The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:09:48 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:09:48] S0: And would you say by the time you... Because I think it was 2004 when you got into the University of Melbourne, were you more adjusted to Australia? Like, did you feel more like a local? [00:09:58] S1: Not really. I think because my lack of the English skill set, I think I had a generally a tougher time to make friends with locals. And it took a while for me to get used to the life there. And then because of that, I mean, I didn't do super well academically in the uni as well. And I also had to work so many jobs just to continue to support my study financially. Spent very little time in a college. Just spending like sixteen hours working and also work on the weekends very hard to do that while I'm studying. [00:10:33] S0: Yeah. So what was your first job when you graduated from that degree? What did you, what was your first full time job? Is that job at Aviva, is that right? Yeah. So that was in London, right? Or did you work in Melbourne first? [00:10:45] S1: I work in Melbourne and I basically in a graduate programme that I'm able to like work in different part of the company. [00:10:54] S0: Yeah, because I did hear from a lot of people that I think between the age of 20 and 30, you started like 10 businesses, is that right?
00:10:54 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:10:54] S0: Yeah, because I did hear from a lot of people that I think between the age of 20 and 30, you started like 10 businesses, is that right? [00:11:02] S1: Sort of, mean, I started many businesses. Even I was in college, I was trading text iles, basically importing textiles from China, and then sell to retailers in Australia. I was exporting red wines and olive oils. And from Australia, I also have a real estate development company and managing projects and residential and commercial project. I started a burger shop. I started like a coffee, a specialty coffee place called Tuck and Co. And obviously we had a lot of issues of making payments from that business. That kind of inspired me to founded Airwallis. And this is all done on the side, apart from my full time job. So although I was making 10 times money outside of my full time job, because I always loved writing code and loved the engineering, especially in trading. I always keep my full time job, continue to write code and just do these side tussles and side projects with my friends. Generally, I'm able to convince a friend to do a full time. So I'm able to managing all this while I have a full time job. [00:12:07] S0: And did you tell your parents that you were doing all these side businesses or you just told them you had a full time job?
00:12:07 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:12:07] S0: And did you tell your parents that you were doing all these side businesses or you just told them you had a full time job? [00:12:12] S1: I think they sort of know I'm doing a lot of stuff, but they didn't know like the relevance of like how important it is or how significant it is. We were making a few million dollar profit a year in all these side businesses. It was quite profitable. So I never really interested in promotion in my full time job in NAB and A and Z because I was making 10 times the income of my managing director. [00:12:40] S0: Wow. Because you were, I think you were in corporate jobs with Aviva, NAB and then ANZ for almost eighty years, right? Yeah. So when did you... I'm always curious about this because I think you see it a lot now with side hustles, right? Was you started these side hustles in the early 2000s or mid 2000s. When did you know that you could leave that full time job and go full time? Was that when Airwallex started or did you do that before Airwallex?
00:12:40 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:12:40] S0: Wow. Because you were, I think you were in corporate jobs with Aviva, NAB and then ANZ for almost eighty years, right? Yeah. So when did you... I'm always curious about this because I think you see it a lot now with side hustles, right? Was you started these side hustles in the early 2000s or mid 2000s. When did you know that you could leave that full time job and go full time? Was that when Airwallex started or did you do that before Airwallex? [00:13:05] S1: Oguyen I had a sort of startup in between jobs in Hong Kong, but I wanted to build currency trading overlay currency overlay platform for mutual funds. That didn't go very well. That's, and I, after I failed that and I basically continued to build the real estate business, which is very profitable. And then the coffee business and the burger business was sort of after that as well. And then because we basically look at Telstra Fast 50 at a time, and we saw over a third of the company on the list is retail franchise businesses like juice bar or like different burger chains and coffee chains. And then we also saw a trend in sort of 20 of all the younger population in Asia potentially going to adopt to the coffee culture as a lot of them are Western educated. And we are actually exactly right on the prediction, but because we found the the Airwallis opportunity during that coffee startup, we just didn't pursuing that further. But we were going to basically do it, try to build a big franchise business of the specialty coffee that we founded in Melbourne.
00:14:15 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:14:15] S0: Back to the episode in a moment. Let's talk about some of the most intimidating acronyms in business. ISO 27,001 SOC two essential eight. They sound like an alphabet soup, don't they? Trust me, I've been there. Vanta is like your business's compliance superpower. They automate the messy mind numbing parts of security monitoring, compliance tracking and audit preparation. All of you as listeners of this podcast get a special offer. All you have to do is go to vanta.com/hi. That's vanta.com/hi. High. Or reach out to me via my email in the show notes and that link banter.com/hi is also in the show notes. Now back to the episode. Interesting. Interesting. I don't think you would have got VC money for a coffee business. They wouldn't have Well, paid I mean, [00:15:27] S1: but if you look at Manor or Luckin Coffee, they all like multibillion dollar businesses. Yeah. So and we actually saw the trend much earlier than they saw it. So I would argue that the valuation, that coffee business could potentially be as good as Airwallet's. [00:15:44] S0: Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Then you probably have more equity, right? You probably have more equity in your coffee business. [00:15:48] S1: I'm pretty sure I will get venture capital on that. And then all this coffee retail businesses are actually also venture backed. I think the venture landscape in Asia or in China specifically is very different to Australia. So you can't really use the, what you see in Australia, what venture are investing to kind of think about what's the overseas market look like.
00:15:48 · Jack Zhang, Vidit Agarwal
[00:15:48] S1: I'm pretty sure I will get venture capital on that. And then all this coffee retail businesses are actually also venture backed. I think the venture landscape in Asia or in China specifically is very different to Australia. So you can't really use the, what you see in Australia, what venture are investing to kind of think about what's the overseas market look like. [00:16:09] S0: Yeah. So you mean there's more different types of investments overseas, right? Because Australia has been... [00:16:13] S1: Yeah, like the consumer is massive, right? Just looking at the amount of tea startup in China, right? So there's tens of billions of money put into that startup and each of them are all multibillion dollar business and very profitable, right? Across South Asia, across China, PT is over $10,000,000,000 right? So they continue to expand and a bunch of these examples in China, South Asia. [00:16:36] S0: Mhmm. Mhmm. I I wanna come back to venture capital in a second because we'll talk about that with Airwallex. But let's go to 2014. I think you started Airwallex in December 2015. Right? [00:16:46] S1: Correct. [00:16:47] S0: So if you go to 2014, tell me about what were you seeing in the world at that point? Because I think now fintech and payments is such a big category. But back then, as you said with the coffee shop, I believe you were trying to do FX fees and it was really high. But tell me in 2014 and early twenty fifteen, what were you seeing in the world? What were you reading? What sort of stuff interested you?