00:34:28 · Jack Zhang
[00:34:28] S1: I think we um we had a 1.5 billion in ARR. And um, I think last quarter we still growing 76% year on year. Wow. Um, and um, so we we we we're gonna be approaching 2 billion probably by the end of the year. Incredible. Um and I think um if you kind of think about it, right? So I said there's a lot of vertical uh discipline in the office of CFO and the finance team, um, and all these discipline are collapsing. So there used to be um hundreds of billion dollars in these sort of companies, uh, and then probably a few trillion dollars of revenue pool out there. Um, but now um the TAM actually went 10 times because the knowledge workers become addressable, right? So, you know, I have customers that like a message bird in the Netherlands, then they had um 40 plus people in uh finance team, and after they got rid of um all the dozen banks, so you have a bank in Australia, they have a bank in Singapore, they have a bank in the US, and a bank in Europe, and bank in the UK, they got rid of all the banks and moved everything onto Airwalls. And uh they automated everything from AR to AP, from FPA, uh and payments and expense management, reimbursement. So once they got everything onto and onto our platform, they essentially able to automate and using agent to automating most of the work in the corporate finance team, and now they have less than 10 people in the finance team, right? So these are the things all kind of addressable, right? So um, you know, how we're processing that, that is a different story. But then essentially you see a collapsing of the traditional uh vertical SaaS market in a sort of office of CFO, and then you can see the 10 times because all the knowledge workers are gonna be changing the job sort of function, as in like instead of doing the manual reconciliation or manual analytics or manual uh adjustment uh in a general ledger, the agent's gonna do all that. They're gonna focus on what's the most important thing, which is uh, you know, make financial decisions and recommending to the CEOs on what they should invest and where they should pull back.
00:36:38 · Tommy Stadlen
[00:36:38] S0: Your status as an outsider from Silicon Valley, seeing these cross-border payments with a coffee shop in in Australia gave you a real edge in terms of seeing something before other people saw it. Do you do you feel like you have gained an edge consistently at as being an outsider?
00:36:55 · Jack Zhang
[00:36:55] S1: I think um I I mean as an entrepreneur, I still believe in fact and truth, right? I mean, that's how why I started a company. I wanna I want to make sure um you know what I what I you know what I'm able to to build upon is something I believe in. Um I think every also every crisis or risk is is an opportunity to um take advantage of, right? So I think if it's anything, he's definitely made us a lot more famous in the US and provided Brennan, you know, and and also like all this factual stuff is on our side and everything sticks, he's gonna be looked like a joke in a couple of years' time as we continue to build a bigger and bigger business, right? As we continue to having more and more uh, you know, venture-driven companies that build on top of us, right? You know, 11 Labs is a big customer, and you know, you have all sorts of AI companies around the world using AirWalls as a sort of core global bank, uh, and a lot of the bigger businesses, especially have multiple entities uh globally that using us for spend management, which you know, RAMP don't have any global capabilities, right? So I think all these things um are the are the fact and uh it's gonna be pretty hard to change or catch up on because it takes us a decade to build the infrastructure. And uh as we kind of keep componing in the next couple of years, I think you know, you've been looking backwards and it's gonna be look, I think they're gonna look pretty stupid.
00:38:20 · Cameron McLain
[00:38:20] S2: Yeah, I have a question. You've you've um you've obviously described a pretty uh impressive work ethic. You've also been described, I think you just described yourself and been described as a perfectionist. We just talked about Yuri basically making a hundred million dollar investment decision based on your background and your and your history and what you've gone through. What do you look for in the people that you hire and how what kind of qualities are are you trying to identify? And what's really important to you and the people that you bring onto Airwalllocks on your mission?
00:38:46 · Jack Zhang
[00:38:46] S1: Uh, I think it's a couple of things. I would say three things, probably the most important one. The first one is intellectual curiosity, uh, that people are just generally curious about a problem and willing to go deeper onto understanding a problem space uh and then have ability to solve it. Um I think the second one is really uh sort of people want to win. Um that people that you know would work hard uh to change things, uh to um not really just taking the status quo, but actually wanting to to fix things into challenging uh the existing um product or problem space. Um and you know, just just do great things about it. I mean, you you you don't have to be a great engineer. I mean you but you must have done something great in your life, right? Whether it's a competition or it's uh it's spots or it's mass or or you know, it's build you build a business or something that you know you're excellent in. And you have to have um achievement in life. So we're really looking for that. And I think the last thing is resilience. Um, that um people, I mean resilience and also optimistic, I guess, that um, but if you have both, then that I think you can you can really do great things in life. It's a lot of what we look for in founders. So it looks like you're really looking for kind of founder mentality. Yeah, like you know, the the people that uh things always not always go, you know, go right. Sorry, go wrong, and and uh, you know, it's it it you always have problems, right? So things go wrong all the time, and you're not gonna get it right every single time. And and how you kind of able to be resilient during that really really period and and keep building on that. You know, we our growth slowed down a bit um a few years ago, and and we had to build it back up uh to continue to grow um at a pretty high sort of ARR. Um and you know, every single new new market we launched, we failed the first time. You know, we failed in the UK the first time we launched it, we failed in in uh in Hong Kong when we launched it, we failed in uh the US the first time we launched it. So uh even in our home market, Australia, the the first product launch we failed, right? So then we just keep building uh and then keep um fixing it. And then eventually we're successful. And now we very rarely fail the go-to-market launch. Love it.
00:41:15 · Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
Uh just we build this you know resilience and then corporate um sort of strategy that we can easily launch the new market. [00:41:24] S0: Jack, it is one of the most crazy up and down life stories, forget about business stories that we've ever had on the show. So thank you so so much for coming on and telling us about your journey and about your giant idea. Really appreciate it. [00:41:35] S1: Yeah, thanks for sharing. Thanks. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Glad to have this conversation.