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?
00:51:20 · Henrique Dubugras, Jack Zhang
[00:51:20] S0: And you had money from family? [00:51:22] S1: I didn't know at that time, right? So basically, this is on Friday, and then she just keep talking about it and getting a bit serious. She's like, hey, why don't we just meet up in law school back in Melbourne Uni tomorrow morning at eight and we talk about this seriously? So she basically had a few million dollars from her parents and her husband's parents, and they want to buy a property in Melbourne. So this is the money that they want to use to buying properties. And then we basically talked from eight to eleven ish, and even her husband really against her investing us. And we basically got a verbal term sheet agreed. She will invest $1,000,000 at $5,000,000 post for twenty percent of the company. And on Monday before... This is all before I even started a company. I haven't even resigned. On Monday, '11 I got a million US dollar wire to my personal bank account. [00:52:15] S0: That's [00:52:15] S1: crazy. There was nothing signed. No company incorporated. [00:52:18] S0: That's crazy. [00:52:19] S1: This is like a girl I met the first time. [00:52:22] S0: Insane. And that wasn't your first million, though. Right? Because none of that was your money. It was company money, but, like, you had made more than 1,000,000 at this point.
00:52:22 · Henrique Dubugras, Jack Zhang
[00:52:22] S0: Insane. And that wasn't your first million, though. Right? Because none of that was your money. It was company money, but, like, you had made more than 1,000,000 at this point. [00:52:28] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I made a lot more than 1,000,000, but I... Number one, you know, I don't think I can take the money out because of my my relationship with my my ex. And and, also, it's a lot risky, but the the probability of the money gonna be disappear. So I wasn't prepared to putting up, like, a million US dollar into the business. [00:52:45] S0: Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. So she invested, and and then how... But, you know, did she come work for the company? Like, how did that work? [00:52:51] S1: Yeah. Because I feel kinda bad that, you know, I took her money, then I was like, what about if this goes to zero? And, like, maybe I can invite her to work for the company so that even went to the zero, and... Which is 99% of the chance. And she at least knows that we worked, like, 200% so that we're not, like, wasting her money. [00:53:12] S0: And did you actually believe it kinda, you know, more more likely than not was gonna go to zero, or in your heart you thought it was gonna work? [00:53:19] S1: 99% of the chance it's gonna go to zero. [00:53:21] S0: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. [00:53:23] S1: Because I have no idea how to do this thing. You know? [00:53:26] S0: Yeah. Okay. So, you you know, you raised the money. And what was the first product or first insight?