00:31:19 · Jack Zhang
[00:31:19] S1: I think people looking at okay, FIA financial system, stable coin, they look at it like, okay, there's two different things. Actually, not. I mean, if you think about cash, right? It's cash still like we have still have a lot of cash in in a society. Yeah. Uh, and it takes like 30, 40, 50 years for cash to gradually disappear. Um, you know, stablecoin is going to be a very similar sort of story. I mean, is, you know, just by first principle, does it make sense for financial services to be 24 by seven? Yes. Right. So um it's a lot of the settlement um uh infrastructure that should be uh you know leveraging stablecoin, whether it's stock trading or commodity trading or FX trading or money market font, tokenized assets. So all these traditional financial services that possibly uh you know moving on-chain maybe should and then and kind of have this uh you know 24 by seven real-time payments uh sort of settlement system. But the world is doesn't, it's not binary. So that when you when you're trading, when you trade like a million dollar FX, where, okay, so I have like $400, $400,000 on stable, and then $600,000 that I couldn't find liquidity on stable. So what do I do with $600,000? So somebody needs to build a unified infrastructure that crosss both field and stable. Essentially, what I'm trying to say is stable just payment rails, right? So whether you know the payment rails is, you know, there's a wallet that's bank to bank, um, you know, the stable, there's many sort of payment rails out there, and these payment rails are going to continue to evolve over the next decade. And so for a platform like us, we basically need to build its unified infrastructure to catering for all these different rails and then facilitating all this sort of transaction. On the other side, uh me and um another uh friend of mine from Melbourne that we actually co-founded a stablecoin infrastructure company recently. Oh, you did? Um essentially uh moving a lot of the settlement layer uh in in Fiat to 24 by 7 on chain, and we built our own layer one. Um so we we're gonna we're gonna make an announcement um very soon. So, you know, again, I mean they this just you know, it doesn't matter how the Rails evolving uh globally, the most important thing is what the customer needs. The customer needs a seamless experience of growing that business globally with efficiency.
00:33:36 · Jack Zhang, Tommy Stadlen
Uh they wanted to, you know, sell the product in all these sort of 200 countries around the world. They want to hire anybody around the world, they wanted to operate with efficiency, they want to have an agent to pay the taxes and look at the PLs and tell them what they should, where they can save money, where they should spend more, because that's more efficiency in certain markets from a go-to-market point of view. All this data sitting in the company right now in a dozen different systems that they're not able to unleash the true power of their product. Right. And that is what airwallets are here to do is to really build uh the infrastructure to allow them to run that business autonomously. [00:34:17] S0: Jack, in brief, where where is Airwalllocks today in terms of scale, evaluation, and revenue? And then this next kind of giant idea of agent banking, how big do you think you'll be in in 10 years?
00:34:28 · Jack Zhang
[00:34:28] S1: I think we um we had a 1.5 billion in ARR. And um, I think last quarter we still growing 76% year on year. Wow. Um, and um, so we we we we're gonna be approaching 2 billion probably by the end of the year. Incredible. Um and I think um if you kind of think about it, right? So I said there's a lot of vertical uh discipline in the office of CFO and the finance team, um, and all these discipline are collapsing. So there used to be um hundreds of billion dollars in these sort of companies, uh, and then probably a few trillion dollars of revenue pool out there. Um, but now um the TAM actually went 10 times because the knowledge workers become addressable, right? So, you know, I have customers that like a message bird in the Netherlands, then they had um 40 plus people in uh finance team, and after they got rid of um all the dozen banks, so you have a bank in Australia, they have a bank in Singapore, they have a bank in the US, and a bank in Europe, and bank in the UK, they got rid of all the banks and moved everything onto Airwalls. And uh they automated everything from AR to AP, from FPA, uh and payments and expense management, reimbursement. So once they got everything onto and onto our platform, they essentially able to automate and using agent to automating most of the work in the corporate finance team, and now they have less than 10 people in the finance team, right? So these are the things all kind of addressable, right? So um, you know, how we're processing that, that is a different story. But then essentially you see a collapsing of the traditional uh vertical SaaS market in a sort of office of CFO, and then you can see the 10 times because all the knowledge workers are gonna be changing the job sort of function, as in like instead of doing the manual reconciliation or manual analytics or manual uh adjustment uh in a general ledger, the agent's gonna do all that. They're gonna focus on what's the most important thing, which is uh, you know, make financial decisions and recommending to the CEOs on what they should invest and where they should pull back.
00:36:38 · Tommy Stadlen
[00:36:38] S0: Your status as an outsider from Silicon Valley, seeing these cross-border payments with a coffee shop in in Australia gave you a real edge in terms of seeing something before other people saw it. Do you do you feel like you have gained an edge consistently at as being an outsider?
00:36:55 · Jack Zhang
[00:36:55] S1: I think um I I mean as an entrepreneur, I still believe in fact and truth, right? I mean, that's how why I started a company. I wanna I want to make sure um you know what I what I you know what I'm able to to build upon is something I believe in. Um I think every also every crisis or risk is is an opportunity to um take advantage of, right? So I think if it's anything, he's definitely made us a lot more famous in the US and provided Brennan, you know, and and also like all this factual stuff is on our side and everything sticks, he's gonna be looked like a joke in a couple of years' time as we continue to build a bigger and bigger business, right? As we continue to having more and more uh, you know, venture-driven companies that build on top of us, right? You know, 11 Labs is a big customer, and you know, you have all sorts of AI companies around the world using AirWalls as a sort of core global bank, uh, and a lot of the bigger businesses, especially have multiple entities uh globally that using us for spend management, which you know, RAMP don't have any global capabilities, right? So I think all these things um are the are the fact and uh it's gonna be pretty hard to change or catch up on because it takes us a decade to build the infrastructure. And uh as we kind of keep componing in the next couple of years, I think you know, you've been looking backwards and it's gonna be look, I think they're gonna look pretty stupid.
00:38:20 · Cameron McLain
[00:38:20] S2: Yeah, I have a question. You've you've um you've obviously described a pretty uh impressive work ethic. You've also been described, I think you just described yourself and been described as a perfectionist. We just talked about Yuri basically making a hundred million dollar investment decision based on your background and your and your history and what you've gone through. What do you look for in the people that you hire and how what kind of qualities are are you trying to identify? And what's really important to you and the people that you bring onto Airwalllocks on your mission?