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

“Took me a decade, right? I started when I was, I mean, if you count in the early days, I mean, more than a decade, right? You started washing dishes and petrol station and lemon factory, then you go from like there to import, exporting, you go from trading, you go from like architecture, real estate. in coffee shop. I mean, all that kind of lead to is a bigger idea that you feel passionate 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
“Because I need to really enjoy and passionate about what I do. And I'm not passion or enjoy any of these businesses I started. I always say that is like a business that makes money and I'm not interested. Obviously, I want a financial security, but making money not going to make you happy. I wanted to leveraging my engineering skill set to create real amplified impact at scale. And so I started like probably 10 plus businesses. And what I really concluded is I don't like any of them. I still wanted to pursuing what going to make me excited and passionate about. And that's kind of leading to the whole founding story of air walls.”
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
“Took off, and especially like you also saw the internet in China took off to the early 2000s, right? So the like of 10 and VCHAT and Alipay and Alibaba all took off. And you just leaving this time that a lot of the generational company get created.”
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 one of the guys running that for me was my co founder, Max Lee. He's the head of product design. He went and become architect and then started the real estate business with me, started a coffee shop with me, which we found the foreign exchange and international payments issue. That's led us to founding air wallets. But we had financial security at that time. And me and Max was basically just in a coffee shop and thinking about like we cannot doing this for the, you know, just make money for the rest of our life, right? And we wanted to creating real scale business leveraging technology. You know, I went to college when I see like Facebook took off. I don't know if you know we don't use Facebook when we were in college. We were like, MySpace, there's like hi friends, friends turbo was another thing. And we just see that shoot off, right? I mean, Google was not even a massive company back then. And we just saw the whole internet.”
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 actually pretty easy. You think about it, right? Literally just found a supplier, find a buyer, and you're not a producer, you're not, you don't need to do any marketing, it's just B2B, right? All you need to do is finding buyers and sellers. And at one stage, I was a reseller of phone cases. I found an Australian manufacturer, not manufacturer, it's more like a brand crater called Qualock. Essentially now it's a private equity owned the business actually went pretty big. And I work with those guys that are designers and I help them to sell phone cases and I was making decent amount of money. You know, I just have a lot of these side businesses that are making money at one stage, you know, come back to the financial insecurity. I probably made like more than 10 million dollars when I was 28, 29. And I had, you know, financial security. At that time, my real estate business is getting real scale, right? We started building like 40, 50 apartments, you know, 40.”
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 I basically exporting olive oil and wine of Australia to China and other countries. And I was importing textiles from China to Australia. And I had a business of a real estate development. I have a business of architecture and project management. And I have all these side businesses that, you know, to be frank, generating millions of income every year passively. Like, you know, obviously I work full-time. I work pretty hard in my job. And I work another six, seven, eight hours and I work all the weekends for my saw hustle, make $200,000 a year on my full-time job. And I make two, three, four, five million dollars a year on the other side hustle as kind of that business is getting more mature”
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 that you have different phases in life, right? So that's kind of why I started air wallets. You know, I basically after I graduated, I went to work at Viva, I work in a bunch of investment banks as developer slash algorithmic trader. And when I was doing those jobs and I really enjoyed writing code, but that's not enough to give me the financial security. So I was doing a lot of stuff on the side. importing exporting businesses for exporting olive oils and wine from Australia.”
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 really enjoy those jobs, right? So when I was working in the Lamo factory under the 40 degree song and carrying these boxes or washing dishes, I mean, I'm thinking about one day, you know, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to do a real proper job. I want to write a 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
“I think when you grew up that if you taste what success looks like early, whether spot or any type of mass competition or Olympic competition or any type of competition or any sort of team spots, the tough experience when I kind of lost financial support and when my family kind of lost most of money, that really toughened you up, right? You become quite resilient. And when you're working 100 hours a week at this age and had to go through that mental challenge of figuring your life out as such a young age, I think you become a lot more resilient. People ask, you know, I get burned out. I mean, I'm just, you know, working too hard and, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, what are you talking about? Do you know what is tough life looks like? In Australia, especially, you know, it's a very wealthy country in general. And there's less 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
“And because the school that we were in, the best schools, and we write really interesting stories, and that magazine just got viral because we kind of printed out of the school for free and we didn't have any costs and we have very limited print and everyone kind of won a copy of it. And I think over like a year and a half, we got like 8,000 merchants that putting ads on the magazine. And we actually made decent amount of money. And obviously we kind of donated to the school kind of a massive early success in my I would say when I grow up, you know, before I came to Australia.”
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 I started a magazine called Urban Exploration. Well, back in high school, I was like 13, 14, together with the student in the sort of student society. And everyone's obviously working for free. And we need to raise money for student funding. And I need to figure out how to do that. And we were essentially going to the restaurants and computer shops and stuff around the school to raise money. And they were like, oh, why don't you just send some flyer up just for two dollar per person and give you some money. But we kind of, nobody want to take flyers, you know, like who cares? So that we thought we might just rise something more interesting and put those ads for those restaurants in the essentially a magazine or a booklet we created. And then hopefully that people will be interested to take it, right? So, but because we write quite interesting stories like student love stories, how to play like Condo Strike.”
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 spend most of the time playing Dota and then competing against each other. And I was pretty suck at playing Dota, to be fair. And I was literally, you know, I spent most of my time working, little time in a university. I kind of just try to spend as much as I can, but I wasn't like the best student in my college compared to my high school, I was like the top top student of the school. Where university was just like an average student because I just didn't spend enough time to study.”
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 met one out of the three co founders when I got into University of Melbourne through the first year. So we went to basically the same faculty and we all started computer science. My CTO, Jacob, he's like one year older than me, but like 100 times smarter.”
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
“You know, like you go to petrol station and be like, oh, you know, do you want to just pay for five bucks for three chocolate and that type of stuff? That's 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
“Yeah, so I went to the University of Melbourne, and that's where I met with my three co-founders. And I also work different jobs throughout the college. And I was working in a restaurant as a dishwasher, in a Westing Hotel, as a bartender. I basically work between four to 11.30 and in a bar. And once that's finished,”
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 guess this situation that you don't have a choice. I left China where I was born and, you know, come to Australia. About that time, I already in Australia for over a year. I couldn't go back to China to do the exam to the universities because I wouldn't be that competitive anymore. I don't even know how to return to the education system by that time. And literally you have to figure out how to survive and how to pay for the tuitions, which is very expensive for international students. I remember 24,000 a year. And you have to figure out the living expenses. I have to do my part just really work as manager jobs as possible to figure out how to live on my own.”
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 actually pay okay. They pay like 14 bucks Aussie an hour. And because you kind of can work over the 20 hours limit during the holiday. And it's actually a pretty decent income, but it's just a really, really tough job.”
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, that's during the summer. I go basically take a few hours of train and buses to get on the mountain every day and to literally carrying lemon, you know, thousands of lemon boxes a day under 40 degrees and for 12 hours a day without even eating lunch.”
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 came to Australia when I was, I guess, 15 ish. And I went basically started high school and my family basically lost most of the money and I lost financial support when I was 16. And I had to basically figure out how to survive in a foreign country by myself. That's why I started working a restaurant, working in lemon factory. You would.”
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 know what is financial discipline. So I don't have a budget. I'm just higher as fast as possible, blow it all out. And I realized at one point that we're running out of money. Every month I'm raising money, basically. So we went from zero to a billion dollar transaction volume within like nine months. So we basically never grow below 100% from 2015 to 2023. We went to like $500 million AR in August last year, then hit like 600 in November and 700 in sort of January and Fab.”
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