Benevolent Disruptors
00:29:57 · Jack Zhang, Chris Corbishley
[00:29:57] S1: Yeah. Because you need to take the pause of max resistance to don't everything properly because we are operating in highly regulated environment and you could do a 100% of that crypto native way. But that's why the limitation, right? So until stablecoin, there's no real world use case of crypto. It's largely stated as a sort of speculative financial instrument and it doesn't really do much good for the world where you kind of have to thinking about how to deliver the benefit of stablecoin to the real world, which is, you know, into interacting with fiat, interacting with the current payment rails. And that's where, I think, where Airwallex is gonna be investing on to fix all these issues. [00:30:39] S0: So, yeah, basically, we always end with the same question to all of our all of our guests. And it's really touching on the kind of personal story, the personal journey, motivation behind getting through the hard times and and the good, and trying to understand, you know, what drives you. And, you know, we we frame it as like a benevolent or disruptor. You know, is it the mission of of enabling global payments in a way that's frictionless and affordable and seeing the the good you can have as a result of that technology? Or is it the the disruption potential and and the the idea of, you know, creative disruption and the technology aspect that kind of motivates you and drives you? I'm just curious.
00:31:17 · Jack Zhang
[00:31:17] S1: Yeah. So I think this is a couple fold. Right? So I think the first thing is entrepreneurship. And when we started the coffee business that we didn't have a good solution to paying coffee beans from Brazil, from Indonesia, and it's very opaque and expensive and slow, and we have to pay like 4%, 4% FX fee, right? So there's like, fundamentally, that's kind of a big problem. I think we want to solve that, so other people, other entrepreneurs that don't have to deal with this same problem. But as we sort of thinking about a larger picture, just the internet, the mobile internet, the cloud, every sort of cycle of innovation sort of fundamentally pushing the humanity forward in a way that is sort of less and less time for us adapting to technology and to change. And the definition of a global business is fundamentally different today than twenty years ago, right, as I said. And then now with sort of AI having this paradigm shift and just think about how many people are going to lose their job because a lot of the people, you know, the job category just going to disappear. And what is the answer to the society to creating more jobs to kind of shift to the future? It's got to be entrepreneurship. And because it used to take, ten, twenty, thirty, even tens of thousands of people twenty, thirty years ago to creating a business or global business. But now with the model, with all this power of AI that people can harness, that you can create a business with one or two person. And now people talk about one person unicorn, and there's a lot of solo entrepreneurs now leveraging this model and can just build agent instead of hiring human to innovate to solve a specific problem. It's just 10 times easier, a 100 times easier to start a business now, to become entrepreneur. So I think there's going to be a 100 times more entrepreneur or more businesses getting built in the next decade than the last decade. And Airwallex sort of is the infrastructure to help those entrepreneurs to access global market from day one, give them that completely AI native financial infrastructure, but also that kind of organic operating system for them to run that company autonomously.
00:33:28 · Jack Zhang
You know, whether you the company started in essence and you wanted to move to UK or Germany or Australia or Singapore or The US, you could have a bank account in a matter of seconds and you can start selling to customers there. We'll give you agent to help you to close the books, to help you to manage expenses, manage your vendor, pay your employees, managing your revenue online or offline, and reconsolidate everything at the end of the month so that you don't have to worry any of that. So that you can get a lot more done and focus on your core mission. And I think by doing this, we essentially helping the world that are moving to that AI native society, AI native workforce, and then help them to creating more jobs, which I think is a big motivation factor for me. On the sort of personal front that, you know, I think myself more like a professional athlete, you know, that you have the if you play tennis, right, you wanted to play with, you know, acras, with Cindere, with Djokovic, this sort of top elite player in the world. And if you're a basketball player, you wanted to play in the NBA. And I feel like, you know, Airwall, essentially, as an entrepreneur, I'm playing I'm an athlete in the business world. I wanted to competing with best entrepreneurs in the world, you know, the like of, you know, Patrick and John from Scribe, you know, I feel excited and motivated to compete. And then ultimately, the competition helps delivering a better outcome for entrepreneurs, for business builders, for everybody that, you know, this economy. So, and I really sort of look forward to continue to compete with the most elite entrepreneurs and ultimately creating value for the society.
00:35:10 · Chris Corbishley, Jack Zhang
[00:35:10] S0: Well, Czak, thank you so much. What a perfect analogy to end with. And it's been a real pleasure not only seeing the journey over the years, but, you know, having this time with you today to see a bit more into the future and the and and the vision for Airwallex going forward. So thank you so much. [00:35:24] S1: Thanks, Chris, for having me.