00:43:45 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Jack Zhang
[00:43:45] S1: That's amazing. On FX desk. [00:43:47] S0: How long into the business was that? This was the first year. So after the p two p idea failed, and we basically cold called Macquarie Bank, tried to connect to interbank market and pivot the business to SMB invoicing type of business, so that you can send invoice and... Or bills to pay overseas, right, or getting paid. Mhmm. And targeting SMB didn't quite work because we're running out of money, and SMB acquisition is very costly, and we couldn't raise more money with that idea. And we pivoted pivoted again to API sort of business that allow larger businesses to move money around the world, and that is the the... Basically, third idea, and that succeeded. By end of by early twenty seventeen, we started on that building that API, and then we signed up two very large customers who... And also end up being... One of them being investor, which is Mastercard, And we also signed up Shein, which is one of the largest ecommerce company in the world now. And we're able to ride with these these customers. Well, Mastercard promised, like, a billion dollar, but end up delivered almost nothing, and that's a different story, but but, you know, we had some very large customers that took off in between 2017 and 2018. So the the business is growing over a 100 x in 2018 from a transaction volume point of view. [00:45:13] S1: Before that, when you were pivoting, was Lucy freaking out? She's like, what have I done?
00:45:13 · Joubin Mirzadegan, Jack Zhang
[00:45:13] S1: Before that, when you were pivoting, was Lucy freaking out? She's like, what have I done? [00:45:21] S0: No. He was... At that time, he was... She was a CFO. Right? She's leading finance, and, you know, we raise... You know, when we when we try to pivot... When we, you know, try to pivot to the to the API idea, we already raised from, you know, Sequoia and and Mastercard and a few other famous VCs. Yeah. And that is... You know, obviously, that the brand kinda helped. The VC's brand helped, and we're able to build a better team, and and then we have the money to pivot to this APR first business. That's how the business took off. And then within, like, two years, by end of twenty eighteen, we got a, you know, $1,200,000,000 offer from Stripe to BIOS. Right? So that is a pretty insane two years' time. [00:46:08] S1: Damn. How big was the company when that offer happened, people wise? [00:46:14] S0: I'd say a 160, 170 people. [00:46:17] S1: So you grew from five to a 170 in two years? Yep. It's fast. That's fast. Yeah. [00:46:24] S0: Half my engineers, and [00:46:28] S1: and we [00:46:28] S0: made a lot of mistake in recruitment. Like what? We hired a bunch of people from Citibank, from, you know, big banks and [00:46:36] S1: Fancy pedigrees. [00:46:37] S0: Yeah. And they told us, you know, this is how it's supposed to work, and and, you know, they've they've been building swift systems and, you know, what you're doing is wrong, and you need to do this and that. And, yeah, we we pay a lot of price for that. [00:46:53] S1: Like what? [00:46:55] S0: Like, I
00:46:55 · Jack Zhang, Joubin Mirzadegan
[00:46:55] S0: Like, I [00:46:56] S1: mean still got an offer, a pretty good offer, 1,200,000,000. [00:46:59] S0: Yeah. But that that that is probably considered the the team and the future of the company. At that time, in 2018, we only did $2,600,000 in revenue. But Forward, we probably did $10,000,000 in revenue. [00:47:11] S1: The next year. [00:47:12] S0: Yeah. So they paid, like, you know, more than... On the... You know, it's 800,000,000 on the cap table and 450 to me and my co founder. So... And it's 80 times forward revenue, which is, you know, better than most AI multiple right now. [00:47:30] S1: Obviously, you said no. Sorry. And I actually like ask you a personal question? Mhmm. Because I this morning, but like right before I walked in here, I had a decision on a candidate. This just reminded me of it. Right now it's me and basically basically, like, 16 engineers. One person in g and a, one person in design. Basically, all... My two co founders and all engineers. And the company it's called Roadrunner has like, it's got quite a lot of demand, but I also know all of the customer base. [00:48:07] S0: It's
00:48:08 · Joubin Mirzadegan
[00:48:08] S1: definitely, I am becoming the bottleneck on everything non engineering related. And we've starved this plant for long enough where I need to go like build the company around the product. Let's put it that way, which is probably what you felt like after you started hiring all these, you know, bankers from Citi. And I have resisted hiring anybody from this industry because I think the industry is like old and sucky. So like, why would I hire? Why would I hire those people? And there's been a guy that's been trying to get a meeting with me for six months, basically since the company started. He knows somebody inside of, he knows somebody well inside of Roadrunner and he comes from sales, but he just... He's he's like, I'll I'll be the janitor. I don't care. Like, inside sales, cold calling, like, he has AE offers at real tech companies. He's like, I don't want those. I want to be a roadrunner. And the thing that I've been like struggling with, it's not the first hire that I should make in this function. It's just not. There's like several other priorities in this function. I need like a finance person, like probably someone on marketing. There's like several other roles in sales that I should hire for first, a bunch on engineering, some platform engineering, some QA engineering, some infra. We have like an agent team that we need to build all these things. Right? He's never, he's never done a POC before. Like the sales that he comes from is like green tech sales. Anyway, I could go on. Eventually I was like, nothing makes sense about the timing of this, him. If somebody like, if my board looked at it, they'd be like, what are you? This seems weird. And I just couldn't help, but have this overwhelming feeling that despite nothing making sense, like how can this guy fail? I just can't see him failing. And what's the worst that happens. He sets, he creates too much customer demand. And so it puts more product pressure on us, puts more engineering pressure on us, puts more pressure on us to hire. So anyway, I call him right before I walked in here and I said like let's, let's do it. And he was about to call me to back out because he was like, obviously the timing is not right. And I'm like, yes, the timing is not right. That's true. But like the timing's never right.
00:50:37 · Joubin Mirzadegan
Meaning like I've told myself that if I find the best person in any function, I'll hire them independent of timing, because I know I'm going to need them all And best people don't just like come around on trees and I'm just growing trees whenever I need them. So anyway, I pulled the trigger and as I was walking in here, I was like, this is gonna look dumb if I'm wrong. And the people from Citibank, you don't look dumb because they have all this experience. And from the outs, you know, they know everything. They've done it all. They have all the answers to the test. And anyway, you... I don't have like maybe anything other than you saying that reminded me of the thing that I was just deliberating all morning. I think like founder's intuition in recruitment is extremely important.
00:51:29 · Jack Zhang
[00:51:29] S0: Sometimes you see this like CV, it's, you know, looks like a really good fit, but you just have this like a weird intuition. It's like maybe it's not the right fit. And and sometimes that you don't trust your intuition and you just trust professional advice and you end up being very, very wrong. I think able to, like, recruit and fire people very fast is extremely important in early stage company, and we made way too many mistakes that we shouldn't. And we made a lot of mistakes in recruitment by looking at experience, which is completely relevant. I wish I had known that 10 ago, and I just didn't. Right? So I hired a lot of these experienced people and end up all... Create a lot of issues for the company, and then we have to fire them all, and which taking years to do that, which is also another big mistake. We should have done that in weeks, not years. Why did it take years? Because I kinda just doubt myself. Right? Because they... They're very good at convincing you you are wrong. And and I think maybe I am wrong because I've never done that. What do I know about it? Right? So they they wanted to build a product in a certain direction, and maybe I was like, well, you have built this same... Similar system in Citi for last decade. And You probably know better than I do. Probably better know than... Yeah. I got... I have to rewrite a lot of the system afterwards because end of the day, first principle thinking is a lot more important than the experience. What were the highest performers? They didn't have experience? The initial sort of playbook is all quite random. It does... You know, because we are from Melbourne and there's not a of it's not like, oh, there's, like, 10 company you can just recruiting from. You know? Like, you can just sit in the front of that door of that company and just try to talk to every single engineer. There's no such thing in Melbourne, and we kinda have to go everywhere and then try random places, and it it is very kind of coincident. Know, you know, we... You know, our chief part officer came from Palantir. He he spent twelve years at Palantir, which is the first hire of Palantir outside of The US, become the GM of Palantir Australia and New Zealand, and then started the the Palantir European office and build a European business.