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

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“We went through the product in the morning and we just talked the whole vision about the company in the future. At that time, we kind of thinking about going to build merchant acquiring essentially competing with Dripe because Stripe was not really an APAC at the time. And we already built the payout rails and FX. And the pay-in is just a natural evolution of connecting the end-to-end part of the platform because all of our customers that paying out to contractors, developers, suppliers, tuitions around the world that need pay in, right? They need process online payment and offline payments. And we kind of have to do that. And then Patrick basically said, oh, we're going to build payout because we have all these payins around the world and we need to do payout and we haven't built anything. Kind of makes sense we either sort of work together or maybe we should buy you guys. And I was like kind of weird, you know, like you have the best fintech company in the world that talk about potentially.”
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 all Gabriel, the CFO at the time, I think now he's CPO. He reached out through Sequoia. And he said, just want another have a conversation to see what you guys are up to. And obviously, like, I'm like a huge admirer of Stripe, right? So every fintech out there would be like, you know, Stripe is the golden standard of developer friend.”
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, before that, literally, I started taking off in January by April and Sequoia said, we want to lead another round. So basically at a $400 million pre, they invest $80 million, so a $480 million post. So they basically, but at that time, the business had no revenue still, like a very little revenue. But the volume is like doubling, tripling every month. And we had like all the big investors backing us, right? And we got the Sirius B at a ridiculous valuation, again, from the same investor, but we added a bunch of other investors. Imagine you from like a near death in sort of January 2018 to then in October 2018, Struck reached out to BIOS.”
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, this is like by end of 2018, we have a real business. We have not a lot, we have probably like 100 customers, but all kind of pretty big customers.”
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 call on you partner. I was like, let's fix out the legal contract later. Let's go live on Sunday night. So we basically start integration on Friday night, worked 48 hours straight, went live on Sunday night.”
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 remember one day Sheim basically needs to pay suppliers in China and they give us $20 million. And our partner in China was the supplier for Xi'an. And he's basically saying that volume got lost between two of their customers, right? So from Xi'an using them directly to using us and we're still using them under the hood, right? But obviously we do the effects and they just do the last mile payment because they have the license in China. We didn't. They were like, no, we're not going to do it. We're literally going to turn your reels off and we're going to keep shein. And so I basically have 48 hours to integrate with a new partner that able to pay into China. And otherwise, I'm going to fuck up my biggest customer. Oh, the only customer at that 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
“This is January 2018. We onboarded that customer. And January 2018, we also onboarded Xi in. So, you know, I wish I have investor Xi at the time, and they were like a serious big company. And I just really just have these two massive customers that I'm rotting on top of them go global.”
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
“They started off, and that we got like a few companies that sending tuition payment around the world. And they are massive, right? So we went from zero to a billion dollar transaction volume within like nine months.”
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 that we able to sell to other businesses other than Tencent and MasterCar, like a lot of tech companies basically. And they started.”
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 was the idol of any entrepreneur in Australia, right? So I basically admired him for a long time and Paul reached out, said, you know, we like to have a conversation. We really kind of had a great conversation. He liked the vision and mission of the company and he ended up leading a series extension, another $6 million essentially gave us the bracing room to really take off the 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
“Essentially, this is like the third year I'm starting the company like 2015 started. Like, I started a bit late, like December 2015. So 2016, the peer-to-peer algorithm failed. The invoicing also failed in 2017. And 2017, I raised the money from the my series A and started pivoting the product to an API-driven product to sell to large enterprises for kind of global money movement. And then Tencent and Marscross supposed to be the customer. And we built a product for a whole year, we end up not getting any customers. And we're running out of money again. Because we were very aggressive hiring. And so by end of 2017, we also running out of money. That's where SquarePack came in. So I started a business. One of the inspirations is because of the founder of SquarePack. And he also, one of the most famous entrepreneurs in Australia, he started one of the biggest tech companies in Australia called Sik.com Doi, which is like the largest job marketplace in the world at one point.”
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
“The 10 cent deal took me three years after that point. It's a big corporate, right? It's just takes a long time. The same thing from the VCAT pay department. They were like, why can't we build ourselves? So they end up build essentially what Airworth built themselves and only using us as one of the liquid providers. So that was really not the product we want to sell to them. And we just become like one of the vendors they have together with GP Morgan and other liquidity providers. And MasterCraft is supposed to give us a billion dollar volume from the Master SEN product, but we got less than a million dollar. And it's just so much high risk transaction at the time, we had to literally offboard that part of the 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
“Only nine years ago, I agree with you totally, but it's not 12. I bought out that investor in this round, by the way. I'm very happy 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
“Would say the second one because the first one was the VC that kind of supposed to invest together with Lucy, they didn't wire the money until like five months later after they signed the term sheet. So they were basically like, show me the demo, show me the demo before they wir the money. I mean, this is like 2015. So the market is a bit, I think, you know, it would be a bad thing for any visit to do that today.”
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, this is Series A, right? This is not seed round. This is Series A. Normally, people will have product market fit and have a zero revenue. So the idea was that Tencent going to give me revenue. And Masaka was also in the round, and Masaka was supposed to give me revenue as well. So Sequoia is like revenue conviction based on to the other investor, which is Tencent and Mascar, supposed to be the two biggest, largest customer for us.”
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 just like, oh, you know, it doesn't matter. And then he The deal. But he actually went to commence pony to invest. So we got the investment the day after that. And then obviously Sakoa and then Mastercard also came in. With”
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 got a 404 on the spot when I clicked the pay button. And my face just went like blue. And I dodged it. It was like, maybe the link was blocked by the Tencent Firewall. Maybe it is, maybe it is not. I mean, we never actually found it out because at that time the PSP we are using under the hood also had some bugs. You know, we didn't know if it's the error were caused by the underlying PSP was all caused by really the 10-cent firewall. We never 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
“And I remember we basically met with James Mitchell in Hong Kong in 5th of January 2017. And I told my team, you know, this would be the most important meeting of my life. And I test the part of everything until like 3 a.m. And I kind of told my CTO nothing can go wrong during the meeting. I went to pitch and it's so funny that James Ashley was at Goldman before and he did the RPO PayPal. And he remember a majority of the revenue of PayPal actually coming from cross-border payment. And he kind of didn't really need me to convince him that much and he kind of sort of convinced him this is like a large enough market and this is a good guy to kind of chasing the opportunity. And he's like, oh, why don't I just take a look at your product? I was like, yeah, let's do that. And I'm demoing the invoicing product, which I know is going to fail, not going to have product market failure, but it's a working product, right? It's a prototype leveraging the same infrastructure is the same.”
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 basically, that will just store the deal was stored, and Sequoia was not willing to invest until 10 cent kind of make a decision. And are basically running out of money. And the Tencent investment team was super helpful. They were like, you have one opportunity to pitch to either the present Martin Lao or James Mitchell, the chief strategy officer. These are the two people can convince the founder of Tencent to invest to kind of basically approve the deal. And I basically waited for almost three months to be able to have a time slot to meet with Jams and Martin.”
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
“Obviously, I pitched 10 cents at the same time and I told Sakoa 10 cent, I want to lead around and kind of play the kind of competition game. And Sequoia would be like, yeah, if 10 cents like co-leading around, we're in. But then like 10 cents did all the scene, everything past RC at one point, I was super happy this is going to be done. And the founder of Tencent said, you know, just go through like a normal corporate approval process and the founder of Tencent didn't approve. After three months process, RCO paused, you know, he just basically is like, because the idea is that this is going to help Tencent to do global VCAP settlement. And then pony in the founder was like, why can't we build ourselves internally? I mean, like 10 people startup can do a better job than us, you know? Like we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of engineers. And then the investment team didn't know what to say.”
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 pitched the vision. I pitched the vision of building the largest payment network in the world, alternative to Swift. And that fundamental infrastructure going to be so important and that's going to take years to build. That's why we don't have any 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
“So basically, I have a product that's working, right? I know it's not going to have product market fit, but I need more money to figure out what the product market fit is. And I basically went to pitch for Sequoia and Tencent. And one of the idea is actually to pivoted the product to an API product to service intens to kind of power VCAP global settlement. You know, when Chinese tourists come to London Airport, they will pay using VCHAT and someone will settle the merchants doing the FX on the back of that. And we were thinking we can do a lot better over the Swiss network and we can do a lot better than the 10th century department. And the idea is to maybe that's an opportunity to pivot and leveraging 10 cents volume to grow the business. And then knowing that the SME product probably going to fail because we only got like 100 customers by that time. And we were raising at $60 million valuation with no 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
“No, and I call the FAX engine, build it out, and I need a bunch of payment rails so I connect to a bunch of aggregators initially because I need the coverage and then I even connect to currency cloud who ultimately become a competitor later. Essentially, I connect to a bunch of competitors ultimately to get me the coverage of the network and I have the product going. But in terms of the customer we want to target to, we're initially targeting SMEs in Australia. We just never really figured out what the product is. We built like an invoicing product to allow SME to sell around the world to get paid through a payment link and then by kind of integrating with a bunch of payment service providers and we just never really get product market fit on that product. It's because the acquisition is too high of S&Bs and we never really got product market fit. At that point we kind of know when you raise more money, otherwise we're going to be dead. So we basically went to raise”
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 helpful. I'm like, dude, I will now, you know, Barclays is a great partner, but we only start working together when I have like $10 billion volume or something, you know? And Tom, the guy who took Maco, now is the head of distribution, Anna Macquarie.”
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
“Able to convince McCoy to build me a product that you can even trade $20 at a two basis point cost price. That co work. I remember even like after Series A, when we raised $13 million from Sequoia and Tencent and stuff and Mastercard, I went to pitch to Barclays as a friend I used to work together. I met him in Hong Kong and I sit in one side of the boardroom, which is like a five meter long table. He went to sit on the other side of the boardroom. And I was like, dude, what is happening? And I made a pitch. He's like, oh, you know, come to talk to me when you have like a billion volume”
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
“8 a.m. I remember then I collected a guy and who took like overnight shift in McCorry to cover the markets because FX is 24 by 24 by 5 and a half markets, right? Tom took the co-fm from a Cory. He's like a junior guy can only work on like a knife shift at a time. And he was about to finish work at eight. And he took my coal and somehow, I mean, I pitched him. He got him exotic. And he's willing to invest the whole team of engineers from a Coral Bank to connect me to the interbank market so that I'm able to get two basis points of liquidity from a cost point of view. So I can even build my FX engine by streaming prices. And, you know, first couple years of FX price was literally trading back to back to Macquarie. Because normally for the interbank liquidity, you can't trade sub half a million or million bucks, right? So that's how you kind of trade on the interbank.”
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 the money we raised from the first $3 million from Lucy the LOVC is really kind of drawing up that when we try to build this peer-to-peer algorithm, which is never going to work. And we kind of know that. And then we were like, oh, we need basically doing the hard way. We really need plug our FX engine to an interbank liquidity, you know, whether the Goldman or GP or like obviously Goldman and GP not going to take my course. And we kind of need to build getting licenses everywhere around the world, connect to the”
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
“It's a weird meeting. I mean, imagine you are seriously, you raise above a billion dollar, and all you really care about is how you grow up. It's kind of weird, right? And they give you literally a verbal term sheet on the spot. It's also kind of weird”
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, you know, I think I was Sequoia and sort of Tencent and MasterCar led on my series A. And Series C, we got like, because we just rejected acquisition offer from Stripe for close to $1.2 billion. And that was a big thing. And we got Termshi from Hill House, from Goldman, wanted to lead a billion dollar round. And the term was not the best. And Neil Shan from Sequoia, China at the time, and basically don't want me to take the deal because he's the one that recommended me not to take the stripe deal. He still said, you know, you should just make the right decision for yourself and for the company. And Neil Shen introduced me to two companies. He introduced me to John Lingford from DST and he introduced me to Scott from Tiger. You know, I had a chat with both and DSC end up leading around.”
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 crazy. So that's another crazy story. Basically, I basically first time Yuri and we talked, like I talked to the partner about the business, obviously, because that's Siri C and that street after I reject the Stripe acquisition offer. And Yuri basically didn't ask me anything about my personal, about my business. He just asked me a bunch of stuff how I grew up. And after that, they were like, we're going to invest at 1.1 billion, 100 million dollars. So I was like literally like within two hours, we grade the term. It's crazy.”
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
“Essentially, that's saved us from dying. So there's like three times that we almost died. And that's the second time that we almost run out of money. Square pack invested. But Blackbird and Etri was the two largest VC in Australia together with Squarepad did the three biggest VC. Yeah, but Eritrean Blackbird rejected us multiple times and they now joined they wrote the largest check at $6.2 billion ever in that history.”
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. So I didn't even get a meeting. I just got an email. So, funny, both These are rejecting me. Now he's on air wallet's cab table.”
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 was $10 million posts. So $2 million, $8 million pre. And I literally rejected all the other VC already by that time. And the only one I haven't rejected, Gobi VC from Hong Kong. And they end up, you know, putting a million dollar and plus other smaller VCs that putting the $2 million together.”
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, basically I went out to pitching the idea of building a new foreign exchange and money movement network. A lot of people think I'm crazy. And one of the VCs actually believed in and actually wanted to write a check and lead around. But I think one of the founders of the VC, that is Metrics Partners. And they give the term sheet they signed and they took aback. Yeah, so they basically said I had a call with the founder after they signed a term sheet and they were like, oh, I don't think this algorithm thing going to work. And that's not a defensibility anyway. And yeah, so they basically took it aback.”
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, so we raised another $2 million from a VC in Hong Kong because all the VCs kind of reject me in Australia. It was only $3 VC. It's so funny though.”
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 me and Max and Jacob three offs literally, you know, obviously kind of hard for Lucy, the girl to fit in. But three of us would literally, and Max, actually four of us, and we would just live in the office.”
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, like, and also early days, I also went all in, right? We just live in 10 square meter office. We sleep in the sleeping bag and we're just working there 20 hours a day running code.”
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 as a faith co founder, which is KLOG, and I used to work together, I basically kind of forced him to resign because he was like, got three kids a lot of obligation. And he's one of the best engineers I know. And we work together in National Australia Bank. And so basically, me, Max, and Lucy, we just went to the downstairs of the net building. It was like, we're not going to leave until you resign. So go resign. And she was stuck there for two hours talking to his manager, which is also my previous manager. And I was like, I know that you're going to get returned because you want the best engineers they ever had. But dude, we're not going to leave until you resign. Whatever that time is. So go fucking get resigned.”
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 she made a few other investments and then didn't turn out to be good afterwards. And I think she stopped investing.”
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, like, literally, I got the money three days over the weekend after the first time I met her. And that ended up probably one of the best investment people ever made. I mean, this is like a girl that, I don't know, 25 years old or 24 and never made any investment. It's her first investment”
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
“A company registered, then by Monday, I'm gonna met text message from my bank account, like you got a million US dollar wall to your personal bank account. Like, obviously, I'll give her the bank account, but I just didn't expect that she would just wire without anything signed.”
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 will go deep on this. I'm like, okay, so and I feel that shit is serious. So we went to the law school on, I remember Saturday. This is like the second day I met her. And she basically negotiated with me for three hours by 11 o'clock and we agreed that she's going to invest a million because I don't want her own 40% of the company. She's going to invest a million dollar, a five million dollar post for 20% of the company. And her husband was there strongly against it. And she's like, we're going to use this money to buy houses and we're going to have a family. What are you doing? She's like, I'm king. And I actually wanted to join these guys. And, you know, and she just pushed that through and we just end up agreed verbally that we're going to do the deal. The crazy thing is this is before even I resigned from my full-time job in A&Z. And this is before even.”
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
“Cross border payments and fundamentally changing how money moves around the world. And then she's allowed to tell me more about it. And because I was like, oh, I have a background in FX and I'm an engineer and my co-founder was a genius engineer. You know, I made a pitch. And she's like, how much money are you raising? I'm like, oh, I'm probably going to raise a million US. And she's like, what about if I give you two million? You know, this is a girl that you met for the first time in your life and you only talked for like less than an hour. And then she's like offering you two million dollars. I was like, for how much of the company was like, I'll give you $2 million for 40% of the company. You know, initially I was, my reaction was should I take it serious? But then she's, let's really kind of have a deeper conversation in law school tomorrow. So law school is the, you know, from University of Melbourne Streets because she also went to University of Melbourne. So for all four of us went to the same college. She's like, let's meet at like 8 o'clock tomorrow.”
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, this is another funny story. So, when I was doing the COVID business and I was thinking about starting air wallets at a time, and one day I just finished work on Friday, I went to the coffee shop to catch up with Max, you know, another co-founder of Air Wallix. And I said, I'm going to resign. Let's do this seriously. And I met a girl who is a friend of Max Colucy, who just resigned from as an investment banker and wanted to get married and have a family in Australia and just sort of hit it up with her. And, you know, she's kind of curious about the coffee business. She's like, oh, I want to talk to you more about coffee business and maybe I can invest in this coffee business. And then like we say, oh, let's just grab dinner, right? So we grab dinner and then she's like, and then, you know, blah, blah, coffee business. I was like, actually, you know what? I'm actually going to really stop keep investing in this coffee business. I'm going to start a new business that really revolution.”
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
“Initially, I thought, let's just do point to point, right? If you have like people want to sending money from Australia to Brazil and you have, you know, people from Brazil want to send into Australia and you can kind of just net it off, right? And that's the initial idea we raised over seed round. But when we actually build algorithm and we realize the amount of volume we needed to make that takeoff, it's like billions of billions, right? And we're just never going to work. I don't even know how to get 100 million volume. Where do I get the billions? And at the end of the day, we just, we raise the 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
“And I was just like, this just doesn't make any sense why this thing being existed for 50 years and processing trillion dollars every day. Why can't we fundamentally build a new system to help people to moving money, just like you're moving information like in data? If the data on the internet is real time, why money is not? Essentially it's data. It's a letter, right?”
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
“Middle because it's going through the Swift network and bounced back after two months. And he just keeps competing to me, you know, like why I'm sending a payment to Brazil and take two months for the payment to come back. And I really look under the hood as like, what is this swift thing that built in the 1970s? And how does Swift work, right? So if you send me money from, say, NetWest, you know, to a bank in Brazil, like a small bank in Brazil, that, you know, they're not going to have a bilateral relationship. Essentially, they go through the SWIFT network. There's a lot of intermediaries, the large global banks that have dominated that kind of relationship. So essentially NetWest will go to Barclays, Barclay go to city, city go to Itawu, and Ital will go to this smaller bank in Brazil. And it's like every...”
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 just started the AI business 10 years too early. And he's like, you know, I don't believe this whole AFC thing. He's like, QR going to take up the world. I wish we should build a QR thing. And I was like, nobody using QR. I never heard of this thing. I mean, this is like a very China thing. And I don't think so. And we kind of just debated and then we end off just agree on that idea. And then we let it go. I mean, that could be another billion dollar startup in 2013. And we'll just keep building the coffee business. And halfway through and we will launch the coffee business and we were essentially importing beans from Brazil from, you know, Indonesia and importing packages from China. And payment is a real issue. And my co-founder's name is Max Lee. The same name is on the OFAC blacklist. So wherever that he's sending a payment using his personal name, because at that time, we're still using personal name to sending money around the world. And his payment just got blocked somewhere in the...”
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
“Process the first problem we found is that there's no square equivalent in sort of 2013. The whole point of sales payments, order management in the back of the kitchen, the ordering system that deliveries, it's nothing was really set up. So I was like, I should start basically a square plus the whole kind of back end order management system. And I pitched the idea to my CTO, you know, Jacob, you know, like, and I was like, dude, let's do something together. I think this is a real opportunity. And that time also NFC, you know, the touch payment started sort of changing the consumer payment behavior. I was like, let's build something that can support NFC payments and let's go into build this point of sale system and payment system for offline merchants. And he's like, oh, no, no, like I think QR is going to take over the world. I mean, he at the time started a company in China and AI. And, 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
“I always knew I love technology. That's why I keep my code, I keep my job of writing code, even I'm making 10 times the money on the site. So I never resign. I never thought about resigning because I need to write code every day so I feel that one day when I actually want to start a business, I can still creating something. You know, when we run in the COVID business, the idea was not really running the covert business. The initial idea was that, okay, we need to basically, I would look at like, you know, in Australia there's a biggest teleco called Telstra. And Telstra publishing the fastest 50 growing company every year in Australia. And more than half those companies retail businesses, like BurgerChan or Coffee Chan or some sort of these retail chains. And I started like a burger chann and I started like a COVID chain. I mean, when I see Chen, it's only just really one business at a time and was supposed to become a chain. But during that setting,”
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