The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN

Thanks, Harry. It’s a great pleasure to join this show.

I came to Australia when I was, I guess, 15 ish. And this, I went basically to start high school and my family basically lost most of the money and I lost financial support when I was 16. And I had to basically figure out how to survive in a foreign country by myself. That’s why I started working in a restaurant, working in a lemon factory. You worked in a lemon factory? Yeah, that’s during summer. You know, I go basically take a few hours of train and buses to get on the mountain every day and to literally carrying lemon, you know, thousands of lemon boxes a day under the, you know, 40 degrees and for two hours a day without even eating lunch.

They actually pay okay. They pay like $14 Aussie an hour. And because you kind of can work over the twenty hours limit during the holiday, and it’s actually a pretty decent income. But it’s just a really, really tough job. We

Well, guess it’s a situation that you don’t have a choice. You know, I left China where I was born and, you know, come to Australia. By that time, I was already in Australia for over a year. I couldn’t go back to China to do the exam to the universities because I wouldn’t be that competitive anymore. I don’t even know how to return to the education system by that time. And literally you have to figure out how to survive and how to pay for the tuitions, which is very expensive for international students.

I remember it’s 24,000 a year. And you have to, you know, figure out the living expenses. You know, I have to do my part, just really work as many jobs as possible to figure out how to live on my own.

Yeah, so I went to University of Melbourne and that’s where I met with my three co founders and I also worked different jobs throughout the college and I was working in a restaurant as a dishwasher, working in a Westing Hotel as a bartender. I basically worked like between four to 11:30 in a bar, and once that’s finished, I started working at a petrol station from midnight to 8AM. So I literally work sixteen hours straight, four, five days a week. What were you doing in the petrol station?

That’s just doing overnight shift and sitting there doing cashing the people paying the petrol and selling lollies. And to

You know, like, you go to petrol station and be like, oh, you know, do you wanna just, you know, pay for $5 for three chocolate and, you know, that type of stuff? That’s me.

I met one out of the three co founders when I got into University of Melbourne, so the first year. So we went to basically the same faculty, and we all started computer science. My CTO, Jacob, he’s like one year older than me, but like 100 times smarter.

I mean, they spend most of the time playing DOTA and then competing against each other, and I was pretty suck at playing DOTA, to be fair. And I was literally you know, I spent most of my time working, little time in a university. Know, I kind of just try to spend as much as I can. But, know, I wasn’t like the best student in my college. To my high school, I was like the top, top student of the school, where at university, was just like an average student because I just didn’t spend enough time to study.

So I started a magazine called Urban Exploration when I was back in high school. I was like thirteen, fourteen, together with the student in the sort of student society. And everyone’s obviously working for free. And, you know, we need to raise money for student funding. And I need to figure out how to do that. And we were essentially going to the restaurants and, you know, computer shops and stuff around the school to raise money. They were like, oh, why don’t you just send some flyer up just for $2 per person and give you some money?

But we kind of nobody wanted to take flyers, you know, like who cares? So that we thought we might just write something more interesting and put those ads for those restaurants in the essentially, the magazine or booklet we created. And then hopefully that people will be interested to take it, right? So but because we write quite interesting stories, like student love stories, how to play like Counter Strike, and because the school that we were in are the best schools and we write really interesting stories and that magazine just got viral because we kind of printed out of the school for free and we didn’t have any costs and we have very limited print and everyone kind of want a copy of it.

And I think over like a year and a half, we got like 8,000 merchants that putting ads magazine, and we actually made decent amount of money. And then obviously we kind of donated to the school. Kind of a massive early success in my, I would say, I grew up, you know, before I came to Australia.

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? You know, 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?

did one hundred hours a week for about twenty years, dude.

Well, I kind of look

I

enjoy those jobs, right? So when I was working in the lemon factory, you know, under the 40 degrees sun and carrying these boxes or washing dishes, I mean, I’m thinking about one day, you know, don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do a real proper job. I want to write a code.

I think that you have different phases in life, right? So that’s kind of why I started Airwallex. 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. And 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.

Sorry, you

Tell

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. Dude, how the fuck did you see that?

It’s actually pretty easy. You know, you think about it, right? Tell me you need You 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. Sellers. And you know, was and at one stage, 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 forty-fifty apartments, you know, forty-fifty million Aussie dollar project. You know, I wasn’t from time involved or anything, but that’s kind of the direction So you we just

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 like 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 companies get created.

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 kind of leading to the whole founding story of Airwallex.

Well, took me a decade, right? I started when I was I mean, if you count in the early days, I mean, more than a decade, right? You started washing dishes and petrol station and lemon factory, then you go from there to import and exporting. You go from trading, you go from architecture, real estate and coffee shop. I mean, all that kind of leads to is a bigger idea that you feel passionate about.

I always knew I love technology. That’s why I keep my code I keep my job writing code even though I’m making 10 times the money on the site. So I never resigned. I never thought about resigning because I need to write code every day so I feel that one day when I actually want to start a business, I can still creating something. You know, when we running the corporate business, the idea was not really running the COVID business. The initial idea was that, okay, we need to basically I would look at like, in Australia, there’s a biggest telco called Telstra.

And Telstra publishing the fastest 50 growing company every year in Australia. And more than half those companies are retail businesses, like burger chain or coffee chain or some sort of these retail chains. And I started like a burger chain, I started like a coffee chain. I mean, when I say chain, it’s only just really one business at a time and was supposed to become a chain. But during that setting up process, the first problem we found is that there’s no Square equivalent in sort of 2013.

The whole point of sales, payments, order management in the back of the kitchen, the ordering system, the delivery system, nothing was really set up. So I was like, I should start basically a square, plus the whole kind of backend order management system. And I pitched the idea to my CTO, Jacob, and I was like, Dude, let’s do something together. I think this is a real opportunity. And at that time also, the touch payment started sort of changing the consumer payment behavior. Was like, let’s build something that can support NFT payments and let’s go into build this point of sale system and payment system for offline merchants.

And he’s like, Oh, no, no, like I think QR is going to take over the world. I mean, because he at the time started a company in China in AI, and he just started the AI business ten years too early. And he’s like, I don’t believe this whole AFC thing. He’s like, QR is going to take over the world. We should build a QR thing. And I was like, nobody using QR. I never heard of this thing. I mean, is a very China thing. And I don’t think so.

And then we kind of just debated, then we end up just can’t agree on that idea, then we let it go. I mean, that could be another billion dollar startup in 2013. And we’ll just keep building the coffee business. And halfway through, and when we launched the coffee business, then we were essentially importing beans from Brazil, from, you know, Indonesia, and, you know, importing packages from China. And payment is a real issue. And my co founder’s name is Max Li. The same name is on the OFAC blacklist.

So whoever that he’s sending a payment using his personal name, because at that time, you know, we’re still using personal name to sending money around the world. And his name his payment just got blocked somewhere in the middle because it’s going through the SWIFT network and bounced back after two months. And he just keep complaining to me, you know, like, why I’m sending a payment to look at Brazil and take like two months for the payment to come back? And I really look in under the holders like, what is this SWIFT thing that built in the 1970s?

And how does SWIFT works, right? So if you’re sending money from, say, Net West to a bank in Brazil, like a small bank in Brazil that, you know, they’re not going to have a bilateral relationship. Essentially, they go through the SWIFT network. There’s a lot of intermediary, the large global banks that have dominated that kind of relationship. So essentially, NetWise will go to Barclays, Barclays go to Citi, Citi go to Itau Wu, and Itau will go to this smaller bank in Brazil. And it’s like everything the smaller the country it is, the more counterparty in the middle go involved and they charge a higher fee and slow down the process.

And there’s a more complicated compliance process because, you know, the SWIFT messages only contain 140 characters. You can’t really pull out information to reduce false positive. And I was just like, this just doesn’t make any sense. Why this thing being existed for fifty years and processing trillion dollar every day? Why can’t we fundamentally build a new system to help people to moving money, just like you moving information, like in data. If the data on the internet is real time, why money is not? Essentially, it’s data.

It’s a ledger, right?

Well, I mean, it’s it’s still dominating the payment world today.

Initially, I thought, let’s just do point to point. Right? If you have like people who want to send in money from Australia to Brazil and you have, you know, people from Brazil who want to send in to Australia, and you can kind of just net it off. Right? And that’s the initial idea we raised our seed round. But when we actually build the algorithm and we realize the amount of volume we needed to make that take off, you know, it’s like billions of billions, right? And it was just never going to work.

I don’t even know how to get, you know, a 100,000,000 volume. Where do I get the billings? And then end of the day, we just, we raise the money.

Well, is another funny story. So when I was doing the COVID business and I was thinking about starting Airwallex at the time, and one day I just finished work on Friday. I went to the coffee shop to catch up with Max, you know, another co founder of Airwallex, and I said, I’m going to resign. Let’s just do this seriously. And I met a girl who is a friend of Max called Lucy, who just resigned from as an investment banker and wanted to get married and have a family in Australia and just sort of heated up with her.

And she’s kind of curious about the coffee business. She’s like, oh, I want to talk to you more about coffee business and maybe I can invest in this coffee business. And then like we said, oh, let’s just grab dinner, right? So we grabbed dinner and then she’s like and then, you know, blah, blah, coffee business. I was like, actually, you know what? I’m actually going to really stop keep investing in this coffee business. I’m going to start a new business that really revolutionizing cross border payments and fundamentally changing how money moves around the world.

And then she’s like, Oh, tell me more about it. And, you know, because I was like, Oh, I have a background in FX, and I’m an engineer, and my co founder was like a genius engineer. You know, I made a pitch. And she’s like, How much money are raising? I’m like, Oh, I’m probably going to raise 1,000,000 US. And she’s like, What about if I give you 2,000,000? You know, this is a girl that you met for the first time in your life, and you only talked for like less than an hour.

And then she’s like offering you $2,000,000 I was like, for how much of the company? She’s like, I’ll give you $2,000,000 for 40% of the company. Initially I was my reaction was like, should I take it serious? But then she’s let’s really kind of have a deeper conversation in law school tomorrow. So law school is from University of Melbourne because she also went to University of Melbourne. So all four of us went to the same college. She’s like, let’s meet at like 08:00 tomorrow and we’ll go deep on this.

I’m like, Okay. So and I feel that she’s serious. So we went to the law school and I remember Saturday, this is like the second day I met her and she basically negotiated with me for three hours by 11:00 and then we agreed that she’s going to invest a million because I don’t want her own 40 percent of the company, she’s going to invest a million dollar and $5,000,000 post for 20% of the company. And her husband was there strongly against it. And then she’s like, we’re going to use this money to buy houses and we’re going to, you know, have a family.

You know, what are you doing? She’s like, I’m king and I actually wanted to join these guys. And, you know, and she just pushed us through and we just end up agreed verbally that we’re going to do the deal. The crazy thing is, this is before even I resigned from my full time job in ANZ, and this is before I even have a company registered. Then like by Monday, I got a text message from my bank account. Like, you got a million US dollar wire to your personal bank account.

Like, obviously, I’ll give her the bank account, but like I just didn’t expect that she would just wire without anything signed.

Yeah. And I, you know, that took like months.

So like literally I got the money three days over the weekend after the first time I met her. And that ended up probably one of the best investment people ever made. I mean, is like a girl that, I don’t know, 25 years old or 24, and never made any investment. This is her first investment.

it’s it’s crazy.

I think she made a few other investments and then didn’t turn out to be good afterwards, and I think she stopped investing.

I resigned. I literally got the money and I resigned the same day.

Yeah. And I there’s a fifth co founder, which is Kellogg, and I used to work together. I basically, you know, like, kind of forced him to resign because he was, like, got three kids, you know, like a lot of obligation. And he’s the best one of best engineers I know and we worked together in National Australia Bank. And so basically me, Max, and Lucy, we just like went to the downstairs of the Net Building. Was like, we’re not going to leave until you resign. So go resign.

And she was stuck there for two hours talking to his manager, which is also my previous manager. And I was like, I know that you’re going get returned because you’re of the best engineers they ever had. But, dude, we’re not gonna leave until you resign, whatever that time is. So go go fucking get resigned.

Yeah. I mean, like and also, like, early days, I also went, like, all in. Right? I just we just live in, like, a 10 square meter office. We sleep in a sleeping bag, and we’re just working there twenty hours a day running cold.

Yeah. Me and Max and Jacob, three of us literally obviously, kind of hard for Lucy, the girl, to fit in. But three of us will literally and Max, actually four of us, and we’ll we’ll just, like, leave in the office.

And then raising money, because I don’t think the million is enough.

Yeah. So we we raised another $2,000,000 from a VC in Hong Kong because all the all the VCs kind of rejected me in Australia. It was only three VC. It’s so funny, though. Let’s just go to that. Sorry.

Yeah. Basically, I went out to pitching the idea of building a new foreign exchange and money movement network. A lot of people think I’m crazy. And one of the VCs actually believed in and actually wanted to write a check and lead the round. But I think one of the founders of the VC, that is Matrix Partners, and they give the term sheet they signed and they took it back. Yeah, so they basically said, I had a call with the founder after they signed the term sheet and they were like, oh, I don’t think this algorithm thing going to work and that’s not a defensibility anyway.

And yeah, so they basically took it aback.

That was $10,000,000 post. So $2,000,000 $8,000,000 pre. And I literally like rejected all the other VC already by that time, and the only one I haven’t rejected is Golby VC and from Hong they end up putting $1,000,000 and plus other smaller VCs that are putting the $2,000,000 together.

Yes. I mean, they should have closed the deal as they signed the term sheet.

is like one of the most famous VCs in Asia.

Yeah. They didn’t even wanted to meet me. They didn’t wanna meet you? No. So I didn’t even get a meeting. I just got an email. So funny, both VCs rejected me. Now it’s on Airwallex cap table.

Yes, they invested in a $6,200,000,000 valuation.

No, so Square Peg invested in Series A plus Okay. Essentially that’s, you know, saved us from dying. So there’s like three times that we almost died, and that’s the second time that we almost run out of money. Square Peg invested it. And but Blackbird and Airtree was the two largest VC in Australia together with Square Peg, they’re three biggest VC. Yeah, but Airtree and Blackbird rejected us multiple times, and they now joined they wrote the largest check at $6,200,000,000 ever in our history.

I think he was.

No. But, like, I I think we we had, like, you know, I love John and we had a great conversation, but you know, I guess for whatever reason I didn’t invest. I

VC now on the side, right? I have a VC called Capital forty nine, and wouldn’t invest in myself. I think that’s crap. Was

Because if I heard that You know who asked that?

At Series C, Yuri Miller from DST asked me. That’s why Yuri is Yuri. But dude, your product doesn’t matter. That’s crazy. So that’s another crazy story. Basically, I basically first time with you, meet YoY and we talked to, like I talked to the partner about the business obviously because that’s Series C and that’s straight after I reject the Stripe acquisition offer and YoYo basically didn’t ask me anything about my personal, about my business. He just asked me a bunch of stuff how I grew up. And after that, they were like, we’re gonna invest at $1,100,000,000 a $100,000,000.

So I was like, literally, like, within two hours, we grade the term. It’s crazy.

But like, you wouldn’t volunteer, like, to pitch your story that before people ask you. You know what I mean?

Well, you’re asking the right question now, maybe.

At that time, you know, I think I was you know, Sequoia and and sort of Tencent and and Mastercard led them on Series A. And Series C, got like because we just rejected like acquisition offer from Stripe for close to $1,200,000,000 and that was a big thing. And we got term sheet from like Hohen, from Goldman, wanted to lead, you know, a billion dollar round. And the term was not the best. And from Sequoia, China at the time, and basically don’t want me to take the deal, because he’s the one that recommend me not to take the Stripe deal.

He still said, you know, you should just make the right decision for yourself and for the company. And NIO Shen introduced me to two companies. He introduced me to Zhang Ling Fu from DST, and he introduced me to Scott from Tiger. You know, I had a chat with both, and DST ended up leading the round.

I mean, it’s it’s a weird meeting. I mean, imagine you are Series C, you raise that above a billion dollar, and all you really care about is how you grow up. It’s kind of weird, right? And they give you literally a verbal term sheet on the spot. It’s also kind of weird.

mean,

just saw there’s crazy people willing to bet on people at that point at billion dollar valuation.

the money we raised from the first 3,000,000 from Lucy, the other VCs really kind of drawing up that when we try to build this peer to peer algorithm, which is never going to work. And we kind of know that. And then we were like, oh, we need like basically doing the hard way. We really need plug our FX engine to an interbank liquidity, you know, whether the Goldman or GP or like, obviously Goldman or GP not going to take my course. And we kind of need to build a, getting licenses everywhere around the world, you know, connect to the local clearing infrastructure one by one.

You know, it’s going to be like a hard, but that seems the only way we can do it. And we basically pivoted at that point that is I cold called Macquarie. 8AM, I remember, then I cold called a guy who took like overnight shift in Macquarie to cover the markets, because FX is 24 by seven twenty four by 5.5 markets, right? Tom took the call from Macquarie. He’s like a junior guy, can only work on like a night shift at a time. And he was about to finish work at eight And he took my call and somehow, I mean, I pitched him, he got him excited.

And he’s willing to invest a whole team of engineers from Macquarie Bank to connect me to the interbank market so that I able to get sub, you know, two basis point of liquidity from a cost point of view. So I can even build my FX engine by streaming prices. You know, for the first couple of years, our FX price was literally trading back to back to Macquarie. Because normally for the interbank liquidity, you can’t trade, you know, sub 500,000 or million bucks, right? So that’s how you kind of trade on the interbank.

And I able to convince Macquarie to build me a product that you can even trade $20 at a, you know, two basis point cost price. Wow. That cold cold worked. I remember even like after Series A when we raised $13,000,000 from Sequoia and Tencent and stuff and Mastercard, I went to pitch to Barclays. A friend I used to work together, I met him in Hong Kong and I sit in one side of the boardroom, which is like a five meter long, you know, table. He want to sit on the other side of the boardroom.

And I was like, Dude, what is happening? And I made a pitch. He’s like, Oh, you know, come to talk to me when you have like a billion volume.

Thanks. Yeah, that’s helpful. I’m like, Dude, like, well now, you know, Barclays is a great partner, but, you know, we only start working together when I have like $10,000,000,000 volume or something, you know? And Tom, the guy who took my Coca Cola, now is the head of distribution in Macquarie.

No. And I got the FX engine, build it out, and I need, like, a bunch of payment rails. So I connect to a bunch of, you know, aggregators initially because I need the coverage, and then I even connect to Currency Cloud who ultimately become a competitor later. Essentially, connect to a bunch of competitors ultimately to get me the coverage of the network. And have the product going, but in terms of the customer we want to target to, we’re initially targeting SMEs in Australia. We just never really figured out what the product is.

We built like an invoicing product to allow SME to sell around the world to get paid through a payment link and then by kind of integrating with a bunch of payment service providers. And we just never really get product market fit on that product. It’s because the acquisition is too high of SMBs and we never really got product market fit. At that point, we kind of know we need to raise more money, otherwise we’re going to be dead. So we basically went to raise money from Sequoia and Tencent with a product we know it’s going to fail.

So basically I have a product that’s working, right? I know it’s not going to have product market fit, but I need more money to figure out what the product market fit is. And I basically went to pitch for Sequoia and Tencent, And I wanted the idea is actually to pivot the product to API product to servicing Tencent to kind of power WeChat Pay global settlement. So you know when Chinese tourists come to London Airport, they will pay using WeChat. In some way, it will settle the merchants doing the FX on the back of that.

And we were thinking we can do a lot better over the SWIFT network, and we can do a lot better than Tencent Treasury Department. And the idea is to maybe that’s an opportunity to pivot and leveraging Tencent’s volume to grow the business. And then knowing that the SME product probably going to fail because we haven’t we only got like 100 customers by that time. And we were raising at a $60,000,000 valuation with no revenue.

Well, pitched a vision. I pitched a vision of building the largest payment network in the world, alternative to SWIFT. And that fundamental infrastructure is going to be so important and that’s going to take years to build. That’s why we don’t have any revenue.

And then, obviously, I pitched Tencent the same time, and I told Sequoia, Tencent might wanna lead the round and kind of play the, you know, the kind of competition game. And and Sequoia be like, yeah. If Tencent’s, like, co leading the round, we’re in. But then like Tencent did all the IC and everything past IC. At one point, I was super happy this is going to be done. And the founder of Tencent said, you know, just go through like a normal corporate approval process, and the founder of Tencent didn’t approve.

After three months process, RCO passed, he just basically is like because the idea is that this is going to help Tencent to do global WeChat Pay settlement. And then Pony, the founder, was like, why can’t we do it ourselves internally? I mean, why like a 10 people startup can do a better job than us? Know, like we have hundreds of thousands of engineers. And then the investment team didn’t know what to say. So

So basically that was just stalled, the deal was stalled and Sequoia was not willing to invest until Tencent kind of make a decision and are basically running out of money. The Tencent investment team was just super helpful. They were like, you have one opportunity to pitch to either the president, Martin Liao, or James Mitchell, the chief strategy officer. These are the two people who can convince the founder of Tencent to invest, to kind of basically approve the deal. And I basically waited for almost three months to able to have a time slot to meet with James and Martin.

And I remember, like, I basically met with James Mitchell in Hong Kong in 01/05/2017. And I told my team, you know, this would be the most important meeting of my life. And I test the product, everything until like 3AM. And I kind of told my CTO nothing can go wrong during the meeting. I went to pitch, and it’s so funny that James actually was at Goldman before. And he did the RPO of PayPal. And he remember a majority of the revenue of PayPal actually coming from cross border payments.

And he kind of didn’t really need me to convince him that much. And he kind of sort of convinced him this is like a large enough market and this is a good guy to kind of chasing the opportunity. And he’s like, Oh, why don’t I just take a look at your product? I was like, Yeah, let’s do that. And I demoed the invoicing product, which I know is going to fail, not going to have product market fail. But it’s a working product, right? It’s a prototype leveraging the same the infrastructure is the same.

And I got a four zero four on the spot when I clicked the pay button. And my face just went like blue. And I dodged it. I was like, maybe the link was blocked by the Tencent firewall. Maybe it is, maybe it’s not. I mean, we never actually found it out because at that time, the PSP we are using under the HOD also had some bugs. You know, we didn’t know if it’s the error caused by the underlying PSP was all caused by really the Tencent firewall.

We never know. And he loved it? What happened with that? No, he’s just like, Oh, you know, it doesn’t matter. And then he actually went ahead and I thought it’s like a gone, the deal. But he actually went to commence pony to invest. So we got the investment the day after that.

And then, obviously, you know, Sequoia and and then Mastercard also came in with Tencent.

Well, I mean, this is Series A, right? This is not a seed round. This is Series A. Normally people will have product market fit and have zero revenue. So the idea was that Tencent is to give me revenue. And Mastercard was also in the round and Mastercard is supposed to give me revenue as well. So Sequoia’s revenue conviction are based on to the other investor, which is Tencent and Mastercard, supposed to be the two biggest, largest customer for us.

I would say the second one, because the first one was, you know, the VC that kind of supposedly invest, together with Lucy, they didn’t wire the money until like five months later after they signed the term sheet. So they were basically like, show me the demo, show me the demo before they wired the money. I mean, is like 2015, so the market is a bit I don’t I think, you know, it would be a bad thing for any VC to do that today. It is, but it’s not that long ago.

I bought out that investor in this round, by the way. I’m very happy about it.

No. As I said, I mean, we we supposed to have, you know, Mastercard and Tencent as a customer. The Tencent deal took me three years after that point. It’s big corporate, right? It just take a long time. The same thing from the WeChat pay department. They were like, why can’t we build it ourselves? So they end up built like essentially what Airwallex built themselves and only using us as one of the liquidity providers. So that was really not the product we want to sell to them.

And we just become like one of vendors they have together with JPMorgan and other liquidity providers. And Mastercard’s supposed to give us a billion dollar volume from the Mastercard Send product, but we got less than a million dollar. And it’s just so much high risk transaction at the time. We had to literally offboard that part of the business.

Essentially, is like the third year I’m starting the company. Like 2015 started. Like I started a bit late, like December 2015. So 2016, the peer to peer algorithm failed. The invoicing also failed in 2017. And 2017, I raised the money from the Series A and started pivoting the product to an API driven product to sell to large enterprises for kind of global money movement. And then Tencent and Mastercard are supposed to be the customer, and we build a product for a whole year, we end up not getting any customers.

And then we’re running out of money again because we were very aggressive hiring. And so by end of twenty seventeen, we’re also running out of money. That’s where Square Peg came in. So I started the business one of the inspirations is because of the founder of Square Peg. And he also one of the most famous entrepreneur in Australia, he started one of the biggest tech company in Australia called seek.com.au, which is like the largest job marketplace in the world at one point. He was the idol of any entrepreneur in Australia, right?

So I admired him for a long time. And Paul reached out, said, we like to have a conversation. And we really kind of had a great conversation. He liked the vision, the mission of the company, and he ended up leading a Series A extension. Another $6,000,000 essentially gave us the bracing room to really take off the business.

To build an alternative to SWIFT, the largest global payment On the

Yeah, and that we’re able to sell to other businesses other than Tencent and Mastercard, like a lot of tech companies basically And they started adopting. They started off. And that we got like a few companies that sending tuition payment around the world. And they are massive, right? So we went from zero to a billion dollar transaction volume within like nine months.

This is January 2018. We onboarded that customer. And January 2018, we also onboarded Shein. So, you know, I wish I have invested Shein at the time. They were like a serious big company. And I just really just have these two massive customers that I’m riding on top of them go global.

Yeah. I remember, like, one day, Shein basically need to pay suppliers in China, and they gave us $20,000,000 And our partner in China was the supplier for Shein. And he’s basically saying that volume got lost between two of their customers, right? So from Shein using them directly to using us, and we’re still using them under the hood, right? But obviously, we do the FX and they just do the last mile payment because they have the license in China. We didn’t. They were like, no, we’re not going to do it.

We’re literally going to turn your reels off, and we’re to keep Shein. And so I basically have forty eight hours to integrate with a new partner that able to pay into China. And otherwise, I was going to, you know, fuck up my biggest customer or the only customer at that time.

call our new partner. I was like, let’s fix out the legal contract later. Let’s go live on Sunday night. So we basically start integration on Friday night, worked forty hours straight, went live on Sunday night.

Yeah. Who is kind of 90% of the business at a time.

Yeah. This is like by end of twenty eighteen, we have a real business. Have not a lot, we have probably like a 100 customers, but all kind of pretty big customers.

No, before that, literally I started taking off in January by April. And then Tencent and Mastercard Tencent and Sequoia said, we want lead another round. So they basically lead at a $400,000,000 pre, they invest $80,000,000 so a $480,000,000 post. So they basically but at that time, the business had no revenue still, like a very little revenue. But the volume is like doubling, tripling every month. And we had like all the big investors backing us, right? And we got the Series B at a ridiculous evaluation, again, from the same investor, but we added a bunch of other investors.

Imagine you from near death in January 2018 to then in October 2018, Stripe reached out to buy us.

Will Gabrick, the CFO at the time, I think now he’s CPO, he reached out through Sequoia. And he said, I just want another have a conversation to see what you guys up to. And obviously, like, I’m like a huge admirer of Stripe, right? So every fintech out there will be like, you know, Stripe is the golden standard of developer friendly APIs and documentation. And I’m a huge fan of what Stripe and John have built. And I was like, oh, if I ever get a chance to talk to Stripe, yeah, I’m all in to learn, right?

The conversation with Will went really well. And then all of a sudden that Patrick reached out, wanted to catch up. At that time, we were literally setting up a developer hub in Shanghai. He said he will fly to Shanghai to see me. Yeah, so he went fly to Shanghai to literally to see me and my co founder. And we spent the whole day together.

Yeah, he flew to Shanghai. Probably the first time he went to Shanghai or second time, I don’t remember. How

We went through the product in the morning and we just talked the whole vision about the company and the future. At that time, we’re kind of thinking about going to build merchant acquiring, essentially competing with Stripe, because Stripe was not really an APAC at the time. And we already built the payout rails and FX, and the pay in is just a natural evolution of connecting the end to end part of the platform, because all our customers that are paying out to contractors, developers, suppliers, tuitions around the world that need pay in, right?

They need process online payment and offline payments, and we kind of have to do that. And then Patrick basically said, Oh, we’re going to build payout because we have all these pay ins around the world and we need to do payout and we haven’t built anything. Kind of makes sense. We either sort of work together or maybe we should buy you guys. And I was like, kind of weird, you know, like you have the best fintech company in the world that talk about potentially going to buy you.

And you literally just like one year in the business. I mean, obviously we started for more than three and a half years at a time, but the real product market fit only been like ten months. You really started even getting product market fit. So what

He said, let’s just spend more time together. So he started this whole documentation on Google Sheet and just ten, twenty pages long and asked me to make comments. So like I made comment and we just worked out. Was like, wow, the vision of the company in the next decade is kind of very much the same. We all wanted to build AWS for financial services. And obviously, is much, much ahead of us. But this is before COVID. I mean, Stripe is like a $9,000,000,000 company. It’s very similar to the scale of Airwallex today.

And then I kind of really liked Patrick, and he’s like, this guy is so smart. He’s, like, much smarter than me. Can

I mean, it’s not that the Google Doc that make me think that he’s smart. He’s just like so intellectually honest about everything. And also, he’s like able to go deep in multiple dimensions. He read about China history. You know, he knows China history more than me. And he knows about quantum physics. He knows, you know, biology. You know, all this field that I have never, like, gone into. And he’s able to talk about it for hours. And I’m just like, how can one person able to go deep in multiple dimensions?

You know, if you talk about fintech, I think I’m as good as these guys, right? But if you’re just talking about biology or quantum physics or China history, I mean, I’m a Chinese. I feel ashamed that he knows more China history than me. And it’s just like, how can you read so many books and just understanding so much? It’s like before AI, you know. How do they table a $1,200,000,000 offer? So essentially it’s complicated deal construct. Essentially it’s $800,000,000 on the cap table and $350,000,000 to me and my co founders.

And I think it’s a $50,000,000 or I think $25,000,000 to the core employees, close to 1.2, 1.11, dollars 1 point $7.05 or something.

And he invited us to San Francisco, and we had a great conversation. I kind of, at that time, I kind of almost get convinced. And he sent his whole team to Melbourne. They did like a whole week of due diligence with all the senior people from Stripe. I met with Claire, the CEO at the time, and I met with the whole team. I was really impressed. And I kind of basically said, I think we’re going to do it. But I was thinking, you know, like, it just kind of, you know, are you really going to do it on the back of your mind?

And I fly back to Melbourne, and I was working in San Francisco two weeks and tried to figure it out. I couldn’t figure it out. I mean, I was like 70% wanted to do it. But like this voice in my head is like, are you going to do it? Are you going to do it? I ultimately be like, Okay, so if I sold a business, I was I think, 34 at a time, 33 at a time. And it’s a five year lockup, right? So I’ll be close to 40 when I finish the lockup.

And what can I do, like, a 38, 39 year old?

If I knew Stripe was going get to $100,000,000,000 I mean, I would probably make at least $3,000,000,000 At that time, Stripe was going to raise the $20,000,000,000 round. We know that we probably can raise another round at a billion. It wasn’t really a valuation. Was like financial was not really what I’ve been thinking about. I said, why did you know? I grew up in, I kind of grew up in Australia. I didn’t live in a very luxury lifestyle, right? So I didn’t need any money. There’s no even like hot in the shops, right?

Billionaires and anyone that just go to the same supermarket. So it’s a very sort of socialized society. And I think with like $200, you can live a pretty good life. And I didn’t know what to do with the money anyway. That’s not what I actually thought about at the time. And I really thought about is what’s going to make me happy. And I went back to Melbourne, asked my co founders like, let’s just vote, right, because I really can’t figure it out. You know, Lucy is like, I don’t really care because my family is wealthy and I don’t need more money.

I really enjoy it. I think we should keep building. My CTO, Jacob, is like, it’s really up to you, Jack. I mean, is your mission and your vision. And we’re all here to help you. And then ultimately, it’s your call. And Max is like, I think I’m Okay to sell. I mean, like, that’s a lot of money. Good old Max. And then we were like, we couldn’t decide. And we asked our senior leadership team to vote. Surprisingly, only one people wanted to sell. Like, literally, like, 90% of people said, you know, they think we can build a bigger business.

Well, that person joined Stripe even worse.

Yes. The whole story. Yeah. I mean, we all kinda tried to hire her afterwards, and I kinda sued her, and that was a and he sued me. She sued me. That was a whole complicated story.

I mean, don’t think she’s that great anyway, so it’s kind of fine. But just she has so much proprietary knowledge of our network, and we were worried about she’s going to give it away to Stripe. That’s a long story. Yeah, mean, that’s really, I went back to Melbourne and changed my mind. I was like, I don’t think I want to be doing another start at 01:38. I think I’m going to give it a shot on this one and put all my life into it. And that’s it.

So one thing that really inspired me from talking and spending time with Patrick is that I said, oh, what’s a long term thing for Stripe or for yourself? Are you going to be here forever or blah, blah, blah? And then Patrick just said to me that he’s going to build Stripe for the next twenty, thirty, forty years. And I’ve just never heard like a founder told me people were dedicated their entire life to building a business. That was so inspiring to me. That’s what I want to do, you know?

It’ll build a real economic infrastructure that changed the world, impacting millions of businesses growing on the internet or growing globally.

Yeah. And we’ve got the money from DST, so we’ve another $100,000,000 and a bunch of other investors. When you raise a

and I didn’t understand what that means at the time. I don’t know what is financial discipline. So I don’t have a budget. I’m just like hire as fast as possible, blow it all up. And realized at one point that we’re running out of money. Like, I was like Yeah, you didn’t

Yeah. And we went from like, I think like 100 something people to like 600 or 700 people like in a year. And then I realized our volume grow, but our revenue didn’t grow as fast. We kind of really need to raise another round. And we also the vision kind of started evolved after Series C. After rejecting Stripe offer, I’m like, Okay, we’re going to compete in long term. And, you know, I mean, obviously, Stripe is a payment lab business. We are banking lab business. But at that time, we’re not a banking business yet, right?

We’re just like a global money movement infrastructure. We were like, Okay, we need to become a true global new bank. And then we need to build our card issuing infrastructure so we can issue corporate card. We need to build merchant acquiring infrastructure so we can handle the payment side of the money flow as well. So we basically need to evolve from a single product company to a multi product company, an end to end platform with infrastructure and software to supporting global businesses. I basically put most of the money out of the $100,000,000 to build this new product and not investing in the existing product.

And that is the biggest bet I made. Essentially, you’ve been investing like more than half the money you raise onto the product that you’re not going to have any revenue for the next three or four years.

I kind of realized once we sort of reject the Stripe offer, and ultimately we’re going to compete, it kind of scares me that if I don’t invest fast enough, ultimately, you know, we just don’t have a role to play.

Well, we kind of did two things. We went all in to international expansion. So we started opening offices in The UK, in The US, and everywhere. And that kind of took to be a disaster because we kind of didn’t have product market fit in any of these places. And then that international expansion basically just failed.

Yeah. We’re not hiring fast enough. We’re not building product enough. We don’t have a real product in The UK, but we hired a bunch of teams here.

Pretty quick. I mean, you just don’t have any revenue because nobody gonna buy your product.

Yeah. I didn’t cut. I basically keep going. And because we had an infrastructure here, we needed people to manage in the infrastructure, and we keep trying. And a lot of the people I hired, like, are my friends.

Yeah. Took me three years to get PMF in The UK. Wow. That’s a lot of money. Well, I mean, it’s a small team, and then we also churn a lot of people. So that was the mistake I made. When you say that was a mistake you made,

We also didn’t have the product. I think we just hired too early, and also, like, we don’t really know what sort of people to hire. It’s kind of a combination of both.

I’m a product engineer. I really have no idea how to build a commercial organization. And all we did is selling to large enterprises, right? But we have a lot of VC network in APAC. And when I come to UK, I don’t have the VC network. I don’t really know how to sell to large enterprises. I don’t have any VC network here. No one opened a door for me, and we just couldn’t really sell the product. The vision really evolved from a single product company to a multi product company.

But that evolved to three and a half years to get the initial product market fit. Just during that three and a half years, we are too aggressive in international expansion while we don’t have a good product.

Yes.

Yeah. What happened? And we’re running out of money again.

Yeah. And I’m at SoftBank, and I was like, okay, so SoftBank was the gold in VC. This is 2019. Okay. And I fly all the way to London in October 2019, and SoftBank going to lead the round. And this WeWork stuff happened. And they stopped investing, and they did all the work, but the partner going to invest in us got fired. And I literally in a situation we’re going to kind of die again if I’m not able to raise money.

Basically, I would have convinced the existing investor to give me a lifeline of convertible notes. So DST and Tencent led the convertible notes. Wow. So we raised essentially, I think, 70,000,000 to $100,000,000 kind of a convertible. But the idea is that we’re able to raise another round straight after that. And I need to find an alternative to SoftBank. And Heydosofia is the answer. So Ian from Heydos that led our Series D to kind of get us going. But the funny thing is that COVID happened in 2020.

When we signed in the SPA, because we have a business in China, we know that the virus is taking off. And this is like February 2020. And we were literally going through this due diligence stuff. And everyone’s sort of the investors start asking me, what is this COVID thing? I didn’t know how to answer the question because I was like, this is going to be really, really bad. And I can’t say that.

knew it was really, really bad because I have employees in China, and RISE is like a shutdown the whole city and all this crazy stuff. I even wrote a text message to the prime minister of Australia to shut the border from China. I remember that the week that the day we actually the week we actually closing the Series D, The US stock market tanked more than ten percent three times. This is the first time ever happened in The US history. So the market went down 30%.

I called NIO Shen, and I was like, Do you think Yin’s going to close? And would you close if you are in this situation? And NIO told me he’s really not sure. He’s like, No one would know in this situation. It’s like never happened before. I wasn’t sure and nobody was sure, to the credit of Ian. I mean, Ian closed. What

That was, I think, 1.7. This is like the round after the convertible, so that all the people that invest in a convertible get converted to the $1,700,000,000 round.

I think was $150 Obviously, half of that is existing, and Ian put in $75 or $80 M.

He is. I mean, is a very secretive phone, and we weren’t allow to put a PR using the HydroSofia name. So you would see a bunch of investors led the Series D, but HydroSofia was not named. I think they changed the policy now.

they’re a little bit more public now. But yeah, I think Ian sit on my board and he’s one of my largest investors and not many people know about it.

Yeah. I mean, he’s been investing in the company from 2019 for like five, six rounds after that. He just keep doubling down. So I think we’re probably one of the largest investment of Hidosofia in terms of dollar amount.

I mean, 2020, obviously during COVID, our revenue went halved. That’s why we weren’t sure whether we’re going to close. Because half our revenue is from tuition and travel, right? And all this tuition What’s your revenue at that point? Stripe acquisition at that time, we were only $2,000,000 in 2018. So we went $10,000,000 in 2019, so five times the revenue in 2019, so 10,000,000. Then 2020, we had 20,000,000.

’21 that we went more than doubled again.

2020, we doubled. Right? So that’s where COVID. And 2021, we more than doubled. We’re kind of 2.5 x.

Yeah. And then crazy assent, no.

Well, I mean, from a Sequoia point of view, they invested $4.80 only for three months, and they made under double the money because the 800,000,000 on the cap table, right? Dude,

Then COVID happened, right? So that we lost half our revenue, and we were really figuring out what to do. At that time, we start getting product market fit on the SMB banking portal. You know, we build the infrastructure. We started to issuing corporate cards. We start getting the merchant acquiring thing kind of build it out, but ultimately launching 2021. The foundation of a global bank started to evolve. I was the first three, four years of just basically building the best money moving infrastructure in the world to build the next generation of a global bank, right, build the future of a global banking.

And that obviously took a lot of money, a lot of got to bet on this new product that only start generating revenue from 2022. So from 2019, 2020, 2021, there’s no revenue for all this new product. Only from 2022 they start generating revenue.

Well, the business is doubling every year from the existing product.

then 2021 happened. And I just got investor knocking on the door every single day, right? So Grand Oaks led a round in January 2021 for $2,600,000,000 Lone Pine led a round in June, July at $4,000,000,000

Yeah. We raised $400,000,000 in 2021. Like, the valuation went from 1.7 to 5.5. Like, every month I’m raising money, basically. Like, then you raise, like, three rounds. And end of twenty twenty one, SoftBank was talking to me about leading an $8,000,000,000 round. And obviously, we didn’t entertain that conversation. Do you

At that time, I know the vision is really big. How much capital is required to build a global bank? Right? It’s going to be in the balance. I just want to raise as much money as I can. And obviously, I only raised like 100 out of 5.5. I should have raised like more at a time. But I think Airwallex will be dead without 2021. We raised $400,000,000 We’re really well capitalized. The business kept doubling. And we had enough money just to keep going. And obviously, we raised a flat round in 2022 because at that time, we were burning close to $200,000,000 a year.

And we weren’t really sure how long we’re going to last. And but we weren’t profitable in ’twenty three. And I just realized that we can just keep growing the business. We keep and then even in ’twenty two, ’twenty three, we keep doubling the business. And we keep doubling the business while our headcount is not growing. So we never did a layoff. And we able to continue to grow the business more than 100%. So we basically never grow below 100% from 2015 to 2023.

Yeah. Fuck. And we’re still growing 90% year on year last quarter.

Yeah. We went to like $500,000,000 ARR in August last year, then hit like 600 in November, 700 in sort of January and February. And the business just can still grow insanely fast.

More than a billion.

Well, we raised around 6.2, like, literally when announced last week or this week.

Yeah. Why did you do that deal? Well, we started the deal end of last year. And, you know I’m so

Well, I mean, people don’t really look at Jack,

I mean, people don’t really look at revenue multiple anymore. Right? People are looking at gross profit. You know, we’re doing $450,000,000 gross profit this year, so essentially it’s, you know, 13 times of this year gross profit. I mean, it’s not bad. I mean, if you look at that, that’s kind of the same sort of multiple Stripe or, you know, the Revoluters are doing.

And I think people are on Li Shun Li don’t give you too much credit on the growth rate today. They don’t give you too much credit on the growth rate? No, I don’t think so. I think people are really looking at public market calm and, you know, because of what happened in 2021, so there’s less investors out there believe that you can grow in 90% for a long period of time. Imagine like in 2021, right, people will go burned. People all growing 100 and just went from growing 100% to like 20% in like months.

I think people just like, investors just got burned through that experience. And think people just give you less credit that you can grow at this high speed for a long period of time.

No, I’m actually buying back the Airwallex stock myself. So I actually in the process of taking a debt of $70,000,000 to buy Airwallex secondaries. No Because I just have so much confidence to the company.

with some of my co founders. Yeah, we are literally buying our own stock.

Yeah, early investors.

at a discount? We haven’t done that yet. Let’s see. Can I join?

some secondaries, not a massive amount of money, but I did.

I recommend founders take enough secondaries so that they can account for life, right? They don’t need to worry about how do they feed the family, how do they support the kids, how do they buy a house. In Melbourne, I don’t I think the living standard is much lower than London. I think in London, you need like 20,000,030 million dollars to live a very kind of comfortable life. I think that amount is right for a late stage founder. Because you just want the founder to be all in building the business rather than thinking about how to support the family, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like for a late stage founder, like, you know, above a billion dollar valuation, I think 20,000,000 to $30,000,000 is a decent amount, but it’s not like ridiculous amount that you set for your life or anything. I think it’s just good for a founder to not think about money too much, and just really focus on the vision.

I don’t like the every day of the job of a CEO, and I like I able to control the destiny of the company. And I ultimately answer to the outcome of the company, the outcome of the customer, the outcome of the employee. I wanted to have that control so I know that we are heading the right direction towards our vision. I don’t like dealing with the people issues, dealing with the policies, the procedures, and all that type of stuff.

A couple of things. Number one, I hired the first 100 people in Airwallex by myself on LinkedIn. And obviously, there’s lot of benefit doing that. But I could have hired a good recruiter just to help me to do the outreach and give him the access of my LinkedIn password. You know what I mean? I didn’t need to do that myself. Today, I could just get AI to do that. Yeah, I think get a good recruiter early on that kind of makes the hiring a lot more efficient.

Number two is that don’t over invest in international expansion when you don’t have product market fit, right? And that could really put in a lot of risk to your company. And we lucky 2021 happened, and we lucky that Ian closed around in 2020 when our revenue halved and COVID happened and stock down 30%. But I don’t think everyone is going be that lucky. So do that. And I think the other thing is just really focus on investing in the culture early.

It’s a lot of pain. The first four, five years, we hired a lot of people with a lot of great experiences. They’re from a bank, they’re from Citibank, they have built a SWIFT network before. You know, they know the thing, and they join, telling me like, you guys know nothing. What you’re going to do doesn’t work. We need to do blah, blah, blah. And none of those people worked. None of people think they know how to build a startup that worked. And ultimately, it’s not about the experience.

It’s about the competency, right? It’s about the curiosity, the determination, about the resilience, and about the belief and the vision, about the passion. And I think we should just have hired those curious, determined, optimistic people from early on, but we didn’t. So we had to like fire all of them and that is a tough, tough decision. And we really slowed down the company. We had like bad press about it. Just a lot of planning to go through.

No. I think you should always prioritize what gives you the biggest leverage. The leverage on brand, the leverage on hiring, the leveraging on commercial opportunities.

Yes. Only the top five make a difference.

Huge difference, whether I like it or not.

Ultimately, you wanted to work with the best investor, not only an investor, but also a friend and people you get along with and you like. It’s not saying I don’t like the investor in Sequoia, but just saying that you just choose the brand over the people.

I wish I have someone like Michael Morris that invests in Stripe. Like a true visionary investor supported the founder from day I think Michael Morris played a very important role of Stripe’s success, waving the flag of Stripe, early days of Silicon Valley like early days of Stripe in Silicon Valley saying, you know, John and Patrick are going to be the next Sergey Brann or Larry Page, you know, that they’re going to build a trillion dollar company, blah, blah, blah. I don’t think I had that support.

Have you met him? Yeah. I mean, Michael Morris invited me to his home and tried to convince me to sell the company.

I mean, I wish I have an investor do that for me, you know? How was that? It’s a beautiful home and there’s nice conversation. And it didn’t convince you? Well, I mean, argument makes a lot of sense that he’s saying, you know, like, I said, you know, why don’t I just keep building and maybe sell later? Like, what now? I haven’t really figured it out, you know, what I want to do with my life yet. It’s like, you know, the earlier you can compound, the faster you can build a trillion dollar business.

I mean, it kind of makes sense.

I really like Elon. I think what he has done is able to ultimately is pushing the humanity forward.

I don’t know about Revolut. I mean, that’s my competition ultimately in the future.

Make decisions knowing that more than 50% probability is going to be a wrong decision.

I don’t think I’m a great investor. I don’t really know how to assess early stage founder very well. Why do you think that is? You know, like before product market fit is really just based on people’s personality. I don’t know how to make an investment decision based on people’s personality or the history of people, right? That’s why I said I wasn’t able to invest in myself. I just haven’t seen enough data to build that confidence.

Generally, people are making decisions based on the knowledge they have. And generally, that is not the right thing to do because the biggest mistake you make is from making a decision based on the knowledge you don’t have.

I think it’s better than Melbourne. I love the global nature of London, and I’ve so far enjoyed meeting a lot of entrepreneurs. I think it’s going to be an exciting place for Do you love people living here? Yeah. Apart from it’s very expensive, you know, everything else is pretty good.

I hope we have built one of the largest global payments and banking platform to power modern businesses around the world. I hope we have built a bigger business than Citi or HSBC because when we succeeded doing that, millions of businesses around the world will benefit from the success of our mission. Public? Public or not, doesn’t matter.

Inadvertibly, we kind of all have to think about that. But right now, we’ve really head down building.

Thanks, Harry. I really enjoyed it, the conversation.