The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:04:47 · Harry Stebbings, Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:04:47] S2: You have now arrived at your destination. [00:04:50] S1: Jack, dude, I'm so excited for this. Listen. We walked around the park, and I heard your story and respectfully I was like, this is such an incredible story that I don't [00:05:00] S2: think many people know quite how awesome it is. So first, thank you so much for joining me. [00:05:06] S0: Thanks, Harry. It's a great pleasure to join this show. [00:05:09] S2: Normally I don't love the whole like, oh, take me back to your childhood because it's normally like, you know, going back to the early days of Stanford. But you started in Australia and I wanted to start actually very young because you started... Was it working in a petrol station? Can you just take me back to the first job and that early time? [00:05:26] S0: I came to Australia when I was, I guess, 15 ish. And this, I went basically to start high school and my family basically lost most of the money and I lost financial support when I was 16. And I had to basically figure out how to survive in a foreign country by myself. That's why I started working in a restaurant, working in a lemon factory. [00:05:53] S2: You worked in a lemon factory? [00:05:55] S0: Yeah, that's during summer. You know, I go basically take a few hours of train and buses to get on the mountain every day and to literally carrying lemon, you know, thousands of lemon boxes a day under the, you know, 40 degrees and for two hours a day without even eating lunch. [00:06:13] S2: How much did they pay you at the Lemon Factory?
00:06:13 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:06:13] S2: How much did they pay you at the Lemon Factory? [00:06:16] S0: They actually pay okay. They pay like $14 Aussie an hour. And because you kind of can work over the twenty hours limit during the holiday, and it's actually a pretty decent income. But it's just a really, really tough job. [00:06:31] S2: We nervousscared. You're 16, 17 at this point, on your own in a foreign country without financial security. It's a pretty intimidating place to be. [00:06:41] S0: Well, guess it's a situation that you don't have a choice. You know, I left China where I was born and, you know, come to Australia. By that time, I was already in Australia for over a year. I couldn't go back to China to do the exam to the universities because I wouldn't be that competitive anymore. I don't even know how to return to the education system by that time. And literally you have to figure out how to survive and how to pay for the tuitions, which is very expensive for international students. I remember it's 24,000 a year. And you have to, you know, figure out the living expenses. You know, I have to do my part, just really work as many jobs as possible to figure out how to live on my own. [00:07:23] S2: There's gonna be a great visual that my team's gonna make of a lemon factory in you. So what happens there? We are earning $14 an hour in a lemon factory. We're working in restaurants. What's the next step? You go to university, take me to this time.
00:07:23 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:07:23] S2: There's gonna be a great visual that my team's gonna make of a lemon factory in you. So what happens there? We are earning $14 an hour in a lemon factory. We're working in restaurants. What's the next step? You go to university, take me to this time. [00:07:37] S0: Yeah, so I went to University of Melbourne and that's where I met with my three co founders and I also worked different jobs throughout the college and I was working in a restaurant as a dishwasher, working in a Westing Hotel as a bartender. I basically worked like between four to 11:30 in a bar, and once that's finished, I started working at a petrol station from midnight to 8AM. So I literally work sixteen hours straight, four, five days a week. [00:08:07] S2: What were you doing in the petrol station? [00:08:09] S0: That's just doing overnight shift and sitting there doing... Cashing the people paying the petrol and selling lollies. [00:08:16] S2: And to... Selling lollies. That is the most random thing to sell in the petrol station. [00:08:23] S0: You know, like, you go to petrol station and be like, oh, you know, do you wanna just, you know, pay for $5 for three chocolate and, you know, that type of stuff? That's me. [00:08:32] S2: Do you know what? I don't actually drive. I don't know if you noticed. I haven't passed my test. It's one of my many flaws. And so petrol station is not something I know too well, but I I will go for a lolly. So we're there. We're at Melbourne University this time, and we've met our three cofounders at this point. Correct?
00:08:32 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang, Harry Stebbings
[00:08:32] S2: Do you know what? I don't actually drive. I don't know if you noticed. I haven't passed my test. It's one of my many flaws. And so petrol station is not something I know too well, but I I will go for a lolly. So we're there. We're at Melbourne University this time, and we've met our three cofounders at this point. Correct? [00:08:46] S0: I met one out of the three co founders when I got into University of Melbourne, so the first year. So we went to basically the same faculty, and we all started computer science. My CTO, Jacob, he's like one year older than me, but like 100 times smarter. [00:09:01] S1: So you meet [00:09:02] S2: him at university, you become friends. Do you start tinkering on ideas together then when you're doing CS together? [00:09:08] S0: I mean, they spend most of the time playing DOTA and then competing against each other, and I was pretty suck at playing DOTA, to be fair. And I was literally you know, I spent most of my time working, little time in a university. Know, I kind of just try to spend as much as I can. But, know, I wasn't like the best student in my college. Compared to my high school, I was like the top, top student of the school, where at university, was just like an average student because I just didn't spend enough time to study. [00:09:38] S2: Dude, you're working sixteen hours a day. I mean, poor you. The university is like the side gig. So what was the first thing that you started? If I say to you, like, your first entrepreneurial thing, what was your first entrepreneurial thing?
00:09:49 · Jack Zhang
[00:09:49] S0: So I started a magazine called Urban Exploration when I was back in high school. I was like 13, 14, together with the student in the sort of student society. And everyone's obviously working for free. And, you know, we need to raise money for student funding. And I need to figure out how to do that. And we were essentially going to the restaurants and, you know, computer shops and stuff around the school to raise money. They were like, oh, why don't you just send some flyer up just for $2 per person and give you some money? But we kind of nobody wanted to take flyers. Like who cares? So that we thought we might just write something more interesting and put those ads for those restaurants in the essentially, the magazine or booklet we created. And then hopefully that people will be interested to take it, right? So but because we write quite interesting stories, like student love stories, how to play like Counter Strike, and because the school that we were in are the best schools and we write really interesting stories and that magazine just got viral because we kind of printed out of the school for free and we didn't have any costs and we have very limited print and everyone kind of want a copy of it. And I think over like a year and a half, we got like 8,000 merchants that putting ads magazine. And we actually made decent amount of money. And then obviously we kind of donated to the school. Kind of a massive early success in my, I would say, I grew up, you know, before I came to Australia.
00:11:17 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:11:17] S2: Do you think people are born entrepreneurs? Or do you think you can become one when you think back to that as a 13, 14 year old? [00:11:25] S0: I think when you grow up, that if you taste what success looks like early, whether a spot or any type of mass competition or Olympic competition or any type of competition or any sort of team spots, the tough experience, you know, when I kind of lost financial support and when my family kind of lost most of the money, that really toughen you up, right? You become quite resilient. And when you're working one hundred hours a week at this age and had to go through that mental challenge of figuring your life out at such a young age, I think you become a lot more resilient. People ask, you know, I get burned out. I mean, I'm just working too hard and, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, dude, what are you talking about? You know, do you know what is, a tough life looks like? In Australia especially, it's a very wealthy country in general, and there's less people who have experienced these tough things in life. And generally people have a different perspective of what life is, right? [00:12:26] S2: So funny for me. I work seven days a week. And three years in people were like, you know what? You won't be able to keep this up. Five years in, you know, you've done five, but you won't be able to keep this up. [00:12:36] S0: That's... I did one hundred hours a week for about twenty years, dude. [00:12:40] S2: And you still look about 25. [00:12:43] S0: Well, I I kind of look a bit old now, but...