The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
01:15:41 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[01:15:41] S1: I totally do. But for any founders, do not take out 20,000,000 or $30,000,000 from my round. If it's too early, I think also timing matters. [01:15:49] S0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like for a late stage founder, like, you know, above a billion dollar valuation, I think 20,000,000 to $30,000,000 is a decent amount, but it's not like ridiculous amount that you set for your life or anything. I think it's just good for a founder to not think about money too much, and just really focus on the vision. [01:16:06] S1: Do you love being a CEO? You mentioned your product, your engineering centrality as who you are. [01:16:12] S0: Do you like being a CEO? I don't like the every day of the job of a CEO, and I like I'm able to control the destiny of the company. And I ultimately answer to the outcome of the company, the outcome of the customer, the outcome of the employee. I wanted to have that control so I know that we are heading the right direction towards our vision. I don't like dealing with the people issues, dealing with the policies, the procedures, and all that type of stuff. [01:16:43] S1: What did you not do in the Airwallet's journey that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you had done?
01:16:43 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[01:16:43] S1: What did you not do in the Airwallet's journey that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you had done? [01:16:49] S0: A couple of things. Number one, I hired the first 100 people in Airwallet by myself on LinkedIn. And obviously, there's lot of benefit doing that. But I could have hired a good recruiter just to help me to do the outreach and give him the access of my LinkedIn password. You know what I mean? I didn't need to do that myself. Today, could just get AI to do that. Yeah, I think get a good recruiter early on that kind of make the hiring a lot more efficient. Number two is that don't over invest in international expansion when you don't have product market fit, right? And that could really put in a lot of risk to your company. And we lucky 2021 happened, and we lucky that Ian closed around in 2020 when our revenue halved and COVID happened and stock down 30%. But I don't think everyone is going be that lucky. So do that. And I think the other thing is just really focus on investing in the culture early. [01:17:41] S1: Did you ever have a moment when the culture was broken, and what did you do to fix it? It's a lot of pain.
01:17:41 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[01:17:41] S1: Did you ever have a moment when the culture was broken, and what did you do to fix it? It's a lot of pain. [01:17:46] S0: The first four, five years, we hired a lot of people with a lot of great experiences. They're from a bank, they're from Citibank, they have built a SWIFT network before. They know the thing, and they join, telling me like, you guys know nothing. What you're going to do doesn't work. We need to do blah, blah, blah. And none of those people worked. None of people think they know how to build a startup that worked. And ultimately, it's not about the experience. It's about the competency, right? It's about the curiosity, the determination, about the resilience, and about the belief and the vision, about the passion. And I think we should just have hired those curious, determined, optimistic people from early on, but we didn't. So we had to like fire all of them and that is a tough, tough decision. And we really slowed down the company. We had like bad press about it. There's a lot of planning to go through. [01:18:36] S1: Should you always take the highest price on fundraising? [01:18:39] S0: No. I think you should always prioritize what gives you the biggest leverage. The leverage on brand, the leverage on hiring, the leveraging on commercial opportunities. [01:18:49] S1: Do venture firms, brands make a material difference? [01:18:53] S0: Yes. Only the top five make a difference. [01:18:56] S1: So having Sequoia makes a big difference? [01:18:58] S0: Huge difference, whether I like it or not. [01:19:01] S1: Why would you not like it?
01:19:01 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[01:19:01] S1: Why would you not like it? [01:19:02] S0: Ultimately, you wanted to work with the best investor, not only an investor, but also a friend and people you get along with and you like. It's not saying I don't like the investor in Sequoia, but just saying that you just choose the brand over the people. [01:19:17] S1: Which investor do you not have that you would like to have? [01:19:20] S0: I wish I have someone like Michael Morris that invests in Stripe. Like a true visionary investor supported the founder from day I think Michael Morris played a very important role of Stripe's success, waving the flag of Stripe, early days of Silicon Valley like early days of Stripe and Silicon Valley saying, you know, John Patrick going to be the next Sergey Brann or Larry Page, you know, that they're going to build a trillion dollar company, blah, blah, blah. I don't think I had that support. [01:19:49] S1: Have you met him? [01:19:50] S0: Yeah. I mean, Michael Morris invited me to his home and tried to convince me to sell the company. Oh. I mean, I wish I have an investor do that for me, you know? [01:19:58] S1: How was that? [01:19:59] S0: It's a beautiful home and there's nice conversation. [01:20:02] S1: And it didn't convince you?
01:20:02 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[01:20:02] S1: And it didn't convince you? [01:20:03] S0: Well, I mean, argument makes a lot of sense that he's saying, you know, like, I said, you know, why don't I just keep building and maybe sell later? Like, what now? I haven't really figured it out, you know, what I want to do with my life yet. It's like, you know, the earlier you can compound, the faster you can build a trillion dollar business. I mean, kind of makes sense. [01:20:21] S1: Listen, I want to do a quick follow-up. I've so enjoyed this. When I ask you about a founder you deeply admire, other than the Collisons, who comes to mind first? [01:20:30] S0: I really like Elon. I think what he has done is able to ultimately is pushing the humanity forward. [01:20:37] S1: If you could put all of your money into one company other than Airwallex, which company would you put all of your money into? [01:20:43] S0: I would put half of my money in SpaceX. [01:20:46] S1: I'd do a third. I'd do OpenAI, SpaceX, and then Revolut. [01:20:49] S0: I don't know about Revolut. I mean, that's my competition ultimately in the future. At 40 I put some money in Stripe. [01:20:57] S1: You put some money in Stripe? Yeah. What's the hardest thing about your role today? [01:21:01] S0: Make decisions knowing that more than 50% probability is gonna be a wrong decision. [01:21:06] S1: You should be a venture investor.
01:21:06 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[01:21:06] S1: You should be a venture investor. [01:21:07] S0: Do you like investing? I don't think I'm a great investor. I don't really know how to assess early stage founder very well. Why do you think that is? Before product market fit is really just based on people's personality, I don't know how to make an investment decision based on people's personality or the history of people, right? That's why I said I wasn't able to invest in myself. I just haven't seen enough data to build that confidence. [01:21:31] S1: What worries you that you think not enough people are spending time on? [01:21:35] S0: Generally, people are making decisions based on the knowledge they have. And generally, that is not the right thing to do because the biggest mistake you make is from making a decision based on the knowledge you don't have. [01:21:49] S1: Penultimate one for you. You're in London now. Are you impressed by London's tech scene? What do you make of it? [01:21:55] S0: I think it's better than Melbourne. I love the global nature of London, and so far enjoyed meeting a lot of entrepreneurs. I think it's going to be an exciting place [01:22:04] S1: for Do you love people living here? [01:22:06] S0: Yeah. Apart from it's very expensive, you know, everything else is pretty good. [01:22:10] S1: Final one for you, dude. Airwallet is in 2035, ten years out. Yeah? Where are you then?