00:43:55 · Jack Zhang, Henrique Dubugras
[00:43:55] S1: And I was... From you know, graduation, I was pitching to Jacob. He was like, hey, let's start business together because he's considered the best engineer of my college. And I know I'm not the best. From a coding perspective, I always wanna partner with the best to do something together. But he always wanted to do his own thing with other friends, and only until I was 30 that he he failed five startups, and he's... He finally said yes. [00:44:19] S0: And then you decided to start a company with him? [00:44:21] S1: Yeah. I think in 2012, I wanted to... So I remember NFC came out. I was a trader at that time, and I I feel like the the the speed of moving to cashless is probably gonna speed up because NFC, you know, people can do NFC payments. [00:44:38] S0: And was Alipay and WePay, like, huge already at this point? No. [00:44:41] S1: It was still pretty small. And I was like... I was obsessed with NFC. I wanted to start, like, a point of sales business, like, a payments business in 2012. And I did a prototype with Max, which is another co founder, and we do everything together. Jacob, my CTO, just said, No, he thinks the idea is a shit. I mean, QR is taking over the world, and that's... He thinks the QR is the future because that's when sort of Ali and WeChat Pay started really getting popular, and he doesn't really believe in NFC payments. You know, we could build a bigger business if we started in 2012. [00:45:16] S0: Wow. And so you decided, nope, NFC. Let's move on from that?
00:45:16 · Henrique Dubugras, Jack Zhang, S2
[00:45:16] S0: Wow. And so you decided, nope, NFC. Let's move on from that? [00:45:20] S1: Well, yeah. Well, I, you know, I couldn't do it myself, so he didn't wanna join me. So that we basically gave up the idea and just keep doing real estate. [00:45:29] S0: Oh, interesting. So then that wasn't the start of AeroAlex? [00:45:32] S1: No. Interesting. I waited for another four years before I started AeroVolix. [00:45:37] S0: And just doing real estate, coffee shop, etcetera? Yeah. [00:45:40] S2: This episode of HD in HD is brought to you by a brand that's close to my heart, Brex. When we started Brex, it wasn't just about creating another financial product. It was about solving the real gritty challenges that founders and startups face every day. Building something from the ground up is hard enough without having to navigate clunky legacy banks with endless fees. That's why Brex is financial stack that scales with you, no matter where you are on your journey. From maximizing runway to earning yield on your cash, Brex was designed to make every dollar count. So you can focus on what really matters, building your dream. So whether you're just getting started or you're ready to take on the next big thing, Brex has your back. Check it out and see why the world's most innovative startups like Anthropic, Scale AI, and Robinhood trust Brex. [00:46:29] S0: How do I roll, like, start?
00:46:29 · Henrique Dubugras, Jack Zhang
[00:46:29] S0: How do I roll, like, start? [00:46:31] S1: Yes. After I'm my daughter, I... You know, we talk about this money movement issue, and then we then we had difficulty paying suppliers in in in these countries around the world, and and we're paying very expensive fees to the banks in Western Union to paying packages to China. And then we were like, okay, let's just start a payments business to solve this problem instead because we hate coffee business, you know? Like, at that time, you know, retail is like a heavy human operational business, and you just work with a lot of people that are not super responsible. You come in, you want to open a shop, and the receptionist has disappeared. You try to call them, they don't respond, and you literally worry about them, are they safe or anything. And after like a couple of days, you saw them partying, posting party pictures on Facebook. You'd be like, what the hell is going on? I just don't want to work with those type of people anymore. [00:47:23] S0: Yeah, so you're like, look, I can't do this in retail situation. I wanna go into, like, a kinda more white collar Yeah. Business. Yeah. And then did Airwallet start in parallel to all these businesses, or, what happened? [00:47:35] S1: No. Airwallet is probably the first business I basically give up all the other business. [00:47:40] S0: How did you give it up? Did you just sell them? Did you just, like, give them? [00:47:43] S1: No. It's just... It's operational. I don't need to do anything about it. [00:47:47] S0: So you just kept them?
00:47:47 · Henrique Dubugras, Jack Zhang
[00:47:47] S0: So you just kept them? [00:47:48] S1: Yeah. Just kept them and just generating cash flow. [00:47:51] S0: Makes [00:47:51] S1: sense. Yeah. But I stopped doing any new real estate projects. I was just, like, maintaining the existing ones. [00:47:56] S0: At this point, you didn't have any financial worry either. You knew you could, like, always have money from these businesses and, you know, it's okay to quit your job and... [00:48:03] S1: Yeah. So it was quitting a job was not not that hard, but I feel deeply insecure because I wasn't achieving anything. [00:48:11] S0: That's so interesting. And so then you started AirWallax to solve the problem you're having in these businesses. Exactly. So how do you meet your cofounders? [00:48:20] S1: College. My cofounder Max and Jacob all all... [00:48:25] S0: How many co founders do you have? [00:48:27] S1: I have three. Well, actually, four, technically. [00:48:32] S0: So four including you or excluding you? Excluding me. Okay. So five founders still. [00:48:36] S1: So five founders. There's Max, who is like our head of product design, who I started the coffee shop, the real estate, you know, everything together. We've just been just working together. And Jake Cope, my CTO [00:48:48] S0: That was a guy that didn't [00:48:49] S1: work with failed five times in China and moved to Australia when I started AirWallox. And there's another guy called Kellogg, who is an Aussie that I met at work. So, he's like the smallest co founder. We gave him 5% of the company when we started.
00:48:49 · Jack Zhang, Henrique Dubugras
[00:48:49] S1: work with failed five times in China and moved to Australia when I started AirWallox. And there's another guy called Kellogg, who is an Aussie that I met at work. So, he's like the smallest co founder. We gave him 5% of the company when we started. [00:49:06] S0: Was it hard to decide how much each kept in a percentage? [00:49:11] S1: I didn't know anything about how to run a business, but the thing I know is that from I grew up is that you always need to share a fair amount of interest and upside with people you work with. I don't know how I understand it. I'm just naturally intuitive about it, and I just share half the company with my co founders. So I basically, when I started the company with Max and Jacob, was like, okay, you guys 25% Then we diluted together to give Kellogg 5%. So he's more like a first employee slash last co founder. And Lucy is actually a very interesting story. So when we started a coffee shop, you know, we... You know, I was working in a bank. The coffee shop was literally downstairs from my bank, so I can come down to drink coffee. And that's kind of why we started in a location because I know the location so well, so I know there's underserved population of specialty coffee, and I know the traffic's... You know? [00:50:07] S0: It's... Because you're working there already.
00:50:07 · Henrique Dubugras, Jack Zhang
[00:50:07] S0: It's... Because you're working there already. [00:50:09] S1: Yeah. Work there. I know the the location. I know it's a very good place. And we were drinking coffee one day on the Friday afternoon, and this girl called Lucy just showed up in a coffee shop and resigned from her investment banking job in Hong Kong and China and wanted to return to Australia. And that was the first time I met her, and she asked me, you know, what do. I said, you know, I work in a bank and blah blah blah. She's like, oh, why don't we have dinner? So she's friends with Max. And we just went to have dinner the first time. And during the dinner, she asked me, you know, are you... What are you doing? Blah blah blah. Are you going to expand the coffee shop? Was like, actually, we're going to resign to start a company called AirWallet to do global money movement. And she's just like, oh, tell me more about it, and then we'll just talk about it. And then she's like, how are going to do it? I was like, oh, we're going to go back to Hong Kong and raising venture capital. And she's like, how much money are you raising? I was like, oh, I'm going to raise 1,000,000 or $2,000,000 and maybe start with a million. And then she's like, why don't I give you $2,000,000 for 40% of the company that you don't need to raise anymore? I mean, this is like a 20 you know, three, 24 year old girl that you met the first time. [00:51:20] S0: And you had money from family?