00:18:28 · Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
[00:18:28] S1: Of course not, yeah. Which in the case to us is the same person, keep doing this. [00:18:32] S0: Last one on venture investors. Um, because I think it's kind of interesting, is that during your gro some of your growth rounds, some of your investors were not really actually backing numbers, you know, you still hadn't really nailed the business, but people like Yuri Milner at DST, as I understand it, really backed, you know, you they went deep on you and your amazing life story, they backed your vision. [00:18:52] S1: Yeah, I don't know how Yuri investing uh is kind of interesting to me. I wouldn't do that myself. I mean, I wouldn't be able to throw a two-hour conversation. And essentially, like I met Yuri and Tom Stafford and John Lingford together. Um, with you know, during a two-hour conversation, the first hour is John and Tom asked me about the business. Uh, Yuri didn't speak a word. And then Yuri spent the next 30 minutes just asking me how I grew up, all the stuff I did, what I just told you about, you know, how I actually lost the financial support, how do so many businesses. Uh, on the back of that, she just offered me to invest um at uh 1.1 billion. Um invest $100 million. Amazing.
00:18:52 · Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
[00:18:52] S1: Yeah, I don't know how Yuri investing uh is kind of interesting to me. I wouldn't do that myself. I mean, I wouldn't be able to throw a two-hour conversation. And essentially, like I met Yuri and Tom Stafford and John Lingford together. Um, with you know, during a two-hour conversation, the first hour is John and Tom asked me about the business. Uh, Yuri didn't speak a word. And then Yuri spent the next 30 minutes just asking me how I grew up, all the stuff I did, what I just told you about, you know, how I actually lost the financial support, how do so many businesses. Uh, on the back of that, she just offered me to invest um at uh 1.1 billion. Um invest $100 million. Amazing. [00:19:37] S0: Um so you kind of get through all of this. You you've come through this unbelievable life journey, you've raised money, company almost dies multiple times. You start really scaling the business now, like very, very big revenue. Um, but the kind of drama's not over because you're a Silicon Valley outsider. There's some really well-funded Silicon Valley insiders competing with you, and they've got venture capital investors who don't want to see you succeed. And so those guys uh, you know, have started slinging, you know, accusations against the company that like, you know, it's giving US comp uh US uh data to the Chinese Communist Party and all this kind of stuff. That must have been like a very intense thing to go through of having all of those accusations thrown at you. What's it like personally as a leader?
00:20:20 · Jack Zhang
[00:20:20] S1: I'm not sure intense is the right word. Um I think it's like more like kind of angry that um, you know, people just like completely making stuff up, right? I mean, we run our China Hong Kong, but it's almost like a separate company and there's um data security in place, and you know, our US data is in uh is in the US data center. And um they, you know, the folks in China even have a different Slack, different Google uh, you know, uh workspace, and um they can't access our US data center at all. They can't even access any of our data center outside of China, Hong Kong. So the it's not a factual anymore, right? So, you know, the Apple, Tesla, um, all these businesses, uh, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, all have employees in China, Citibank, JP Morgan, you know, it's nothing wrong with an employee in China, have a business area. We're doing global business. Yeah. I mean, you have to have a presence in China because it's even, you know, despite how bad the geopolitic is between US and China, there's a lot of transactions happen between US and China, right? China's still the largest supply chain in the world, right? So um, so I think um, you know, I think we focus on the fact um where anything when you kind of talk about factual, we're doing pretty well. And obviously, um on the other side, they um use my aesthetic to kind of pay me um this sort of Chinese spy thing. And and I thought it's pretty funny initially. I live so why people believe in that. They actually think I live in Hong Kong or something, or I live in, I don't know, I can't remember. They say Lucy also lives in China and all this stuff. I mean, like I live in Holland Park, thank you. A lot of West London, right? So I mean I think um anything in China has just become sort of um an interesting topic in the US, right? So you get a lot of um uh uptake on that. And and I think the uh they they saw the opportunity to attack me because I'm not from Silicon Valley. You know, as I said, the the market is 10 times in terms of addressful market, and um the competition is getting worse. You know, if you're looking at as a bunch of the other areas, right? In the coding agent area, uh, you know, uh factory and and cognition and you know, rippling a deal. So all this sort of drama start happening in the in the last couple of years. And uh sort of competition have a new definition in Silicon Valley.
00:22:52 · Jack Zhang, Cameron McLain
And I just hope that people can compete on product um and uh rather than you know doing this weird racist thing. [00:22:59] S2: You're trying to build a global financial platform. You've kind of moved into a period of geopolitical fragmentation. Do you think it's possible to build a like a truly global finance platform these days with the world as it is geopolitically?
00:23:12 · Jack Zhang
[00:23:12] S1: I I think so. I mean, if if if you're kind of thinking about what the the the kind of future look like, um you know, the every single entrepreneur that building on AI are global first. They have customers everywhere, they have um uh they have employees everywhere. So that the the these sort of paradigm shifts that are driven by technology, the like the like of internet, the like of mobile, the cloud, the AI, these are things that non-stoppable, right? It's inevitable by um geopolitics. I mean, because the the adoption of technology on mobile, on cloud, on um AI, it's just it's just so fast, right? It's kind of have this, and then the cycle of this paradigm shift is actually becoming shorter and shorter. Right. Um and the government and try to react by this sort of technology shift and innovations. And um as a as a platform that we need to kind of basically make sure that we solve all these, you know, geopolitic challenges or data sovereignty challenges or uh financial infrastructure challenges so that we give that kind of seamless um, you know, global banking and payments platform for our customers. So they don't have to worry about all that. And I think I think it's it's challenging, but it's 100% possible that that's exactly what we're building now. We have such a small sort of domestic market and we have to build a global platform to able to build a viable business. I mean, FinTech is a high risk, low margin business. So like if you can't get scale, that you just die, right? Disappear. So uh, you know, for us it's really important to think about what the long term looks like. So we basically have to build this infrastructure-driven, uh, multi-product, multi-region go-to-market approach, which is extremely complicated. And it takes, you know, it takes us six years to get to the first $100 million ARR, then it took us three years to get to a billion. Then now we are approaching two billion by another year. So you know, within 12 months, right? So I think it's just can continue to see that kind of exponential growth because of the things we build start component. Yeah. Uh and also like, you know, the very simple decisions we made a decade ago become some of the best advantages we have, which is infrastructure first, APR first. Right. So that that makes, you know, the entire organization is infrastructure first APR first.
00:25:40 · Jack Zhang, Cameron McLain
And all these reels that we build uh become a core vantage in the genetic world. Right. So now it's very easy for us to deploy at Agent OS, essentially a bunch of um, you know, MSC, MCPs and command lines to allow uh engineers or just people uh vibe code on top of our platform that you know, beyond just like a simple uh you know web interface or a mobile interface, now it's kind of becoming the default to have uh agent to consume your product. And then the banks are just not even anywhere close to where we are. So they they're so far behind in the in the in the APR world, um, and they're so far behind on the infrastructure because they did you know all these global banking, many acquisitions, and they have disjointed experiences and systems in place, right? Um and the data is all in different places, it's just impossible for them to build uh the the operating system for agent to use. Um and that just gives us a huge amount of advantage to essentially defining uh the next sort of era of a global banking, which is we call agentic banking. [00:26:47] S2: And what do you believe about that future of agentic finance, agentic banking that very few people understand? Because it's you know, you're you're right front and center, and I think it's coming very, very fast. But like what paint a picture for our listeners of what that looks like and what they might not understand about that future yet.