Airwallex is the most insane story in startups.
Jack Zhang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Airwallex, one of the world’s fastest-growing global payments and financial infrastructure companies. Since founding the company in 2015, Jack has scaled Airwallex to over $100B in annual payment volume, $360M in run-rate gross profit, and a global team of 1,500+ employees. Under his leadership, Airwallex has raised over $900M from investors including Square Peg, Lone Pine, and Tencent.
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In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
00:00 Intro
01:03 From Lemon Factory and Petrol Station to Billionaire: The Early Days
11:39 $5M Side Hustle While Working Full-time: How Jack Did It
23:14 Failing Three Times Before Product-Market-Fit
30:22 The Term Sheet That Got Pulled and Lost Matrix $1BN
35:28 Why We Rejected Stripe’s $1.2BN Acquisition Offer
51:37 0-$1B Transaction Volume in 9 Months: How Shein Saved Airwallex
01:15:52 When COVID Hit, They Lost 50% of Revenue Overnight
01:19:03 We F****** Up Scaling Internationally… & Burnt $200M/year
01:23:14 Why Jack is Taking Out a Line of Debt for $70M
01:24:00 The Truth About Secondaries and How Much is “Enough”
01:28:00 The Hiring Mistakes that Almost Broke the Culture
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