00:08:34 · Jack Zhang
[00:08:34] S1: Well, I didn't know how big Airwalls is gonna be, by the way. I was, you know, I remember I thought I was gonna be pretty happy if it's a hundred million dollar business, you know? Okay. Yeah. So I think I think my key thing is is not really the pursuit of evaluation, it's really pursuit of happiness. And I wanted to find something I truly happy about. And, you know, like I was doing real estate and I almost doing nothing, and I was making multiple million a year, and I'm not really using any of my intelligence and I'm not solving any hard problems. And I mean, what I okay, I could build a few buildings here and there. I mean, it's not to discriminate people doing real estate. I'm just like, no, just not for me. And I don't feel I made a real impact to the world. I was doing trading. I saw uh, you know, uh 20, 30 minute PLs and on a daily basis, but like, you know, I don't feel anything. I'm not really impacting people's life, I'm not making anything better in this world. Yeah, um I just feel I'm irrelevant. I'm I'm just like, I live, I eat, I, you know, I travel around maybe have a family, but then what do I leave to this world? Nothing. Right. So is it is it a drive for relevance? I wouldn't say it's relevance. I think it's more like just I wanted to make uh my own stamp in the world that I wanted to say, hey, you know, the day I died, I said I have achieved so many things, I made you know people's lives better. Um, I've impacted X many millions of lives, right? So I think that is something um I always feel that um something I'm I'm fascinated about.
00:10:06 · Cameron McLain, Jack Zhang
[00:10:06] S2: That's a nice segue into the stripe story where you uh famously rejected a offer from the Collinson brothers to buy your company for 1.2 billion. I think at that moment you had two million in revenue or something. [00:10:18] S1: Like something something for the past 12 months I had two million, right? [00:10:20] S2: Okay, but that was two million in revenue. Well, there's forward it's a bit better. Um, you know, you would have you know made an awful lot of money in that process, but I guess did you go through a similar kind of uh framework at that moment? Like that wasn't a happiness maximizing decision, you wanted to continue working on hard problems. Yeah, walk us through that. That's a that's a pretty big moment.
00:10:37 · Jack Zhang
[00:10:37] S1: Yeah, I think the first one is essentially not come down to financial decisions, right? It's come down to okay, it's a five-year lockup, I'll be 39 by the time I finish um the the lockup period, and um if I've survived the five years, and um and and and then you know, like what I'm gonna do at age of 39, how can I build another component business? You know, the business growed 100x um in that year in terms of volume, not revenue, but it's a massive um sort of acceleration of growth. And I can kind of see at that time we already kind of, you know, the mission has already evolved from just a money movement company to uh, you know, building a new generation of a global bank to basically competing with SSBC or Citibank, right? So I think they are so out of date, and I feel that modern businesses deserve better, uh, deserve a better global bank to help them to grow and operate with efficiency. And, you know, it takes 10 years to get on the starting line to build a global bank, right? So um obviously I didn't think it's gonna take that long at that time, and I was not a little naive in thinking about, you know, I didn't know it's gonna take us seven years to get a license in Japan, for example. I didn't know how complicated it is to go live in Mexico, in Korea, in Brazil, all these uh emerging markets as well. So and then there's so many regulatory challenges all around the world. I think I thought as we go in growing, things are gonna get easier over time, but it's went the opposite direction. It's actually getting harder and harder. Yeah.
00:12:12 · Tommy Stadlen, Jack Zhang
[00:12:12] S0: If you said yes to that, well, today Stripe's obviously a lot bigger today, you would have had a lot of stock in Stripe. How much did you walk away from essentially? [00:12:19] S1: Or three or four billion dollars. [00:12:21] S0: And you feel good about it still? [00:12:22] S1: Yeah. I mean, what are gonna what I'm gonna do with extra two, three billion dollars. [00:12:28] S0: Well, yeah, and you've you since then you've grown your business massively as well. [00:12:30] S1: Yeah, so I mean, I also I would say this is in still very early days of of the race, right? So I wouldn't call them a finish line. [00:12:39] S0: Tell us the story about your first angel investor.
00:12:39 · Tommy Stadlen, Jack Zhang
[00:12:39] S0: Tell us the story about your first angel investor. [00:12:42] S1: Yeah, that was a very interesting story. So um, you know, we had a coffee business, and Max, my covonder from Airwalls, was running the coffee shop at the time. Um, and one day I finished work Friday afternoon, and I went to the coffee shop. Uh, then I met Lucy there, who is a friend of Max, uh, who just um uh sort of finished her her work and just resigned from her work in Hong Kong and then went back to Australia. Uh at that time he was thinking about getting married and have kids. And uh at the same time, he's like, Hey, do you want some investment for your coffee business? And looks like you guys are doing pretty well. I was like, no, no, no. I mean, we we're not we we we're not gonna keep doing this coffee business. We actually have some new ideas and uh we we're gonna think about it, do. And it was just a random coffee chat, and he kind of got interested. He said, Hey, why don't we just have dinner? Um, so we we had dinner and we talk about it over dinner, and he's like, How much money are you raising for this global money movement business? And uh we said, we're probably gonna raise a million dollars. Um and he she basically dropped the bomb on the spot. It's like, hey, how about if I give you two? [00:13:50] S0: She offered you two million dollars on the spot. That's the first meeting. It's the first time I met her. And how old is she at this point? She's like mid-20s. So she's in the mid-20s, left her job in banking.
00:13:50 · Tommy Stadlen, Jack Zhang
[00:13:50] S0: She offered you two million dollars on the spot. That's the first meeting. It's the first time I met her. And how old is she at this point? She's like mid-20s. So she's in the mid-20s, left her job in banking. [00:14:00] S1: Yeah, so she has a million dollars that uh that she was gonna buy a house to get married. Yeah. There's some rumors like her family is like super wealthy and all that type of stuff. It's kind of bullshit. And you know, I think you know, her family is wealthy, but not like in a sense that people kind of imagine, right? Her dad is not a billionaire or anything like that, anywhere, anywhere close to that, right? You know what I mean? [00:14:22] S0: So there's not enough money there to make it a sensible decision to offer someone you've just met two million dollars.