00:15:34 · Joubin Mirzadegan
[00:15:34] S1: Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So you're in Australia. If you're working at, you know, gas stations and computer stores, but you had already started a company when you were 14, company, whatever, a magazine that had made a bunch of money. Yeah. A bunch of money, some money. Why don't you try that path again instead of doing it this way? I was zero capital. Right? I was barely surviving. I think, you know,
00:16:00 · Jack Zhang, Joubin Mirzadegan
[00:16:00] S0: I was also, like, initially working on the lemon farm and then, you know, picking up lemons for twelve hours a day, and and, you know, the trend in and out took three and four hours. So you... When you're at a surviving mode, it's very hard. Right? That you you basically... You need to pay for the tuition, and you need to pay for your living expenses. You just have no bandwidth to think about what you can do. And even you wanna do it, you just have no capital to it. And and, you know, my my English wasn't wasn't great either at that time, and I was barely speak English. And also, like, I lost a lot of confidence as well. Right? Imagine that you you wealthy and you you academically one of the best in in the city, and and all of sudden, you kinda become this, like, in a foreign country, you don't speak the language very well. You know, people look down on you, and and you're just awkward. Right? And I also just feel... Wanted to hide somewhere and just just work and then go through this, you know, like, worst period of my life. And then, hopefully, by the time I graduate, I can find a job. I'm... I never thought about dropout, start a company, raise VC money as a thing. [00:17:12] S1: Right? There's no venture capital in Australia back then. Right? There's there's Still not much now.
00:17:12 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Jack Zhang
[00:17:12] S1: Right? There's no venture capital in Australia back then. Right? There's there's Still not much now. [00:17:17] S0: No. Yeah. I mean, like, we're the... Probably the the only unicorn in Melbourne, and it is... There's not many tech company at all. When I started the company, you know you know, if you start a company in Silicon Valley, you raise venture capital, you got a lot of founders surrounding you to give you tips, and the VC tell you, you know, certain things and how to recruit people, help you to close candidate. I've got none of that. And I made every single mistake the founder shouldn't make, which is... I've got no one to ask opinions and to get help. It it is a very different environment. It's very hard to imagine what I can do in in Silicon Valley, you know, versus... You know, like, it... It's just not a thing. The mentality was just not there. So did you drop out? No. I I finished my my degree. [00:18:07] S1: And you you you paid for your tuition through this work? [00:18:10] S0: Yeah. Finished. Yeah. Then what? Then I interned at Goldman. I... Then financial crisis happened in [00:18:19] S1: Where'd you in... Where? Where?
00:18:19 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Jack Zhang
[00:18:19] S1: Where'd you in... Where? Where? [00:18:20] S0: In Melbourne. In Melbourne. Okay. Yeah. And I went to work at a insurance company in Melbourne and London as sort of a software developerinvestment analyst in the sort of... Under like a portfolio management side of the insurance company. And, you know, this is like a crazy time, 2008, you know, and insurance company does a lot of weird stuff at that time, you know. They does a lot of investment and proprietary trading, and obviously, after GFC, they all shut it down, but, you know, at that time was was interesting technology. And, you know, I worked at a bunch of investment banks in Australia on the trading floor, routing algorithm trading or market making kind of algorithm to, you know, like, kinda as a career. And I was doing a lot of stuff on the side. I I started many small businesses in architecture, real estate, coffee, burger. [00:19:21] S1: Come on. What do you mean coffee and burger? [00:19:25] S0: Like, I had a burger shop at a a coffee shop, like a blue bottle. We we were actually gonna, you know, franchise in... You know, the aim is to build our largest coffee chain in the world. And, you know, but that's how Air Water store started. [00:19:36] S1: Mojal. Sorry. Continue.
00:19:36 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Jack Zhang
[00:19:36] S1: Mojal. Sorry. Continue. [00:19:38] S0: Yeah. We were. My my co founder's name is is Max Li. He was actually architect, and we started the architecture firm together. We started the real estate development company together. We started the burger store together. Then we look at the the Fast 50... We call Telstra Fast 50 in Australia. It's essentially showing the fast growing businesses in Australia. I was like, wow. Two third of those Fast 50 actually are retail businesses, you know, some sort of retail chain in the food and beverage sector. And I was like, we should we should do that. And, you know, Melbourne is very famous for coffee, and we were like, let's just take the Melbourne coffee to the rest of APAC. And and I convinced him to resign from his architect job to to start the the coffee chain. And his name is Max Lee, and the same name is on the OFAC blacklist. Every time on the OFAC blacklist. [00:20:35] S1: What is that?
00:20:35 · Jack Zhang
[00:20:35] S0: OFAC blacklist is like this blacklist by the... By OFAC, the regulator in The US. Right? So if you are a criminal, like, know, politically sanctioned person that you you end up on this list. Right? So... And the same name is on that list. Right? It's a different person. Then wherever he's sending money to Brazil, to Indonesia to buy coffee beans, because we roast our own bean to to scale. Right? And the money just disappeared for a couple weeks and then bounced back, and he come to complain to me, you know, what is going on with this global money movement system called SWIFT that built in the nineteen seventies? And I just look under the hood, like, how that works. Right? If you're sending money from, say, National Australia Bank to a small bank in Indonesia, it goes through... Maybe it goes to CBA, you know, one of the largest banks in Australia, goes through Citibank, or goes to DBS and go to bank in Indonesia, then go to, like... Then land at a smaller bank. So it's like three, four banks in the middle, and none of these banks have enough information about Max Li because the swift messages only have 140 characters, and it doesn't have date of birth, doesn't have address, and so that... There's a bunch of people in India or or Malaysia, like, you know, handling manual fax between the banks, and it's just a lot of middlemen. And I was like, why can't we just go direct to the the Indonesia central bank and from the payment system to Australia, go direct to the payment system in Indonesia, build a alternative network to SWIFT? I thought actually doable, and that's how Airwallis was born. And you wrote it? Yeah. Me, and I got my CTO join me. He's kind of a genius engineer. Max Lee has become my head of design, head of product design, and I got the guy that used to do trading together, also a hacker to be my last co founder. So four of us started the started the company.