YouSaid · the spoken record

Jack Zhang

lines on the record: 120
first: 2025-05-27
most recent: 2025-05-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Hope we have built no one of the largest global payments and banking platform to power modern businesses around the world. I hope we have built a bigger business than CD or HSPC because when we succeeded doing that, millions of businesses around the world will benefit from the success of our mission. Public or not doesn't matter”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's better than Melbourne. I love the global nature of Linden, and I've so far enjoyed meeting a lot of entrepreneurs. I think it's going to be exciting place. Do you love living?”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, people are making decisions based on the knowledge they have. And generally, that is not the right thing to do because the biggest mistake you make is from making a decision based on the knowledge you don't have.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like before product market fit is really just based on people's personality. I don't know how to make an investment decision based on people's personality or the history of people, right? That's why I said I wasn't able to invest in myself. I just haven't seen enough data to build that confidence.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, his argument makes a lot of sense that he's saying, you know, like, I said, you know, why don't I just keep building and maybe sell later? Like, what now? I haven't really figured it out, what I want to do with my life yet. It's like, you know, the earlier you can compound, the faster you can build a trillion dollar business. I mean, it kind of makes sense.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I have someone like Michael Morris that invests in Strub, like a true visionary investor supported the founder from day one. I think Michael Morris played a very important role of Strub's success, waiving the flag of Stripe early days of Silicon Valley, like early days of Stripe in Silicon Valley saying, you know, John Patrick going to be the next Sergei brand or Larry Page that they're going to build a trillion dollar company, blah, blah, blah. I don't think I had that support.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, you wanted to work with the best investor, not only an investor, but also a friend, and people you get along with and you like. It's nothing I don't like the investor in Sequoia, but just saying that you just choose the brand over the people.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think you should always prioritize what gives you the biggest leverage, the leverage on brand, the leverage on hiring, the leverage on commercial opportunities.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of pain. The first four or five years, we hired a lot of people with a lot of great experiences. They from a bank, they're from Citibank, they built a SWIFT network before they know the thing, then they join telling me like, you guys know nothing, what you're going to do doesn't work, we need to do blah, blah, blah. And none of those people worked. None of the people think they know how to build a startup that worked. And ultimately, it's not experience, it's about the competency, right? It's about the curiosity, the determination, about the resilience and about the belief in the vision, about the passion. And I think we should just have higher those curious, determined, optimistic people from early on, but we didn't. So we had to like fire all of them and that is a tough, tough decision. We really slowed down the company. We had like bad press about it, just a lot of plan to go through.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couple of things number one I hide the first 100 people in air wallets by myself on LinkedIn. And obviously there's a lot of benefit doing that, but I could have hired a good recruiter just to help me to do the outreach and give him the access of my LinkedIn password. You know what I mean? I didn't need to do that myself. Today I could just get an AI to do that. Yeah, I think get a good recruiter early on that kind of make the hiring a lot more efficient. Number two is that don't overinvest in international expansion when you don't have product on market fit, right? And that could really put in a lot of risk to your company. And we lucky 2021 happened and we're lucky that Ian closed around in 2020 when our revenue halved and COVID happened and stocked down 30%. But I don't think everyone is going to be that lucky. So do that. And I think the other thing is just really focus on investing in a culture early.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like the everyday of the job of a CEO and I like I able to control the destiny of the company and I ultimately answer to the outcome of the event like an outcome of the company the outcome of the customer the outcome of the employee right I wanted to have that control so I know that we are heading the right direction towards our vision I don't like the dealing with the people issues you know dealing with you know the policies the procedures and all that type of stuff”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think for a lay stage founder, like, you know, above a billion dollar valuation, I think 20, 30 million dollar is a decent amount, but it's not ridiculous amount that you set for your life or anything. I think it's just good for founder to not think about money too much and just really focus on the vision.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I recommend founders take enough secondary so that they can account for life, right? They don't need to worry about how do they feed the family, how do they support the kids, how do they buy a house. In Melbourne, I think the living standards is much lower than London. I think in London, you need like $20, $30 million to leave a very kind of comfortable life. I think that amount is right for a late stage founder. Because you just wanted the founder to be all in building the business rather than thinking about how to support the family, if you know what I mean.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm actually buying bag there while a stock myself. So I actually in the process of taking a debt of $70 million to buy airwall secondaries. I just have so much confidence to the company.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I think people really looking at public market calm and, you know, because of what happened in 2021, so there's less investors out there believe that you can grow in 90% for a long period of time. Imagine like in 2021, right? People will go burned. People all grow in 100% and just went from growing 100% to like 20% in months. I think people just like invasive just got burned through that experience. And I think people just give you less credit that you can grow at these highest speed for a long period of time.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, people don't really look at revenue multiple anymore, right? People are looking at gross profit. We doing $415 million gross profit this year. So essentially it's 13 times of this year gross profit. I mean, it's not bad. I mean, if you look at that's kind of the same sort of multiple stripe or the revolutions are doing.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We went to like. $500 million AR in August last year than hit like 600 in November and 700 in sort of January and FAB. And the business just can still grow insanely fast.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that time, I know the vision is really big. How much capital required to build a global bank, right? It's going to be in a balance. I just want to raise as much money as I can. And obviously, I only raise like 100 at five and a half. I should have raised more at a time. But I think air wallets will be dead without 2021, right? We raised $400 million. We really well capitalized. The business kept doubling. And we had enough money just to keep going. And obviously we raised a flat round in 2022 because at a time we were burning close to $200 million a year and we weren't really sure how long we're going to last. But we went profitable in 23. And I just realized that we can just keep growing the business. We keep and then even in 22-23, we keep doubling the business. And we keep doubling the business while our headcount is not growing. So we never did a layoff. And we able to continue to grow the business more than 100%. So we basically never grow below 100%.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we raised $400 million in 2021. The valuation went from $1.7 to $5.5. Like every month, I'm raising money, basically. Then you raise like three rounds. And end of 2021, South Bank was talking to me about leading an $8 billion round. And obviously we didn't entertain that conversation.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the business still is doubling every year from the existing product. And then 2021 happened. And I just got investor knock on the door every single day, right? So Grand Oaks led around in January 2021 for 2.6 billion. The loan pilot around in June, July at $4 billion.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then Kobe happened, right? So that we lost half our revenue and we were really figuring out what to do. At that time, we start getting product market fit on S&B banking product. You know, we built the infrastructure. We started to issuing corporate card. We start getting the merchant acquiring thing kind of build it out, but ultimately launching 2021. The foundation of a global bank started to evolve. I was the first three, four years of just basically building the best money moving infrastructure in the world to build the next generation of a global bank, build the future of a global banking. And that obviously took a lot of money. A lot of got to bet on this new part that only start generating revenue from 2022. So from 2019, 2020-21, there's no revenue for all this new product, only from 2022, they start generating revenue.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strap acquisition at that time, we were only $2 million in 2018. So we went $10 million in 2019. Five times the revenue in 2019, so 10 million, then 2020, we had 20 million. That we win more than doubled again.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, 2020, obviously during COVID, our revenue went halved. That's why I wasn't sure whether it's going to close. Because like half of our revenue is from tuition and travel, right? And all this tuition”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, he's been investing the company from 2019 for like five, six rounds after that. He just keep doubling down. So I think we're probably one of the largest investment of Hidosophia in terms of dollar amount.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they're a little bit more public now. But yeah, I think Ian sitting on my board and he's one of the largest investor and not many people know about it.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He is. I mean, Hedo Sophie is a very secretive phone, and we wouldn't allow to put a PR using the Hedo Sophia name. So you would see a bunch of investors led a series D, but Hedosophia was not named. I think they changed the policy now.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 1.7. This is like the round after the convertible. So, the older people that invest in the convertible get converted to the 1.7 billion dollar round.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew it was really, really bad because I have employees in China and Rises like a shutdown, the whole city and all this crazy stuff. I even wrote a text message to the prime minister of Australia to shut the border from China. I remember the week we actually closing the series D, the US stock market tanked more than 10% three times. This is the first time ever happened in the US history. So the market went down 30%. I quote NeoShane and I was like, do you think Ian gonna close? And would you close if you are in this situation? And Neil told me he's really not sure. He's like, no one would know in this situation. It's like never happened before. I wasn't sure and nobody was sure to the credit of Ian. I mean, Ian closed.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, I would have convinced existing investor to give me a lifeline, a convertible notes. So DST and Tencent led the convertible nodes. So we raised essentially, I think $70 to $100 million, like kind of a convertible. But the idea is that we're able to raise another round straight after that. And I need to find an alternative to SoftBank and Hedo Sofia is the answer. So Ian from Hedo that led our CRSD to kind of get us going. But the funny thing is that COVID happened in 2020. When we signed the SPA, you know, because we have a business in China, we know that the virus is taking off. And this is like February 2020. And we were literally going through this due diligence stuff. And everyone sort of, the investors are asking me, what is this COVID thing? I didn't know how to answer the question because I was like, this is going to be really, really bad. And I can't say that.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I fly all the way to Landon in October 2019, and Saltbank is going to lead around. And this we work stuff happened. And they stopped investing and they did all the work, but the partner gonna invest in us got fired. And I literally in a situation we're going to kind of die again if I'm not able to raise money.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a part of an engineer. I really have no idea how to build a commercial organization. And all we did is setting to large enterprises, right? But we have a lot of VC network and APAC. And when I come to UK, I don't have the VC network. I don't really know how to sell to large enterprises. I don't have any VC network here. I know why open a door for me and we just couldn't really sell the product. That the vision really evolved from a single product company to a multi-part company. But that evolved took three and a half years to get the initial product market fit. Just during that three and a half years, we are too aggressive in international expansion while we don't have a good product.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also didn't have the product. I think we just tired too early, and also we don't really know what sort of people to hire. It's kind of a combination of both”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I didn't cut. I basically keep going because we had the infrastructure here, we needed people to manage the infrastructure and we keep trying. And a lot of the people I hired, like my friends”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we're not hiring fast enough. We're not building product enough. We don't have a real product in the UK, but we hired a bunch of teams here.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we kind of did two things we went all into international expansion. So we started opening offices in the UK, in the US, and like everywhere. And that kind of to be a disaster because we kind of didn't have product market fit in any of these places. And then that international expansion basically just failed.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of realize once we sort of reject a strap offer, and ultimately we're going to compete, it kind of scares me that if I don't invest fast enough, ultimately, you know, we just don't have a role to play”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like more than half the money you raise onto the product that you're not going to have any revenue for the next three or four years”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we went from like, I think 100 something people to like 600 700 people like in a year. And then I realized our volume grow, but our revenue didn't grow as fast. We kind of really need to raise another round, and we also the vision kind of started evolved after CRC after rejecting Stripe offer. I'm like, okay, we're going to compete in long term. And, you know, I mean, obviously Stripe is a payment lab business. We are banking lab business. But at that time, we're not a banking business yet, right? We're just like a global money movement infrastructure. We were like, okay, we need to become a true global new bank. And then we need to build our card issuing infrastructure so we can issue corporate card. We need to build merchant acquiring infrastructure so we can handle the payment side of the money flow as well. So we basically need to evolve from a single product company to a multi-product company, an end-to-end platform with infrastructure and software to supporting global businesses. I basically put most of the money out of the 100 million to build this new product and not investing in existing product. And that is the biggest bet I made. Essentially, you've invested”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I didn't understand what that means at the time. I don't know what is financial discipline. So I don't have a budget. I'm just like higher as fast as possible, blow it all out. And I realized at one point that we're running out of money. Like I was like”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's really, I went back to Melbourne and changed my mind. I was like, I don't think I want to be doing another style at 138. I think I'm going to give it a shot on this one and put all my life into it. And that's it. So one thing that really inspired me from talking and spending time with Patrick is that I said, oh, you know, like, what's a long-term thing for Stripe? I'm all for yourself. Are you going to be here forever or blah, blah, blah? And then Patrick just like said to me that he's going to build Stripe for the next 20, 30, 40 years. And I've just never heard like a founder tell me people would dedicate their entire life to building a business. That was so inspiring to me. That's what I want to do, you know, it'll build a real economic infrastructure that changed the world.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means, I don't think she's that great anyway, so it's kind of fine, but just she has so much preparatory knowledge of our network. And we were worried about she's going to give away to Stripe. That's a long story”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the whole story. Yeah, I mean, we all kind of try to hire her afterwards, and I kind of sued her. And he sued me, she sued me. That was a whole complicated story.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were like, we couldn't decide. And we asked our senior leadership team to vote. Surprisingly, only one people wanted to sell. Like literally like 90% of people said, you know, they think we can build a bigger business.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in, I kind of grew up in Australia. I didn't live in a very luxury lifestyle, right? So I didn't need any money. There's no even like hot in the shops, right? Billionaire isn't anyone that goes to go to the same supermarket. So it's a very sort of socialized society. And I think with like 200 grand, you can leave a pretty good life. And I didn't know what to do with the money anyway. And that's not what I actually thought about at the time. And I really thought about is what going to make me happy. And I went back to Melbourne asked my co-vonors, like, let's just vote, right? Because I really can't figure it out. You know, Lucy is like, I don't really care because my family is, you know, it's wealthy and I don't need more money. I really enjoy it. I think we should keep building. My CTO, Jacob, is like, you know, really up to you, Jack. I mean, this is your mission, your vision. And we all here to help you. And then ultimately it's your call. And Max is like, you know, I think I'm okay to sell. I mean, like, that's a lot of money.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I know Strav is going to get to 100 billion, I mean, I will probably make like at least $3 billion. You know, at that time, Strive was going to raise the $20 billion round. We know that we probably can raise another round and at a billion. It wasn't really a valuation. It was like financial was not really what I've been thinking about.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He invited us to San Francisco, and we had a great conversation. I kind of at that time, I'm kind of almost get convinced, and he sent his whole team to Melbourne. They did like a whole week of due diligence with all the senior people from Stripe. I met with Claire, the CEO at the time. And I met with the whole team. I was really impressed. And I kind of basically said, I think we're going to do it. But, you know, like it just kind of, you know, are you really going to do it on the back of your mind? And I fly back to Melbourne and I was walking in San Francisco two weeks and try to figure it out. I couldn't figure it out. I mean, I was like 70% wanted to do it. But it's worse thing I had is like, are you going to do it? Are you going to do it? I ultimately be like, okay, so if I sold the business, I was, I think 34 at a time, 33 at a time. And it's going to five year lockup, right? So I'll be closer to 40 when I finish the lockup.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So essentially, it's a complicated dual construct. Essentially, it's $800 million on the cap table and $350 million to me and my co-founders. And I think it's a $50 million, I think $25 million to the co-employees close to $1.2, $175 or something.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's not that Google Doc that make me think that he's smart. He just like so intellectually honest about everything. And also he's able to go deep in multiple dimensions. He read about China history. You know, he knows China history more than me and he knows about quantum physics. He knows biology. All this feel that I have never gone into. And he's able to talk about it for hours. And I'm just like, how can one person able to go deep in multiple dimensions? You know, if you talk about fintech, I think I'm as good as these guys, right? But if you're just talking about like biology or quantum physics or China history, I mean, like I'm a Chinese, I feel ashamed that he knows more China history than me. And just like, how can you read so many books and just understanding so much? It's like before AI, you know.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, you know, let's just spend more time together. So he started this whole documentation on Google Sheet and just 10, 20 pages long and asked me to make comments. So I make comment and we just worked out. I was like, wow, the vision of the company in the next decade is kind of very much the same. We all wanted to build AWS for financial services. And obviously Stripe is much, much ahead of us. But this is before COVID. I mean, Strive is like a $9 billion company. It's very similar to the scale of Air Wallace today. And I kind of really liked Patrick and it's like, this guy is so smart. It's like much smarter than me.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to buy you, and you literally just like one year in the business. I mean, obviously, we started for more than three and a half years at a time, but the real product market fit only been like 10 months, you know, like you really started even getting product market fit.”
2025-05-27 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source