The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:40:39 · Jack Zhang
[00:40:39] S1: I have a bunch of friends that are like super successful. Know Eric from Brax really well. And he and his co founder Pedro just very complement each other. And Eric is only like 28. Right? I very rarely sort of meet somebody like every time we catch up, I learn something from him. This is probably the the most optimistic person I know in the world. He always think everything just gonna work out ultimately. Right? So... And you always, he's always open about sharing his his lessons and failures and the success he had, and always wanted his friends to be successful and helping his friends and just very, very inspiring. And to hang out with somebody that always willing to share. Very close with the founder of MessageBird. Now they just rebranded to Bird. And they build the entire sort of network of carriers around the world to challenging Twilio, to providing the best communication infrastructure to help businesses to sending text SMS and WhatsApp or other omni channels. But now they're building application layer, a marketing platform, a CRM platform to help modern business to acquire customers, engage customers and then convert customer with payments. So they build the entire payment infrastructure on top of Airwallets. It's almost like he's reinventing his businesses from a purity of infrastructure business to application plus infrastructure business, and then challenging the clavails of the attempt of the world. It's very, very impressive founder. And the one thing I really like about him is like told me one thing I really changed my perspective life. He told me, dude, money is fluid, but time is not.
00:42:24 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:42:24] S0: So [00:42:26] S1: that you should really spend your time on things going to evolve your life experience. And that's where you should spending your time and effort on. Just enrich yourself, enrich your experiences and then spending, and I also learn a lot to spending time with people that I feel I can learn from. Also one thing I kind of figured this out myself is like, think about the amount of people you can spend a significant amount of time in your life. How many you can spend this amount of time with? I don't know, 20, 30 people, Right? Mean, you divide it by 50 weeks a year, like it can't be more than 50 people. Right? Because I'm talking about like people you're spending time every year with. And I just wanted to build relationship that can have an endurable sort of relationship. It just that you want to spending time and effort on somebody that you feel that you can have a lifelong relationship that can kind of, that you can keep learning from each other and rather than just spend like useless time on something.
00:43:33 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:43:33] S0: Yeah. That's so interesting. And then let's talk a bit about venture capital and some of the areas of venture capital that maybe aren't spoken about. I think one is you've actually, I think, tweeted about this years ago, and I see this all the time where there's this disconnect between founders and investors. Founders think they know more, investors think they know more. You've raised a lot of money from very credible investors in Australia, Asia Pacific, US. What do you think is broken about the relationship between founders and investors that if you had a chance, you would wanna fix? [00:44:06] S1: I don't know that there's a broken relationship. I have great relationship with my investors. I think you you you have... You start with engaging investors with your with your passion and honesty, what you actually wanted to build. Right? I think that I can't think of a investor like I have like a really bad relationship with. If you think about Paul from SquarePack and I, he inspired me to be entrepreneur. Right? And we talk about challenges and businesses and problems and personal life all the time. And that has been a great relationship. I don't have anything broken I can I can talk about? [00:44:45] S0: Yeah. No. Fair enough. I realized that was a hard question. Maybe an aspect that you would have a view on that's unique is what's the biggest difference between Australian and US VCs in your experience? [00:44:59] S1: Like do they [00:44:59] S0: ask different questions or they focus on different metrics?
00:44:59 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:44:59] S0: ask different questions or they focus on different metrics? [00:45:04] S1: I didn't interact with Australian VC that much apart from Paul from Scrap Pack. I had one call with Airtree when it was early on and they didn't understand what I was talking about. Yeah. This is like a a pointless conversation. Yeah. And I I I messaged the Blackbird guys and never got a response to have a conversation. Right? They they... They're not interested in having a conversation. So that's all my interaction with with Australia VCs. [00:45:31] S0: Yeah. Fair enough. Okay. And then we saw an announcement yesterday, you've announced a new partnership with McLaren f one. Congratulations. I'm a big Formula one fan, and I'm sure a lot of people are gonna ask you for tickets now, so get ready for those ticket requests. How does a partnership like that come about? Like, I'm sure there's a lot of people involved, but just give me the summary. Is that an internal strategy at Airwallet? Or did they approach you? How did that happen?
00:45:58 · Jack Zhang
[00:45:58] S1: I think as any company gets scale, one of the biggest challenge is how do you make your go to market as efficient as possible? And it all come down to brand and brand building. It's come down to the company's brand, the founder's brand, and the employer brand as well. And as a key sort of phase of Airwallex in the next decade, that if you wanted to be a bigger company than the lack of HSBC and Citibank, if we wanted to be the platform to allow modern businesses to operate and then grow globally, we need to have a much, much bigger brand and a trusted brand by millions of businesses around the world. I think partner with McLaren will help us accelerate in that journey. We align from a core sort of philosophy point of view that engineering for excellence and the core of Air Wallace is we really engineering product driven company that obsessed with our customers, obsessed with operating speed, the efficiency, the craftsmanship, and just the mentality of never settle, just keep improving ourselves to go faster and to win. And then just from a culture point of view, there's a massive alignment between the two organizations. They have like 10s of millions of followers around the world. And as a lot of people see the show of Strive four Survive, and that really expanded the impact of F1 beyond just racing. And we, a company that's scaling globally, we would love to be associated with McLaren build the next phase of Airwallis. And they're also using Airwallis product to operating that internal financing, right? So they start using Airwallis to making vendor payments or promoting that treasury management, using Airwallis infrastructure. We're powering the new merchandise platform they are building on payments, credit card processing. So that's all like really exciting initiative to see like the brand that we sponsor to become a customer and then just adopting more than financial technology to operating FRM team because they travel around the world, they're paying people around the world, they're paying vendors around the world. Is what Airwall is doing, right? It's empower this global businesses to operating with much better technology and efficiency. So we're super excited for that sponsorship. And also the driver Oscar is from Melbourne and, you know, love to sponsor a fellow Aussie driver and help them to build in their career in the world stage.
00:48:33 · Vidit Agarwal, Jack Zhang
[00:48:33] S0: Yeah. No. Congrats. And are you a f one fan? Do you watch it? [00:48:37] S1: I only become a f one fan after the Netflix series. [00:48:40] S0: Oh, cool. Cool. Because they've got three races in The US now. Right? I think they got Vegas, Miami, and Austin. So I'm sure you'll get a chance to go next year or this year. This year when they start. [00:48:50] S1: Yeah. Well, Grand Prix in Melbourne is coming up in a few months. I already got a lot of ping for tickets. So I'm sure that you will see a lot of startup founders in Australia coming to our events. [00:49:00] S0: Yeah. They're very cool. And then maybe two other quick topics before we go to final sprint and finish is one of the partnerships you did was with the University of Melbourne for supporting international students, and you talked about your own experiences as an international student. Maybe just give us a quick summary of what is that partnership and how's it going?