Jack Zhang, then 34 and three and a half years into running his startup, found himself in a San Francisco home with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, being courted by Sequoia's Michael Moritz. The pitch was simple: sell Airwallex to Stripe for $1.2 billion. Given that the Melbourne-based company had only about $2 million in annualized revenue at the time, the math was a frankly ludicrous 600-times revenue multiple. Moritz argued that joining forces with Stripe's 'generational founder' Patrick Collison would compound into something extraordinary. Zhang, after two weeks of restless walking around San Francisco, even said yes.
Then he flew nearly 8,000 miles back to Melbourne, thought about it, and spectacularly changed his mind. He realized he had only just tasted entrepreneurship, with the business growing 100 times in 2018, and the vision on his office whiteboard - to build global financial infrastructure - was unfinished. The fact that two of his three co-founders voted against the deal certainly helped. That decision now looks like a masterstroke of stubbornness, as Airwallex claims over $1.3 billion in annualized revenue, growing at 85% year-over-year, and processes nearly $300 billion in annualized transaction volume.
Zhang's conviction is rooted in a personal history that makes corporate boardroom dramas look tame. He grew up in Qingdao, China, moved to Melbourne alone at 15, and when his family's finances collapsed, worked four jobs - bartending, dishwashing, gas station graveyard shifts, and picking lemons - to get a computer science degree from the University of Melbourne. He later wrote trading code at an Australian investment bank, a well-paid but unfulfilling gig, after starting roughly 10 prior businesses ranging from a teen magazine to a burger chain.
The idea for Airwallex was born from the frustration of running a Melbourne coffee shop and trying to pay international bean suppliers. Co-founder Max Li watched payments get flagged, frozen, or lost for weeks in the correspondent banking system, enforced by American banks and OFAC sanctions. This pushed Zhang to dissect how SWIFT and correspondent banking worked, with the goal of building a proprietary global money movement network. That exact idea is now executed at massive scale, with Airwallex holding close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets - a number Zhang estimates is double what Stripe has.
Acquiring those licenses has been an epic, unglamorous grind, definitively proving you cannot 'vibe-code' your way into global finance. In Japan alone, the licensing process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company had to acquire shell companies with grandfathered licenses and completely rebuild their underlying technology. As Zhang dryly notes, integrations require secure rooms where you need a biometric scan just to enter and access a central bank's system, a far cry from the cozy pitch in a house overlooking the Golden Gate.