Episode Details

How Jack Zhang and the Airwallex team built a billion-dollar company in just three years. By the time he was 30, Jack Zhang had already launched more than 10 businesses, with interests ranging from coffee to real estate.

While many of them were successful, Zhang never got to the point where he left his full-time job.

“I just tried to do different things to see if I could achieve something or feel happy about what I was doing,” he says, “but I hadn’t really found anything I was passionate about.”

He certainly wasn’t afraid of the hard work and long hours that came from starting and sustaining businesses, saying that “work was never a torture.” Despite all that time and effort he invested in each startup, he ultimately felt that none of these businesses ever amounted to much more than a new way to make some extra money. Nothing ever became a greater purpose.

With a passion for technology and a love for writing code, Zhang longed to do something within the tech sphere that would have a real impact. Like so many serial entrepreneurs, he finally found a business he was passionate about by looking at his own personal pain points.

Zhang would become the co-founder and CEO of financial tech company Airwallex, which eliminates foreign transaction fees in an increasingly globalized world. In doing so, he’s created a company that, in just three years, entered the $1 billion club.

While the creation of a fabled “unicorn” company was far more nitty-gritty and far less magical than one might imagine, he still owes a little bit of his success to that almighty and mystical force: luck.

The Magic of the Perfect Team

The idea for Airwallex came from the difficulties Zhang and one of the co-founders ran into while running import businesses between Asia and Australia. Sending international payments through a payment service provider (such as PayPal) not only slowed the process but piled on an unpleasant foreign transaction fee.

So, with his background in tech and foreign exchange trading, Zhang and friend decided to tackle the problem themselves. They soon invited three other friends on board as co-founders, forming the Airwallex quintet: Jack Zhang, Jacob Dai, Ki-Lok Wong, Lucy Yueting Liu, and Max Li.

With $1 million invested between Zhang and his first co-founder, along with an additional $2 million from outside investors, they began creating the first version of their product, geared toward the SME (small-to-medium-sized enterprise) market.

“ believed in the team we had at the time, and believed in the company’s vision, and believed we were solving something quite important in the global scale,” Zhang says.

And as the business grew, so did the team. But Zhang says that as they hired new people, they presented an intentional hurdle to ensure that new additions were passionate about their vision. Every new hire was required to take a pay cut to work at Airwallex.

Zhang says that, for ambitious, passionate, top-tier talent, the money isn’t the deciding factor in where they choose to work. He believes they pay far more attention to whether the work aligns with their passions and if the scope of the work presents an exciting challenge. And these were the kinds of people Zhang wanted to hire.

“I still think that the people willing to take a massive pay cut to join you are the most fundamental people who really believe in the vision,” he says. Even with that condition, Airwallex was able to scale from 80 to 320 employees in just 12 months.

While hiring was going well and the business continued to grow, because the creation of Airwallex cost so much, they flew through the initial $3 million investment and needed another round of financing to go to market. Turns out, building an expansive, global financial network isn’t easy.

Hard Work and a Little Luck

“My personal experience is full of luck, really,” Zhang says, “but also we put an incredible amount