The Fintech OG's from TWIF
00:10:17 路 Jack Zhang
[00:10:17] S1: I'm not sure I had that moment. I tried many things before Airwalls, actually. I I was an FX algorithmic trader and market making, building market making platforms and various investment banks and hedge funds before and on the side. I was doing a lot of side hustle. Started about a dozen businesses in real estate architecture, design, importing, exporting, trading, coffee businesses and burger chains and like olive oils and red meat, it's like anything you can think of that I olive oils. I haven't heard that story. Yeah, yeah, with exporting olive oil from Australia to South Asia and just like general Asia countries, and because there's a booming in demand and olive oil switching from peanut oil. So I made a lot of money doing that. But uh not none of those businesses, actually, everything is profitable than airwalls. It's funny. We only start getting profitable now after a decade of building it, but those businesses are profitable from day one and just not as interesting. It's not able to scale that much. And in 2012, while I was starting the coffee business, I actually wanted to start a business very similar to Square, building opponent sales and payment system. That's when AFC payment just started. And I was quite fascinating about that. And then I pitched the idea to my CTO and co-founder, and and he saw like a QR code coming out of China, and he's like, dude, I think QR is gonna take over the world is so easy. And I was debating between like AFC and QR, and then turned out to be neither neither of us are right. And QR did take over China and some of the Asian countries, and where the rest will become like this touchless, sort of this sort of carless AFC payments-dominated ecosystem. But if we have started, we might become a bigger company by by this time because we'll start the company three or four years earlier. I've been very just open-minded of exploring ideas where I do know I wanted to start something in technology because I was an engineer by trend and I always run code and I want to build a business that scale it into creating a lot of impact. I was when I was doing a coffee business, I was like, like even we have thousands of stores. If the coffee business gets shut down tomorrow, I'm not sure how many people are gonna miss that. I'm not sure people are gonna care about that much.
00:12:27 路 Jack Zhang
Yeah, you build great coffee, yeah, great coffee, but it doesn't really create that much of an impact to people's life. Because people just have many, many alternatives. Where if we build fundamental economic infrastructure in a world that powering millions of entrepreneurs and businesses to grow their business globally, beyond the border, to help them to operate efficiently, now especially with AI, to create an alternative finance function for them, to save them time and costs, and to give them true autonomous to focus on that, building their own mission globally, that to advance the economy, that that's something a lot more meaningful. That's something a lot more significant. And I feel I'm like at least kind of building something significant and important. I think similar to what life's building, life could talk about it, why he's doing it.
00:13:16 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg
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00:14:30 路 Leif Abraham
[00:14:30] S2: I generally speaking, I think I agree with Jack said in the sense of that I don't think it's a sense of like I have to be the one building that. I'm sure those founder stories exist. I would still argue that most founders at the end of the day are first off driven a little bit by ego, and the sense of that you want to prove yourself, you have a chip on your shoulder that you want to fix in some way, wherever that might be coming from. And and therefore I think the best founders have the ability to be successful in pretty much any industry. And I talk about Jackmart now, it's like on the oil or global payment infrastructure. It's like like two different sides of the same coin, right? And so I think it is very much I think very much driven by that most founders have a ship on their shoulder and they're looking to be successful in their own right. And maybe to prove something to themselves, maybe to prove something to I don't know, their dad. I don't know, tell me. But but I do think most of it is driven by that. And you could argue that's a little bit ego or whatever, but I think that's a powerful force that at the end of the day I think is creating a lot of motivation. And at the end of the day, I think I know a lot of founders who have never been in the industries that they're in now before they started their companies. And myself included, right? Not a finance person, not a fintech guy, was not deep in investing before I started public. And now I have deep discussions about market structures with people. And it's just because you go into it with a little bit of naivety in that moment, and that also helps you to be a little bit more first-principled thinking. And I think that also helps you to potentially be successful because you're asking questions that others might not who have been deep in that space before, and so on.
00:16:13 路 Jack Zhang, Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:16:13] S1: We actually love to recruit people who are not in banking and payments that we we don't think that's a bonus when we're interviewing people, you know, that whatever that experience you have might not be relevant, might award you from thinking first principle. [00:16:26] S0: Has that always been part of your ethos in hiring, or is that something that you realized? [00:16:32] S1: Just made too many mistakes hiring experienced people. I hired a bunch of people from Citibank when I started the business, and a bunch of senior people essentially come to tell me that how this business should be built. I remember we had a board meeting in Japan and the investors we had like this leadership offside in Japan. The whole leadership offside is a bunch of Citibank, ex-Citibank bankers telling me, I don't know, I have no idea how to build this payments business, and I should step down from the CEO. [00:17:01] S0: Wow. [00:17:03] S1: Obviously, that didn't go very well with these guys because they all get fired. [00:17:07] S0: I was gonna say, I I doubt they still work for Airwalls. Interesting. I went and do you think that's something that changes based on the stage of the company? Like it sounds like you did that a lot early on, where the company's smaller and hasn't been built out. Or do you think that's like continues throughout? I would I would just have a hard time thinking now, like the Citibank person at Airwall's scale, at airwalls success level, would still say something quite that harsh. Or do you am I wrong?
00:17:07 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Jack Zhang
[00:17:07] S0: I was gonna say, I I doubt they still work for Airwalls. Interesting. I went and do you think that's something that changes based on the stage of the company? Like it sounds like you did that a lot early on, where the company's smaller and hasn't been built out. Or do you think that's like continues throughout? I would I would just have a hard time thinking now, like the Citibank person at Airwall's scale, at airwalls success level, would still say something quite that harsh. Or do you am I wrong? [00:17:35] S1: I mean, I think because at that time we had a very little revenue in the business have not scaled early like 2018, right? Almost no revenue. I have no credibility to prove I'm right by any means. And they feel they have all the experiences and they can overpower me and then tell me how to build a business because they have seen scale and clearly I think they are wrong. And my approach is right because now I have I have enough credibility to prove the first principle thinking, the curiosity, the grids, the determination are far more important than the knowledge you have and the experience you have in building a startup.