The Fintech OG's from TWIF
00:00:00 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:00:00] S0: Hey everyone, welcome back to the This Week in FinTech FinTech OG series. Today I'm joined by two incredible founders who have each redefined their corner of the financial world. We have Jack Zhang, who is the co-founder and CEO of Airwallocks, a global payments and banking platform powering over 150,000 businesses, as well as Life Abraham, co-founder and co-CEO of Public.com, the next gen investing platform helping the top 20% of millennials build long-term wealth. In this episode, we explore their journeys from coffee shops and olive oil to building billion-dollar fintechs, why they both value first principles thinking over traditional industry experience and their candid takes on hot topics like stable coins, AI and finance, and tokenized assets. They share their career highs, their career lows, and the unconventional advice they'd give to anyone starting in fintech today. Don't forget to like and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and let's dive in. Sweet. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me, you guys. I'm glad we can make this work. I want to start off. I obviously know who you guys are and more about your backgrounds. I'm excited to dive even deeper into all of that today. But for anyone that isn't familiar with you and your companies, can you give me like a quick 60-second-ish intro on you and the companies that you guys started? Jack, we'll start with you. Cool.
00:01:34 路 Jack Zhang, Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:01:34] S1: Thanks, Judy. And I started the company in 2015. Initially, I was running a coffee shopping for Founding Airwalls. And we've been paying suppliers and packages around the world and coffee beans from Indonesia, Brazil, and Africa. And we had a lot of issues in international payments and high fees and payments got lost in transmission and very slow transmitting time, et cetera. So that we look into it and then we try to understand how correspondent banking works and slash sweep then found a lot of issues in the sense that we wanted to basically solve this global payments issue instead of continue to building the coffee shop. So that's kind of how we how we started the business. And fast forward 10 years now we are a global payments and banking platform empowering about over 150,000 businesses globally, helped them to operate beyond that whole country, whether it's receiving the payments online or offline, or set up a bank account globally, moving money around the world, or between the entities, managing the expenses, transfer, vendors, procurement, bills, etc. etc. to become a super app for businesses in terms of money in and money out, and all the treasury in the middle. That's that's air walnuts. [00:02:54] S0: Amazing. I want to dive deeper into that in a second. But Life, give me a little bit more about you and your company.
00:02:54 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Leif Abraham
[00:02:54] S0: Amazing. I want to dive deeper into that in a second. But Life, give me a little bit more about you and your company. [00:03:01] S2: Yeah. So we started public about six or seven years ago. And if you look at the investment space, especially in the US, you can literally look at it as the incumbents essentially have super clunky experiences that most of us tend to end up hating. And then all the like new generation of investment managers that came out that were very heavily focused on speculation, right? Options trading, single crypto, CFDs in Europe, et cetera, et cetera. And so we saw this opening to really build select the next-gen schwab for this generation, for people that take investing a little bit seriously, and where you bring together this ability for people to really build their wealth over the long term with a vast amount of asset classes as well as all the tools they need in order to build a public portfolio for the long term. [00:03:44] S0: And remind me, what year was public started? [00:03:47] S2: 2019.
00:03:47 路 Leif Abraham, Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:03:47] S2: 2019. [00:03:49] S0: Okay. So at that point, Robinhood was taking off. I remember I think I, as a reporter, I think I first met with them probably like 2017 and then like 2018, 2019 is when they started to gain more traction. They definitely weren't what they are today. Obviously, 2020 and 2021 changed that drastically for both them and yourself in terms of client acquisition, business growth, et cetera. But talk to me a little bit about that. Since obviously when you were starting, the goal was to compete against places like Schwab. Is your goal to compete against someone like a Robin Hood 2 now that they're expanding to a different asset class where it's not just like the gambling type folks that they they had initially started out with? [00:04:31] S2: Yeah, our audience is a little bit more upmarket. Like we serve like the top 20% of millennials, you can think of it. That's like our core of a user. And so our users are a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit larger account balances and so on. And that kind of lends itself to a slightly more sophisticated product as well. I think where Robinhood goes a little bit more mainstream and a little bit more mass market, we're a little bit more focused on the top 20%. And so, like if you think of, for example, account transfers, we get the most transfers from like a Schwab or Fidelity.
00:04:31 路 Leif Abraham, Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:04:31] S2: Yeah, our audience is a little bit more upmarket. Like we serve like the top 20% of millennials, you can think of it. That's like our core of a user. And so our users are a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit larger account balances and so on. And that kind of lends itself to a slightly more sophisticated product as well. I think where Robinhood goes a little bit more mainstream and a little bit more mass market, we're a little bit more focused on the top 20%. And so, like if you think of, for example, account transfers, we get the most transfers from like a Schwab or Fidelity. [00:05:00] S0: Interesting. Okay. And then Jack, I wanna. So you start you were running a coffee shop before you started Airwallocks. And if my memory serves me correctly, you also have had acquisition offers before from large companies. Talk me through turning down an acquisition and like continuing to build this business and the time frame for when that was happening and stuff, too. Like, what were some of the things going through your head then? How did you evaluate that? I have so much more I want to learn about all of this because it just seems like, especially recently, MA's really been picking up in the fintech space.
00:05:39 路 Jack Zhang
[00:05:39] S1: Well, that that happened a while ago. I think end of 2018, that's when Strive offered to buy us at $1.2 billion. And uh very attractive offer because at that time we only did just over $2 million in revenue in 2018. And obviously the companies did more than 10 million in revenue in 2019, but either way, it's still a very small scale compared to to where we are today, and certainly a very attractive offer from a valuation point of view. But ultimately, we think that we had a very different approach coming to solving the problem in the market. That if you're thinking about the problem we're solving is that 20, 30 years ago, we think about global business that you really think about as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Nike, that type of businesses. But since the rise of the internet, mobile internet, cloud, now AI, so every third generation of this technology innovation creating this massive amount of businesses, like internet native, and the nature of this business also are globally native, right? So a mom and dad shop selling on Amazon, or they open a Shopify store or creator transacting on the working for bigger platform, and they all kind of global businesses from day one. They have revenues around the world, and they have suppliers and employees or vendors around the world, and they have expenses around the world. So that just the nature of the internet is borderless, and that just created generations of generations of modern businesses that are globally native. And and everyone just wanted to be the platform to service in these global businesses. And to do that well, you need both payments and banking. And when you look at acquisition offer, strive was really much of uh a kind of a money-in-app. Essentially, it's just really focused on online payments and growing the GDP with the internet. And then we have a quite different mission is to be the payments and banking platform uh to empower modern businesses to ultimately become to build in the future of global banking. And to do that, it's we need a different sort of mentality. We need to be regulated around the world. And and we need to not only build uh the money in app, we need to build the banking app and the the money out app as well. So that kind of gives us a very different perspective to the mission and and also just stand alone with the a hundred billion dollar plus opportunity in front of us.