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He Turned Down $1.2 Billion From Stripe. Now His Company Is Worth $8 Billion
He Turned Down $1.2 Billion From Stripe. Now His Company Is Worth $8 Billion
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Legendas (134)
0:00
Feels a bit unreal, right? But within 12 months and you went from almost no business to, you know,
0:06
$1.2 billion acquisition offers and it's only three years into the entrepreneur journey.
0:10
And at that time, we only had $2 million revenue. So,
0:12
it's a pretty bold decision not not to proceed with the offer.
0:16
In 2018, Stripe offered to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. They said no. Seven years later,
0:23
the company is now worth $8 billion and has customers all over the world,
0:28
including Shein, Brex, McLaren Racing, and more.
0:32
But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Before the billion dollar offers and
0:36
the big name partnerships, Jack worked sixteen-hour days just to stay afloat.
0:40
Factory work, bartending, and overnight shifts at petrol stations were all means
0:45
of survival when his family could no longer support him.
0:48
Basically have to wake up five o'clock in the morning, take the first train,
0:51
then took a bus for close to an hour, then walk for another 30 minutes to the
0:55
lemon farm. I just pack them up and do that for 12 hours a day.
1:00
And in the summer, it's 40° Celsius and it's uh pretty intense.
1:04
I remember like one year the the Christmas and the train sort of stopped running because
1:09
I don't have the money or don't want to use the money to to pay for the taxis and had to,
1:14
I basically walked all night and you know by the time I got home it's like seven in the morning.
1:20
That work ethic took him far. By his 30s, he made millions
1:24
from side businesses but something was missing.
1:27
I always wanted to find something no one need to ever wake me up and I will be up every day
1:32
and feel extremely passionate and motivated uh and then willing to devote my my entire sort of
1:38
life towards and I think Airwallex is probably the the one that really kind of get me to that state.
1:45
There are three numbers to look out for in Airwall's story.
1:48
$1 million the company's first ever investment
1:52
1.2 billion, the acquisition offer from Stripe
1:55
in 2018 that the Airwallex co-founders walked away from
2:00
and $1 billion, the annualized revenue the company reached in 2025.
2:07
This is Founder Effect.
2:13
This is Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of fintech company Airwallex.
2:18
He was born in Qingdao, China and moved to Melbourne at age 15, alone.
2:23
I stayed with Australian family and really sort of taught me how to get used to the the culture.
2:29
I mean, initially the uh I don't really speak English and it took a while for me to adjust.
2:36
When his family's finances collapsed, Jack became determined to find his own footing.
2:41
I think I have two choices. Either I returned to China and try to go
2:45
back to the education system there or I continue to stay in
2:48
Australia and figured out how to pay the tuitions and uh the livings on my own.
2:53
You kind of end up working a lot of uh odd jobs and dishwashing in the restaurant, sort of
2:59
bartender doing evening shift then uh also doing overnight shift after that in a petrol station.
3:05
So, end up working 15, 16 hours a day, 5, 6 days a week and also doing pretty intensive labor work
3:12
during holidays and trying to make up the the differences in paying the tuition fees. Yeah.
3:17
On top of working long hours, Jack earned a computer science
3:21
degree from the University of Melbourne in 2007.
3:23
He entered the banking industry but quickly realized it didn't fulfill him. So,
3:27
he began building his own businesses on the side.
3:30
So I started importing job uh for textiles from from China, exporting olive oil and red wines
3:37
uh from Australia to other Asia countries and I started a real estate development company.
3:42
I was probably making a few million dollar profit a year. I always sort of wanted to
3:47
make money but that always doesn't give me the high order of happiness.
3:50
I also had a daughter when I was 30. I remember I just look at her, I'm like I haven't done
3:56
anything that make her feel proud. And yeah, I think that's the moment I'm like, I need to
4:02
stop doing these side hustles and I need to just resign from my full-time job and do something big.
4:09
One of Jack's side hustles was a coffee shop in Melbourne. Little did he know that
4:13
this cafe would serve as ground zero for what would become his multi-billion dollar idea.
4:18
I started a a coffee business very similar to Blue Bottle in in Australia and then and looking at
4:25
to create it as like a franchise. My co-founder's name is is Max Lee and he constantly wiring money
4:32
to to overseas like Brazil, Indonesia, buying coffee beans or China for buying packages.
4:38
Every time sort of wiring money out and the money just disappear for a
4:42
few months and bounce back. Also that the FX fees are really expensive. He sort of
4:47
complained to me quite a lot and I got really interested to understand what the problem is.
4:53
We tried to understand how the money moves around the world using the the the SWIFT
4:57
system which was built in the 1970s, and we thought you know why can't we build a parallel
5:02
payment system to SWIFT and fundamentally changing how money move around the world.
5:07
And that was the idea for Airwallex. In December 2015 Jack quit his full-time
5:12
banking job and pivoted away from his lucrative side hustles to go all-in on this new venture.
5:18
He brought together a group of friends, Max Lee,
5:21
Jacob Dai, Ki-lok Wong, and Lucy Liu - and together, the five of them founded Airwallex.
5:27
Lucy, one of the company's co-founders, made the company's first ever investment. Within
5:32
one week of meeting Jack, she invested $1 million into Airwallex and joined full-time.
5:38
She happened to just be visiting Max in in a in a coffee shop and uh we we sort of chatted
5:43
and but you know, this is the first time we met, so we we said, "Let's just grab dinner."
5:47
Uh and then during dinner I sort of said we're starting a new business.
5:51
She sort of started talking about investing. I was pretty shocked.
5:54
We met again the day after and we started sort of
5:57
negotiating from like 8:00 and then we basically got a deal done by by midday.
6:02
By year two the team raised a $13 million series A round backed by
6:07
investors like Tencent and HongShan Capital Group formerly known as Sequoia Capital China.
6:13
And in 2018, about three years into building Airwallex, Jack and his co-founders received
6:18
an acquisition offer from fintech company Stripe for $1.2 billion. They turned it down.
6:25
And we never thought that we can get that from the one of the best companies in the world, right?
6:29
So very intrigued, but at the same time just feel that we only just getting started. I think
6:36
ultimately we made a decision based on number one that we
6:39
feel that we haven't really achieved as entrepreneur, what we wanted to achieve.
6:44
Number two, we still feel extremely optimistic about the future of the
6:49
company. Uh and then number three that and then we decided that the
6:53
financial outcome doesn't ultimately give us the high order of happiness.
6:58
After rejecting the Stripe offer we invested over 80% the the cash
7:03
of the company to a few future products that we know that would
7:07
not generate any cash for the company for like at least three, four years.
7:11
But those new product that we built um and invested it so early on and we took
7:16
the risk and uh now that account for 60% of the company's revenue.
7:20
Despite the company's growth trajectory, Airwallex's rise wasn't without turbulence. Covid
7:26
disruptions, fundraising challenges, fraud issues and years of cash burn created major setbacks.
7:32
In 2019 we had a lot of fraud issue because we you know as a startup we didn't build enough
7:37
anti- fraud technology also Covid in in 2020 and we lost half the business in in a month.
7:42
The market was crashed after '21 and very hard to raise external funding.
7:47
We were burning almost 200 million a year in 2022 and I realized if we
7:51
don't turn profitability you know you know the market is not going to give me money anymore.
7:57
In a very tough moment and you know we were like Ah you know why didn't we take
8:01
the offer right kind of that come across of our mind a few times and looking backwards I
8:06
do believe that we made the right decision to to continue pursuing the mission ourselves.
8:11
Jack also admits to some personal missteps from poor hiring choices to premature international
8:16
expansion. These decisions ultimately strained the company and its culture.
8:21
So many you know mistakes and we almost made all the mistake
8:26
as a tech company founder that we shouldn't make.
8:28
In the early days, we try to save every single dollar we we could and there's
8:32
not much of HR support. I think we probably invest a little too late.
8:36
And we have to really changing the culture a few years into the
8:40
business and that's like very damaging and that lesson is is probably the most
8:44
expensive lesson we learned in the first five years of starting the business.
8:48
And we also like went international expansion too early before we have product market fit in the UK.
8:52
I think more than 50% of the chance that the decision I make today is going to be
8:57
wrong. There's no way that we can wait uh to make the best decisions in the world. So,
9:03
you know, I rather make the wrong decision and move on and executing with velocity rather than,
9:08
you know, wait for the right moment to make the right decision. So, there's no right moment,
9:12
there's no right decision. It's all about uh keep reflecting and keep debating and keep adjusting.
9:19
In December, Airwallex raised another $330 million in a Series G round,
9:25
valuing the company at 8 billion.
9:27
You know, I work 100 hours a week from the age of 16 for 20 plus
9:32
years. And when you kind of in that tough situation that if you need to survive,
9:36
you don't really think about burnout. I mean, either you survive or not.
9:40
I'm just past 40 years old, so uh physically cannot uh work that long anymore. But
9:46
um you know I would say still 70, 80 hours a week easy. If I feel tired I just taking a
9:52
bit of a you know break. I think that's the most important thing like if you have the
9:56
wrong strategy and not able to think deep enough and that's where the bigger mistake come from.
10:01
His company just crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, growing 90% year-on-year.
10:07
According to Airwallex, it processes payments in 120 countries, serves 200,000 businesses,
10:13
and their network moves over $200 billion a year.
10:17
I think it's definitely a milestone. There's very few fintech's um ever able to achieve
10:22
this scale. And we are obviously one of the fastest growing fintech company out there.
10:26
The goal post right now is just really um able to
10:29
serving over a million customers and 10 billion in revenue by 2030.
10:33
I very rarely feel proud of myself and uh I think I I feel proud of uh the team. I guess
10:40
we're pretty lucky to, we're working hard but also enjoying this journey to get to where we are.
