The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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?
00:18:10 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[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? [00:18:25] S1: I think a couple of things. Number one, I was financially independent, right? So I don't have to work and my business is very profitable. And I built quite a lot of businesses and every single one I succeeded, where I haven't failed anything apart from the software startup I try to do in Hong Kong. And then two is that, I think in 2015, my daughter was born, I was 30 years old and I look at her, I was like, Oh, I haven't done anything that make you proud. That kind of make me seriously think of like what my impact in sort of the society looks like and what going to be continue to invest my time on for the rest of my life. And I don't think I will have a future to make that such impact in the corporate world, and hence I decided to start Airwallex. [00:19:19] S0: I was listening to a few of your interviews on YouTube and in one of them you said that in those 10 businesses that you built, you didn't find something you're passionate about. But Airwallex was the first time you found something you're passionate about. I think a lot of people, particularly young people today go through that. I'm sure a lot of them speak to you and go, Jack, I want to find my passion. How did you know that was your life's work in a way?
00:19:19 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:19:19] S0: I was listening to a few of your interviews on YouTube and in one of them you said that in those 10 businesses that you built, you didn't find something you're passionate about. But Airwallex was the first time you found something you're passionate about. I think a lot of people, particularly young people today go through that. I'm sure a lot of them speak to you and go, Jack, I want to find my passion. How did you know that was your life's work in a way? [00:19:44] S1: I was passionate about technology. You did think about college days, right? I see the rise of, I don't know, people still remember like Friendster, like even before Facebook. I saw the rise of Google and Facebook and a bunch of these like a massive tech startups, and Tencent, Alibaba and all that. So it's a massive influence on my, so how I grew up and how I influenced by those massive technology success stories. And also I studied computer science engineering. So I'm always have a passion of writing code and have a passion of technology and how technology can influence the world. Also it's massively like scaled in a short period of time. And that's why I'm always stay full time and writing code, even that I'm making so much more money outside of my full time job. And that's what inspired me to start Airwallex.