The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:28:30 · Jack Zhang, Vidit Agarwal
So I think that the company just really evolved after we got series A funding and the vision got evolved from FX trading platform for SMEs to a global payments and money movement infrastructure company to help larger businesses to make payments in the world. And that is the third time we building the platform. And the first two customers are Mastercard and Tencent, right? So that it is, we went from like try to acquire SME to basically building API money moving infrastructure for large enterprises. That's and we were succeeded with that with the third time we're trying. [00:29:07] S0: I've got three topics on my notes. You tell me which one you want to talk about. So I've got, we can either focus on go to market, building a team, or raising venture capital. Which out of the three do you want to focus on? And I'll ask you a few questions. [00:29:22] S1: I mean, it's up to you. Whatever that you feel like the audience is interested in, I'm happy to talk [00:29:26] S0: about Okay. Maybe the team the team aspects I think interesting because as you've touched on before, you're only one person and you need a team. What were the key skills that you needed in the early, like first two, three years of Airwallex that you reflect back on now and you're really glad you hired those skill sets?
00:29:26 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:29:26] S0: about Okay. Maybe the team the team aspects I think interesting because as you've touched on before, you're only one person and you need a team. What were the key skills that you needed in the early, like first two, three years of Airwallex that you reflect back on now and you're really glad you hired those skill sets? [00:29:46] S1: I think because we pivot the business three times, right? Or twice. And then the third time we're building it, we evolved to a global payments platform for larger businesses, building API infrastructure. And clearly there are not enough larger businesses in Australia. That I basically had to relocate it to Hong Kong to start looking at working with these larger businesses in Asia, specifically like China internet companies going global. And I think that kind of require you hire a different caliber of people. And we were lucky, the bunch of people I hired in series A is still with Airwallet today. If you look at our GM in APAC and our sort of chief commercial officer in China and a bunch of early Airwallet people still with the company after eight years. And that's kind of half luck and then half it's just that I'll be able to convince those really good people to join me early on. And I'm not saying I haven't made mistakes. I made many mistakes of hiring the wrong people and you learn from those mistakes. How you [00:30:54] S0: know when you've brought the wrong person? When do you know that that person's wrong?
00:30:54 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:30:54] S0: know when you've brought the wrong person? When do you know that that person's wrong? [00:30:58] S1: Your intuition. I think you sort of know very quickly whether you hired the right or wrong person. I think a lot of the people having a challenge of to process information and make a decision on the back of that. And if you drag along that process for too long and that will kill the startup. I think all founders need to really trust the intuition on people and then making decisions early on so that they, you don't drag the company down. [00:31:26] S0: Do you still interview the senior leaders that come into Airwallex? Are you the final interview? [00:31:31] S1: Of course. [00:31:32] S0: What of questions do you ask? Like if I'm applying for a chief commercial officer job at Airwallex and I get interviewed with you, what are some questions you would ask me?
00:31:42 · Jack Zhang
[00:31:42] S1: I would ask you what is your motivation to join Airwallet? Right? Why do you want to join us? And that's really important to me. If you want to join Airwallet because you want to hire a payor or salary, then clearly, wouldn't like that. I think people need to really have a clear motivation, whether they want to grow their career, whether they want to make an impact, or they want to join a high growth company. We're operating in highly complicated environment. Mean, that's all valid reasons, right? So I think the second thing I really try to understand is that people have the intellectual curiosity and an ability to solving problem in a complicated world. And then you really kind of test that by asking, tell me like, what's your biggest achievement in the last sort of five to ten years? What you have, what's the most complicated problem you have solved? And they generally able to tell you something and then you just go ask the question on the back of that, right? Because it's go multiple layer down to try to drill down whether that person have real in-depth curiosity or they just sit on the servers, right? So I've interviewed somebody said, Oh, I mean, I'm interested in macroeconomics and I'm like, Okay, tell me about it. Which particular area of microeconomics you're interested in? It's like, okay, I'm interested in currency trading or how currency prices are fluctuated. I'm like, okay, tell me about more about it. What impacts on the currency price fluctuation? And then they keep me honest and I was like, okay, just tell me more about it. And then if you kind of able to have the ability to kind of just keep drilling down on question of another, another, and ask the why of the why of the why. And then you're able to very quickly figure out that person have doubts or not.
00:33:25 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:33:25] S0: Yeah, totally. I think another part of that that I love speaking to founders about is how someone evolves with the growth of the company. You talked earlier about hiring people at series A, and I think you're now at series E, right? That was your last round of series E. What have you noticed about people that are able to evolve with Airwallex? Because as you've said, a core part of a startup is quick growth. And I know a lot of people join a startup but then they can't keep up with its growth. What have you learned there about people management and I guess culture building as well? Like, I know you've got these operating principles that are on YouTube now. What is critical there in terms of making sure people can evolve with the company?
00:34:04 · Jack Zhang
[00:34:04] S1: I think people's personality is more important than than kind of intelligence in a startup, especially in a hyper growth phase. Because you feel rejection, you're facing denial, you're facing frustration in almost every day of your job. If you join a company that have a sales motion product market fit already, it's very easy to just do your job because you have all the infrastructure to follow the process and here you go, right? But when you are selling a product that not quite get product market fit, you need to talk to customers to get that feedback and facing constantly denial. And that is not what everybody likes to do. And you, you basically have to be very resilient and very curious about what you can do to fix those problems. It's, it's, it's more like a, a job of, of fixing problem or solving problem instead of just get a smooth sailing of what you do. Think, and also because the company have a different requirement and demand in different stage of the company, your skill set also evolve, right? And so you have to grow very quickly and adjusting yourself. Have to have a very low ego. You have to be less territorial and you have to be generally like curious and just wanted to improve yourself. Most of the people that we had to let go in the early days of wallet is because the ego and the territorial mindset is like, okay, this is my team. You can't, can, you see, you're going to tell anything that of working for me, you have to go through me, right? That's just a completely wrong mindset. And we will kind of the same. And then let's just work together to figure out how solve the problem. Forget about this is your team or his team or my team. And this is my people or your people. We all kind of work as a common vision. Let's just focus on the problem.