20VC: The Most Insane Story in Startups: Airwallex: The Angel That Turned $1M into $1BN | The Fund That Pulled a Term Sheet & Lost $1BN | Rejecting Stripe's $1.2BN Offer | Scaling to $1BN in Revenue & 100% YoY Growth for 8 Years with Jack Zhang
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 693 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2025
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Airwallex is the most insane story in startups:
- The best angel investment ever: The angel that turned $1M into $1BN.
- One of the world's best VCs pulled a term sheet and lost $1BN.
- The company turned down a $1.2BN offer from Stripe.
- The company scaled to $1BN in transaction volume in 9 months.
- The company has never not grown 100% in a year.
Jack Zhang is the Co-Founder and CEO of Airwallex, one of the world's fastest-growing global payments and financial infrastructure companies. Since founding the company in 2015, Jack has scaled Airwallex to over $130B in annual payment volume, $720M in ARR, and a global team of 1,800+ employees. Under his leadership, Airwallex has raised over $1.2BN from investors including Square Peg, Lone Pine, and Tencent.
In Today's Episode We Discuss:
00:00 – The Best Angel Investment Ever: From $1M to $1BN
06:55 – From Lemon Factory and Petrol Station to Billionaire: The Early Days
15:20 – $5M side hustle while working full-time: how Jack did it
24:45 – Failing Three Times Before Product-Market-Fit
31:00 – The Term Sheet That Got Pulled and Lost Matrix $1BN
34:40 – Why We Rejected Stripe's $1.2BN Acquisition Offer
49:05 – 0-$1B transaction volume in 9 months: How Shein Saved Airwallex
1:03:40 – We F****** Up Scaling internationally... & Burnt $200M/year
1:08:00 – When COVID hit, they lost 50% of revenue overnight
1:11:45 – Why Jack raised at 6x revenue and is now buying back stock himself
1:15:00 – The truth about secondaries and how much is "enough"
1:18:00 – The hiring mistakes that almost broke the culture
1:20:15 – Why Jack is Taking Out a Line of Debt for $70M
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I don't know what is financial discipline. |
| 0:01.8 | So I don't have a budget. |
| 0:03.1 | I'm just like higher as fast as possible below the dollar. |
| 0:07.4 | And I realize at one point that we're running out of money. |
| 0:11.1 | Every month I'm raising money, basically. |
| 0:12.8 | So we went from zero to a billion dollar transaction volume within like nine months. |
| 0:17.7 | So we basically never grow below 100% from 2015 to 2023. We went to like |
| 0:23.9 | $500 million AR in August last year, then he'd like 600 in November and 700 in sort of January |
| 0:31.0 | and fab. Air wallachs is the most insane story in startups of the last decade. I went for a walk in the park with their founder |
| 0:39.0 | Jack Zhang a month ago, and I literally couldn't believe it. It was insane hearing so many |
| 0:45.6 | different parts, from the angel investor that turned one million into what will be a billion |
| 0:52.2 | dollar gain to the renowned global VC firm that pulled the term |
| 0:57.1 | sheet and lost what will be a billion dollar gain to the company failing on their first three |
| 1:03.2 | products to turning down a $1.2 billion acquisition offer from Stripe when they had just two million in revenue to hitting a billion |
| 1:13.6 | in revenue by the end of this year and they've grown 100% every single year for the last eight |
| 1:20.9 | years. This is one of the great startup stories of our time and I'm so thrilled to welcome |
| 1:27.4 | Jack Zhang co-founder and |
| 1:29.3 | CEO of Air Wallachs, one of the world's fastest growing global payments and financial |
| 1:34.9 | infrastructure companies. But before we dive into the show today, I love seeing the team come |
| 1:39.8 | together to make this show happen. What I don't love is trying to keep track of all the information, the data and the projects that we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools. |
| 1:49.0 | That's why we use Coda, the all in one collaborative workspace that's helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page, |
| 1:57.0 | offering the flexibility of docs with the structure of spreadsheets, Coda |
... |
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