The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:14:24 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:14:24] S2: Sorry, you had an import? Tell me about what. [00:14:26] S0: Yeah, so I basically exporting olive oil and wine of Australia to, you know, China and other countries. And I was importing textiles from China to Australia. And I had a business of real estate development. I have a business of architecture and project management. And I have all these side businesses that, you know, to be frank, generating millions of income every year passively. Like, you know, obviously I work full time, you know, I work pretty hard in my job. And, you know, I work another six, seven, eight hours, and I work all the weekends for my side hustle. You know, make $200,000 a year on my full time job. And I make $23.04, $5,000,000 a year on the other side hustle as kind of that business is getting more mature. [00:15:11] S2: Dude, how the fuck did you see that? $23.04... I mean, that's real money when you are full time working at Aviva or as an algo trader, and then you're doing an import export business of olive oil. That's not an easy business to do, is it? It's actually pretty easy. [00:15:28] S0: You know, you think about it. Right? Tell me. [00:15:30] S2: Just you
00:15:30 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:15:30] S2: Just you [00:15:31] S0: literally just find a supplier, find a buyer, and you're not a producer. You're not a... You don't need to do any marketing. It's just b two b. Right? You just... All you need to do is finding buyers and sellers. And at one stage I was, you know, a reseller of phone cases, you know. I found like an Australian manufacturer well, not manufacturer, it's more like a brand creator called Qualock. Essentially now it's a proper equity owned businesses, it actually went pretty big. And I work with those guys that are designers and, you know, I help them to sell phone cases. And I was making decent amount of money. You know, I just have all of these side businesses that are making money. At one stage, you know, come back to the financial insecurity, I probably made like more than $10,000,000 when I was 28, 29. And I had financial security. At that time, my real estate business is getting real scale, right? You know, we started building like 40, 50 apartments, you know, $4,050,000,000 Aussie dollar project. You know, I wasn't from time involved or anything, but that's kind of the direction [00:16:31] S2: So you we just got people to run them for you?
00:16:31 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:16:31] S2: So you we just got people to run them for you? [00:16:32] S0: Yeah. And one of the guys running that for me was my co founder, Max Li. He's the head of product design. He went, become architect, then started the real estate business with me, started a coffee shop with me in which, you know, we found the foreign exchange and international payments issue. That's lead us to founding Airwallex. But we had financial security at that time. And me and Max was basically just in a coffee shop and thinking about, like, we cannot doing this for the just make money for the rest of our life, right? And we wanted to creating real scale business leveraging technology. You know, I went to college when I see Facebook took off. I don't know if you know, like, don't use Facebook when we were in college. Were like Myspace, there's like Hi Friends, Friendster. Facebook was not a thing. And we just see that shoot off, right? I mean, Google was not even a massive company back then. And we just saw the whole internet took off. And especially like you also saw the internet in China took off to the early 2000s, right? So the like of Tencent and WeChat and Alipay and Alibaba all took off. And you just live in this time that a lot of the generational company get created.
00:17:45 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:17:45] S2: The lovely thing for me is I knew parts of this story, but I didn't know a lot of this story. But before we just go to the founding of Airwall is there, you have all of these side businesses. How do you think about the importance of focus? Cause when I hear people with lots of side businesses, I'm always like, why didn't you just focus on the real estate company? You could have made that 10x bigger. How do you think about the importance of focus versus when it's worth it to have a portfolio? [00:18:09] S0: Cause I need to really enjoy and passion about what I do. And I'm not passionate or enjoy any of these businesses I started. I always say that just like a business that I'm making money. And I'm not interested. Obviously, want a financial security, but making money is not going to make you happy. I wanted to leveraging my engineering skill set to create real, you know, amplified impact at scale. And so I started like probably 10 plus businesses, and what I really concluded is I don't like any of them. Still wanted to pursuing what's going to make me excited and passionate about, and that's kinda leading to the whole founding story of Airwalks. [00:18:44] S2: I I feel sorry for many people today because I think so many people actually don't find what they truly love. Like, I'm so lucky, honestly, Jack. I found Vanture when I was 13 years old by watching The Social Network. And that's how I got exposed to Vansha. I'm very lucky that I found that because it's
00:18:44 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang, Harry Stebbings
[00:18:44] S2: I I feel sorry for many people today because I think so many people actually don't find what they truly love. Like, I'm so lucky, honestly, Jack. I found Vanture when I was 13 years old by watching The Social Network. And that's how I got exposed to Vansha. I'm very lucky that I found that because it's [00:18:58] S0: Well, took me a decade, right? I started when I was I mean, if you count in the early days, I mean, more than a decade, right? You started washing dishes and petrol station and lemon factory. Then you go from there to import and exporting. You go from trading. You go from architecture, real estate and coffee shop. I mean, all that kind of leads to is a bigger idea that you feel passionate about. [00:19:23] S1: So take me [00:19:23] S2: to the moment where you found that passion, where you're like, you know what? I've tried these 10 businesses, but this is the thing that I want to do.
00:19:31 · Jack Zhang
[00:19:31] S0: I always knew I love technology. That's why I keep my code I keep my job writing code even though I'm making 10 times the money on the site. So I never resigned. I never thought about resigning because I need to write code every day so I feel that one day when I actually want to start a business, I can still creating something. You know, when we were running the corporate business, the idea was not really running the COVID business. The initial idea was that, Okay, we need to basically I would look at like, in Australia, there's a biggest telco called Telstra. And Telstra publishing the fastest 50 growing company every year in Australia. And more than half those companies are retail businesses, like burger chain or coffee chain or some sort of these retail chains. And I started like a burger chain, I started like a coffee chain. I mean, when I say chain, it's only just really one business at a time and was supposed to become a chain. But during that setting up process, the first problem we found is that there's no square equivalent in sort of 2013. The whole point of sales, payments, order management in the back of the kitchen, the ordering system, the delivery system, nothing was really set up. So I was like, I should start basically a square, plus the whole kind of backend order management system. And I pitched the idea to my CTO, Jacob, and I was like, Dude, let's do something together. I think this is a real opportunity. And at that time also, NFC, you know, the touch payment started sort of changing the consumer payment behavior. I was like, let's build something that can support NFC payments and let's go into build this point of sale system and payment system for offline merchants. And he's like, Oh, no, no, like I think QR is going to take over the world. I mean, because he at the time started a company in China in AI. And he just started the AI business ten years too early. And he's like, I don't believe this whole NFC thing. He's like, QR is going to take over the world. We should build a QR thing. And I was like, nobody using QR. I never heard of this thing. I mean, is a very China thing. And I don't think so. And then we kind of just debated, then we end up just can't agree on that idea, and then we let it go. I mean, that could be another billion dollar startup in 2013. And we'll just keep building the coffee business.