The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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...
00:12:43 · Jack Zhang, Harry Stebbings, Harry Stebbings
[00:12:43] S0: Well, I I kind of look a bit old now, but... [00:12:46] S1: And the amazing thing is [00:12:47] S2: that you did that on things you didn't love. Like, I've done a hundred hours a week for staff for ten years. But dude, mine is like in cushy offices with lovely things around me. You did shit jobs, no offense, in the early years, working insane hours. That's also what's so insane. Like lemon factories and restaurants. [00:13:05] S0: I didn't enjoy those jobs, right? So when I was working in the lemon factory, under the 40 degrees sun and carrying these boxes or washing dishes, I mean, I'm thinking about one day, don't I want to do this anymore. I want to do a real proper job. I want to write a code. [00:13:22] S2: The show has been very successful, think, but also because I'm very open about my life. I saw my grandparents lose everything. They lose their home overnight. You lose all security as a family, and it's very jarring. I'm always actually running from that. The reason I work so ferociously hard is because I don't want my family to ever be in that place. That's what I'm... Why I'm working so hard, if I'm honest. Are you running from that financial insecurity still? Or do you think you're running towards something, if I were to ask you? I think that you
00:13:22 · Harry Stebbings, Jack Zhang
[00:13:22] S2: The show has been very successful, think, but also because I'm very open about my life. I saw my grandparents lose everything. They lose their home overnight. You lose all security as a family, and it's very jarring. I'm always actually running from that. The reason I work so ferociously hard is because I don't want my family to ever be in that place. That's what I'm... Why I'm working so hard, if I'm honest. Are you running from that financial insecurity still? Or do you think you're running towards something, if I were to ask you? I think that you [00:13:53] S0: have different phases in life, right? So that's kind of why I started AirWallox. You know, basically after I graduated, I went to work at Aviva. I worked in a bunch of investment banks as a developeralgorithmic trader. And when I was doing those jobs, and I really enjoyed writing code. But that's not enough to give me the financial security. So I was doing a lot of stuff on the side. I was importing, exporting businesses for exporting olive oils and wine from Australia. [00:14:24] S2: Sorry, you had an import? Tell me about what.
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.