The Fintech OG's from TWIF
00:07:59 路 Jack Zhang, Julie VerHage-Greenberg, Leif Abraham
And and we decided to basically continue to build on our own, and that's because the the opportunity is too big. And I think if you're looking at like the the folks that we're competing, like for HSBC or Citibank, and it's just fascinating to be able to compete in when and build a larger business than those folks in the next decade. [00:08:19] S0: Yeah, so much has changed since then. And so at that point, you got that acquisition offer, and life was roughly around the same time that you were starting public. How did you guys meet? [00:08:29] S2: How do we meet? We met through I think it was ahead of Sophia event or so, I think was the first time we met. [00:08:36] S1: But yeah, met in there at Vegas around Lonnie. Yeah. [00:08:41] S0: Where so many FinTech friendships are born. But also, if it was around like, you know, sounds horrible, by the way. It does until you're like, if unless FinTech, you're like, no, that actually makes a lot of sense too. Lots of friends made over drinks in the black jacket. [00:08:58] S2: That sounds better. That sounds much better. [00:09:01] S0: Or at an awesome concert that FT partner throws, which they need to do like a really good one again this year. They have to be crushing it with all of this like MNA and IPOs, like Steve, we we need some bit, you know. [00:09:14] S2: Exactly. What's up? Yeah, dare, dare him a little bit. Come on.
00:09:14 路 Leif Abraham, Julie VerHage-Greenberg
[00:09:14] S2: Exactly. What's up? Yeah, dare, dare him a little bit. Come on. [00:09:16] S0: I think he's a little scared. Like post Malone was pretty legit. So topping post Malone a couple years ago is gonna be a little bit tricky, but he can do it. Okay. Diving back in here, it sounds like both of you had some passion around what you started, right? It wasn't necessarily just like knowledge around it, but it does feel like there was passion involved. And I feel like you have to have that. Because I'm sure you guys each have a lot of other ideas, like, oh, someone should do this for a startup. But unless you have that, just like I have to do this type thing, sort of like as a reporter, I remember people saying, don't write a book unless you just feel like you have to write. And I feel like it's very similar to doing a startup. Don't do a startup unless you have this idea and you just have to solve it. So talk to me a little bit about when you first started brainstorming and getting this urge to do that idea and what did tip you over the edge. Like, no, like I need to be the one that goes to solve this. I can't let someone else do it for me. Either one of you can go first too.
00:10:17 路 Jack Zhang
[00:10:17] S1: I'm not sure I had that moment. I tried many things before Airwalls, actually. I I was an FX algorithmic trader and market making, building market making platforms and various investment banks and hedge funds before and on the side. I was doing a lot of side hustle. Started about a dozen businesses in real estate architecture, design, importing, exporting, trading, coffee businesses and burger chains and like olive oils and red meat, it's like anything you can think of that I olive oils. I haven't heard that story. Yeah, yeah, with exporting olive oil from Australia to South Asia and just like general Asia countries, and because there's a booming in demand and olive oil switching from peanut oil. So I made a lot of money doing that. But uh not none of those businesses, actually, everything is profitable than airwalls. It's funny. We only start getting profitable now after a decade of building it, but those businesses are profitable from day one and just not as interesting. It's not able to scale that much. And in 2012, while I was starting the coffee business, I actually wanted to start a business very similar to Square, building opponent sales and payment system. That's when AFC payment just started. And I was quite fascinating about that. And then I pitched the idea to my CTO and co-founder, and and he saw like a QR code coming out of China, and he's like, dude, I think QR is gonna take over the world is so easy. And I was debating between like AFC and QR, and then turned out to be neither neither of us are right. And QR did take over China and some of the Asian countries, and where the rest will become like this touchless, sort of this sort of carless AFC payments-dominated ecosystem. But if we have started, we might become a bigger company by by this time because we'll start the company three or four years earlier. I've been very just open-minded of exploring ideas where I do know I wanted to start something in technology because I was an engineer by trend and I always run code and I want to build a business that scale it into creating a lot of impact. I was when I was doing a coffee business, I was like, like even we have thousands of stores. If the coffee business gets shut down tomorrow, I'm not sure how many people are gonna miss that. I'm not sure people are gonna care about that much.
00:12:27 路 Jack Zhang
Yeah, you build great coffee, yeah, great coffee, but it doesn't really create that much of an impact to people's life. Because people just have many, many alternatives. Where if we build fundamental economic infrastructure in a world that powering millions of entrepreneurs and businesses to grow their business globally, beyond the border, to help them to operate efficiently, now especially with AI, to create an alternative finance function for them, to save them time and costs, and to give them true autonomous to focus on that, building their own mission globally, that to advance the economy, that that's something a lot more meaningful. That's something a lot more significant. And I feel I'm like at least kind of building something significant and important. I think similar to what life's building, life could talk about it, why he's doing it.
00:13:16 路 Julie VerHage-Greenberg
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00:14:30 路 Leif Abraham
[00:14:30] S2: I generally speaking, I think I agree with Jack said in the sense of that I don't think it's a sense of like I have to be the one building that. I'm sure those founder stories exist. I would still argue that most founders at the end of the day are first off driven a little bit by ego, and the sense of that you want to prove yourself, you have a chip on your shoulder that you want to fix in some way, wherever that might be coming from. And and therefore I think the best founders have the ability to be successful in pretty much any industry. And I talk about Jackmart now, it's like on the oil or global payment infrastructure. It's like like two different sides of the same coin, right? And so I think it is very much I think very much driven by that most founders have a ship on their shoulder and they're looking to be successful in their own right. And maybe to prove something to themselves, maybe to prove something to I don't know, their dad. I don't know, tell me. But but I do think most of it is driven by that. And you could argue that's a little bit ego or whatever, but I think that's a powerful force that at the end of the day I think is creating a lot of motivation. And at the end of the day, I think I know a lot of founders who have never been in the industries that they're in now before they started their companies. And myself included, right? Not a finance person, not a fintech guy, was not deep in investing before I started public. And now I have deep discussions about market structures with people. And it's just because you go into it with a little bit of naivety in that moment, and that also helps you to be a little bit more first-principled thinking. And I think that also helps you to potentially be successful because you're asking questions that others might not who have been deep in that space before, and so on.