00:16:32 · Tommy Stadlen, Jack Zhang, Cameron McLain
[00:16:32] S0: So she turned a million dollars into half a billion dollars as an angel investor. [00:16:36] S1: Yeah. And then she sold a bunch over the years, right? So unbelievable. [00:16:39] S0: And then you've also had probably still have half a billion stock. Still half a billion? Wow. So maybe into a billion. And and and so you've also I think it's gonna be a lot more than that. A lot more. So that's probably one of the best angel investments in the history of investing. But you've also had, I would say, some of the worst uh decisions ever by venture investors. Inevitably, venture investors have to pass on a bunch of stuff which becomes successful. But you you had uh uh a term sheet pooled, is that right? From a venture investor really early that could have turned out. [00:17:06] S1: Yeah, we had we have millions, we have multiple term sheet pooled in our journey. [00:17:12] S2: That's quite unusual. [00:17:13] S1: You don't hear that. I don't know. Yeah, we kind of uh maybe a bad luck, and then we had we had this a few times. Including early on, so people who could early on and even when we have become very successful. [00:17:24] S2: Yeah, wow. And many of them then came back after putting term sheets and tried to invest and didn't invest later on. I also heard.
00:17:24 · Cameron McLain, Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
[00:17:24] S2: Yeah, wow. And many of them then came back after putting term sheets and tried to invest and didn't invest later on. I also heard. [00:17:29] S1: Yeah. I mean, like, you know, I've I think a couple of VCs in Australia, and when I said I wanted to do something cross-border payment, you know, Australia is more of a software market, right? So you have the like of Alasing Canva culture and safety culture, the bunch of software companies. So VCs are more familiar with software. And it's like somebody wanted to build a fintech company in Australia, highly regulated. Um, it would just never such thing just never succeeded in in in the VC history in Australia, right? So it's quite weird. And out of the three biggest VCs, only one believed me, and obviously doing quite well. [00:18:02] S2: Do you hold a grudge for the port term sheets or business is business? [00:18:06] S1: I probably hold a little bit of that uh with the individual, not so much with the font. Right. Uh, I feel that's a bit of an integrity issue here. [00:18:15] S0: But you know for context for listeners not deeply immersed in kind of venture world, is it's not the dumb thing to sign a term sheet saying you're gonna invest and especially if you're kind of doing multiple of this to many different companies. [00:18:28] S1: Of course not, yeah. Which in the case to us is the same person, keep doing this.
00:18:28 · Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
[00:18:28] S1: Of course not, yeah. Which in the case to us is the same person, keep doing this. [00:18:32] S0: Last one on venture investors. Um, because I think it's kind of interesting, is that during your gro some of your growth rounds, some of your investors were not really actually backing numbers, you know, you still hadn't really nailed the business, but people like Yuri Milner at DST, as I understand it, really backed, you know, you they went deep on you and your amazing life story, they backed your vision. [00:18:52] S1: Yeah, I don't know how Yuri investing uh is kind of interesting to me. I wouldn't do that myself. I mean, I wouldn't be able to throw a two-hour conversation. And essentially, like I met Yuri and Tom Stafford and John Lingford together. Um, with you know, during a two-hour conversation, the first hour is John and Tom asked me about the business. Uh, Yuri didn't speak a word. And then Yuri spent the next 30 minutes just asking me how I grew up, all the stuff I did, what I just told you about, you know, how I actually lost the financial support, how do so many businesses. Uh, on the back of that, she just offered me to invest um at uh 1.1 billion. Um invest $100 million. Amazing.
00:18:52 · Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
[00:18:52] S1: Yeah, I don't know how Yuri investing uh is kind of interesting to me. I wouldn't do that myself. I mean, I wouldn't be able to throw a two-hour conversation. And essentially, like I met Yuri and Tom Stafford and John Lingford together. Um, with you know, during a two-hour conversation, the first hour is John and Tom asked me about the business. Uh, Yuri didn't speak a word. And then Yuri spent the next 30 minutes just asking me how I grew up, all the stuff I did, what I just told you about, you know, how I actually lost the financial support, how do so many businesses. Uh, on the back of that, she just offered me to invest um at uh 1.1 billion. Um invest $100 million. Amazing. [00:19:37] S0: Um so you kind of get through all of this. You you've come through this unbelievable life journey, you've raised money, company almost dies multiple times. You start really scaling the business now, like very, very big revenue. Um, but the kind of drama's not over because you're a Silicon Valley outsider. There's some really well-funded Silicon Valley insiders competing with you, and they've got venture capital investors who don't want to see you succeed. And so those guys uh, you know, have started slinging, you know, accusations against the company that like, you know, it's giving US comp uh US uh data to the Chinese Communist Party and all this kind of stuff. That must have been like a very intense thing to go through of having all of those accusations thrown at you. What's it like personally as a leader?
00:20:20 · Jack Zhang
[00:20:20] S1: I'm not sure intense is the right word. Um I think it's like more like kind of angry that um, you know, people just like completely making stuff up, right? I mean, we run our China Hong Kong, but it's almost like a separate company and there's um data security in place, and you know, our US data is in uh is in the US data center. And um they, you know, the folks in China even have a different Slack, different Google uh, you know, uh workspace, and um they can't access our US data center at all. They can't even access any of our data center outside of China, Hong Kong. So the it's not a factual anymore, right? So, you know, the Apple, Tesla, um, all these businesses, uh, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, all have employees in China, Citibank, JP Morgan, you know, it's nothing wrong with an employee in China, have a business area. We're doing global business. Yeah. I mean, you have to have a presence in China because it's even, you know, despite how bad the geopolitic is between US and China, there's a lot of transactions happen between US and China, right? China's still the largest supply chain in the world, right? So um, so I think um, you know, I think we focus on the fact um where anything when you kind of talk about factual, we're doing pretty well. And obviously, um on the other side, they um use my aesthetic to kind of pay me um this sort of Chinese spy thing. And and I thought it's pretty funny initially. I live so why people believe in that. They actually think I live in Hong Kong or something, or I live in, I don't know, I can't remember. They say Lucy also lives in China and all this stuff. I mean, like I live in Holland Park, thank you. A lot of West London, right? So I mean I think um anything in China has just become sort of um an interesting topic in the US, right? So you get a lot of um uh uptake on that. And and I think the uh they they saw the opportunity to attack me because I'm not from Silicon Valley. You know, as I said, the the market is 10 times in terms of addressful market, and um the competition is getting worse. You know, if you're looking at as a bunch of the other areas, right? In the coding agent area, uh, you know, uh factory and and cognition and you know, rippling a deal. So all this sort of drama start happening in the in the last couple of years. And uh sort of competition have a new definition in Silicon Valley.
00:22:52 · Jack Zhang, Cameron McLain
And I just hope that people can compete on product um and uh rather than you know doing this weird racist thing. [00:22:59] S2: You're trying to build a global financial platform. You've kind of moved into a period of geopolitical fragmentation. Do you think it's possible to build a like a truly global finance platform these days with the world as it is geopolitically?