting the criteria above, and are referred by an existing customer or partner.
Just to avoid confusion, while SMB as used above may be referring to the owner it typically means "Small and/or Medium Business". Where what counts as small and medium varies a bit but is generally <500 employees and annual revenue <$10 million.
Pretty surprised here and I think it was really just bad marketing or I guess unsustainable unit economics.
Price out the cheapest F-150 (XL) with a supercrew cab and 4x4 and you are looking at $50k. Trucks are just expensive. The Lightning is expensive but not that much more than any other truck and the Ford incentives + EV credit brought it down quite a bit. The Lightning Flash (extended range) was routinely selling OTD < $60k with 0% financing.
I'd put off buying a pickup for a decade because I couldn't find the right one and the Lightning is awesome. I was skeptical at first due to range concerns but there are chargers in the middle of nowhere in 2025.
I think a lot of the other commenters might change their thoughts if they drove one for a bit.
Edit: I get somewhere around 50mpg (dollar equivalent when charging at home) in a full-size truck that fits my whole family and our gear + handles better in the snow than any ICE truck + can do plenty of hauling and light towing.
I need to read books like this with extra intentionality or it all just flows through and I might retain a couple of key concepts if I'm lucky.
1) Highlighting or underlining along with folding page corners to make it easy to find high impact passages when flipping through later.
2) Writing a short chapter summary in the blank space at the end of each chapter. Just a couple of minutes to reflect on what I just read and to summarize the core message of the chapter.
Sounds like they're getting paid based on his note to employees:
> "The proceeds from Meta's investment will be distributed to those of you who are shareholders and vested equity holders [...] The exceptional team here has been the key to our success, so I'm thrilled to be able to return the favor with this meaningful liquidity distribution."
Honestly if this acts as a liquidity event for a whole bunch of current employees, while at the same time giving off "Meta hand picked the CEO and whoever they felt were the best AI engineers and jumped ship" energy, I wouldn't be tooo surprised if current "scaliens" view this as the inflection point, and decide it's not worth staying for the other ~51% of their shares.
Lol, what triggered this absolute hatchet job targeting Mercury? I haven't read other posts from the author but are all of them of this style?
Most of it reads like a Muddy Waters style short-seller exposé. The author whirlwinds through a bunch of hot gossip, paints a customer-experience focus as some sort of evil scheme, dredges up a handful of old issues most of which seem to have been since remediated, cherry picks a handful of transactions out of millions, seems to blame Mercury for the actions of multiple other businesses and individuals, references a wire transfer doc that was pulled from some random Synapse server without knowing what else might have accompanied that doc in the original workflow and so on and on and on.
Banking, payments, and money movement are hard and absolutely ridden with fraud. Any company that moves money will encounter fraud, money laundering, all of this.
The focus on consent orders as proof that Mercury is breaking the law seems like fluff. Most of the banks that were willing to partner with fintechs at the start, and maybe still most of the banks doing this, are local or small regional banks that don't have the robust BSA/AML programs that larger banks have so some growing pains are expected here. The FDIC issued consent orders for 25 banks in 2024, at least 13 of those were for BSA violations and/or fintech partner oversight.
The request to make an exception for OnlyFans without changing the terms for all adult entertainment businesses does not seem at all damning? Immad calls out that they are a "very big specific client and they have a very strict content policy". That seems true and possibly exception-worthy when there's a blanket policy disallowing a specific type of customer?
The Axis Consulting invoice callout is pretty random and unsubstantiated. It's just a screenshot of an invoice then commentary saying "purports to be" and "no trace of 'Axis Consulting' at the listed address". With one minute of searching it is possible to see that Axis Consulting, LLC was registered with the New Mexico Secretary of State and the company that formed the entity does appear to be a marketing agency.
I'm sure there are issues at Mercury and they probably did cut some corners while growing rapidly and push some limits trying to streamline things for customers but what in the world is this post. It reads like a man scorned and on a rampage.
If this were actual journalism or research there would be some sort of "compared to what". What is Mercury doing today that is bad and why is it bad? What laws or regulations apply to their business and what are they failing to do properly?
I'll also note that I have multiple Mercury accounts and part of the way they have mitigated the risk of easier account opening and taking on higher risk customers is that they impose fairly low transaction limits on new customers and limit the ability to write checks without going through their platform. There are probably other similar limitations that I haven't hit yet.
These are annoying, especially if you don't know you are going to encounter them and a transaction gets held up, but they make sense for offsetting risk while speeding up account opening and expanding the profiles of customers you take on.
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