The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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?
00:16:47 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[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? [00:17:10] S1: I think in '20 sort of '12, 2013, I remember AFC was a big thing that you can tap on the phone and make a payment. And I was very interested in it. I think about 2013, was talking to my co founder Max to start something very similar to Square using AFC technology and just see the trend of mobile payments taking off. And we did a prototype and I pitched my CTO, Jacob at the time he's running another startup. And he basically disagreed with me completely on the idea. He was in China, he sold QR code taking over the world. And he's like, what are you talking about? What is NFC? I mean, this thing is like last generation stuff. QR going to take over the world. Then I'm not interested in this idea. Arguably speaking that if we continue to build that startup, we'll a much bigger company today because that's like three to about three years earlier than Airwallex founded.
00:17:10 · Jack Zhang, Vidit Agarwal
[00:17:10] S1: I think in '20 sort of '12, 2013, I remember AFC was a big thing that you can tap on the phone and make a payment. And I was very interested in it. I think about 2013, was talking to my co founder Max to start something very similar to Square using AFC technology and just see the trend of mobile payments taking off. And we did a prototype and I pitched my CTO, Jacob at the time he's running another startup. And he basically disagreed with me completely on the idea. He was in China, he sold QR code taking over the world. And he's like, what are you talking about? What is NFC? I mean, this thing is like last generation stuff. QR going to take over the world. Then I'm not interested in this idea. Arguably speaking that if we continue to build that startup, we'll a much bigger company today because that's like three to about three years earlier than Airwallex founded. [00:18:10] S0: Yeah, right. So then what gave you the confidence to build Airwallex? Because as you spend a lot of time with founders, I spend a lot of time with founders, you need that conviction conviction and belief in yourself. What gave you that belief in yourself to go, let's try this?