He Turned Down $1.2 Billion From Stripe. Now His Company Is Worth $8 Billion

It feels a bit unreal, right? But within 12 months, you went from almost no business to a $1.2 billion acquisition offer. And it's only three years into the entrepreneur journey. And at that time, we only had $2 million revenue. So it's a pretty bold decision not to proceed with the offer. In 2018, Stripe offered to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. They said no. Seven years later, the company is now worth $8 billion and has customers all over the world, including Sheehan, Brex, McLaren Racing, and more. But it wasn't all smooth sailing. Before the billion-dollar offers and the big-name partnerships, Jack worked 16-hour days just to stay afloat. Factory work, bartending, and overnight shifts at petrol stations were all means of survival when his family could no longer support him. Basically, you have to wake up five o'clock in the morning, take the first train, then take a bus for close to an hour, then walk for another 30 minutes to the lemon farm. I just pack them up, do that for 12 hours a day. And in the summer, it's 40 degrees Celsius, and it's pretty intense. I remember one year, the Christmas, and the train sort of stopped running because I don't have the money or don't want to use the money to pay for the taxis. I basically walked all night. And by the time I got home, it's like 7 in the morning. That work ethic took him far. By his 30s, he'd made millions from side businesses. But something was missing. I always wanted to find something no one needs to ever wake me up, and I will be up every day and feel extremely passionate and motivated and willing to devote my entire life to it. I think Airwallex is probably the one that really kind of got me to that stage. There are three numbers to look out for in Airwallex's story. $1 million, the company's first-ever investment. $1.2 billion, the acquisition offer from Stripe in 2018 that the Airwallex co-founders walked away from. And $1 billion, the annualized revenue the company reached in 2025. This is Founder Effect. This is Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of fintech company Airwallex. He was born in Qingdao, China and moved to Melbourne at age 15. Alone. I stayed with Australian family and really sort of taught me how to get used to the culture. I mean, initially, I don't really speak English and it took a while for me to adjust. When his family's finances collapsed, Jack became determined to find his own footing. I think I have two choices. Either I return to China and try to go back to the education system there or I continue to stay in Australia and figure out how to pay the tuitions and the livings on my own. You kind of end up working a lot of odd jobs and dishwashing in a restaurant, sort of bartender, doing evening shift, then also doing overnight shift after that in a petrol station. So end up working 15, 16 hours a day, five, six days a week, and also doing pretty intensive labor work during holidays and trying to make up the differences in paying the tuition fees, yeah. On top of working long hours, Jack earned a computer science degree from the University of Melbourne in 2007. He entered the banking industry but quickly realized it didn't fulfill him. So he began building his own businesses on the side. So I started an importing job for textiles from China. I was exporting olive oils and red wines from Australia to other Asian countries and I started a real estate development company. I was probably making a few million dollar profit a year. I always sort of wanted to make money, but that always doesn't give me the high order of happiness. Also had a daughter when I was 30. I remember I just look at her, I'm like, I haven't done anything that make her feel proud. And yeah, I think that's the moment I'm like, I need to stop doing this side hustles and I need to just resign from my full-time job and do something big. One of Jack's side hustles was a coffee shop in Melbourne. Little did he know that this cafe would serve as ground zero for what would become his multi-billion dollar idea. I started a coffee business very similar to Blue Bottle in Australia and looking at to create it as like a franchise. My co-founder's name is Max Li and he constantly wiring money to overseas, like Brazil, Indonesia, buying coffee beans or China for buying packages. Every time he's sort of wiring money out and the money just disappear for a few months and bounce back. Also that the FX fees are really expensive. He sort of complained to me quite a lot and I got really interested to understand what the problem is. We try to understand how the money moves around the world using the SWIFT system, which was built in the 1970s. And we thought, you know, why can't we build a parallel payment system to SWIFT and it's fundamentally changing how money moves around the world. And that was the idea for Airwallex. In December 2015, Jack quit his full-time baking job and pivoted away from his lucrative side hustles to go all in on this new venture. He brought together a group of friends, Max Li, Jacob Dai, Key Lock Wong, and Lucy Liu, and together the five of them founded Airwallex. Lucy, one of the company's co-founders, made the company's first ever investment. Within one week of meeting Jack, she invested $1 million into Airwallex and joined full-time. She happened to just be visiting Max in a coffee shop and we sort of chatted and, you know, this is the first time we met, so we said, let's just grab dinner. And during dinner, I sort of said, starting a new business. She sort of started talking about investing. I was pretty shocked. We met again the day after and we started negotiating from like eight o'clock and then we basically got a deal done by midday. By year two, the team raised a $13 million Series A round backed by investors like Tencent and Hongshan Capital Group, formerly known as Sequoia Capital China. And in 2018, about three years into building Airwallex, Jack and his co-founders received an acquisition offer from fintech company Stripe for $1.2 billion. They turned it down. And we never thought that we can get that from one of the best companies in the world. So very intrigued, but at the same time, just feel that we're only just getting started. I think ultimately we made a decision based on number one, that we feel that we haven't really achieved as entrepreneur we wanted to achieve. Number two, we still feel extremely optimistic about the future of the company. And then number three, that we decided that the financial outcome doesn't ultimately give us the high order of happiness. After rejecting the Stripe offer, we invested over 80% of the cash of the company to a few future product that we know that would not generate any cash for the company for at least three, four years. But those new product that we built and invested it so early on, and we took the risk. And now that encounter for 60% of the company's revenue. Despite the company's growth trajectory, Airwallex's rise wasn't without turbulence. COVID disruptions, fundraising challenges, fraud issues, and years of cash burn created major setbacks. In 2019, we had a lot of fraud issue because we, you know, at the start, we didn't build enough anti-fraud technology. Also COVID in 2020, and we lost half the business in a month. There's the market, it was crashed after 21 and very hard to raise external funding. We were burning almost 200 million a year in 2022. And I realized if we don't turn profitability, you know, the market is not gonna give me money anymore. In a very tough moment, you know, we were like, oh, you know, why didn't we take the offer, right? Kind of that come across our mind a few times. And looking backwards, I do believe that we made the right decision to continue to pursue in the mission ourselves. Jack also admits to some personal missteps from poor hiring choices to premature international expansion. These decisions ultimately strained the company and its culture. So many, you know, mistakes. And we almost made all the mistakes as a tech company founder that we shouldn't make. In the early days, we try to save every single dollar we could. And there's not much of HR support. I think we probably invested a little too late and we have to really changing the culture few years into the business. And that's like very damaging. And that lesson is probably the most expensive lesson we learned in the first five years of starting the business. And we also like when international expansion too early before we have part of market fit in the UK. I think more than 50% of the chance that the decision I make today is going to be wrong. There's no way that we can wait to make the best decisions in the world. So, you know, I'd rather make the wrong decision and move on and executing with velocity rather than, you know, wait for the right moment to make the right decision. So there's no right moment, there's no right decision. It's all about keep reflecting and keep debating and keep adjusting. In December, Airwall expressed another $330 million in a Series G round. Valuing the company at $8 billion. You know, I work 100 hours a week from the age of 16 for 20 plus years. And when you're kind of in that tough situation that you need to survive, you don't really think about burnout. I mean, either you survive or not. I'm just past 40 years old, so physically cannot work that long anymore. But, you know, I would say still 70, 80 hours a week easy. If I feel tired, I'll just taking a bit of a, you know, break. I think that's the most important thing. Like if you have the wrong strategy and not able to think deep enough, and that's where the bigger mistake come from. His company just crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, growing 90% year on year. According to Airwallex, it processes payments in 120 countries, serves 200,000 businesses, and their network moves over $200 billion a year. I think it's definitely a milestone. There's very few fintechs ever able to achieve this scale. And we obviously one of the fastest growing fintech company out there. The goalpost right now is just really able to serving over a million customers and 10 billion in revenue by 2030. I very rarely feel proud of myself, and I think I feel proud of the team. I guess we're pretty lucky to working hard, but also enjoying this journey to get where we are.