The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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.
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