Once close enough for an acquisition, Stripe and Airwallex are now going after each other

Jack Zhang was 34 years old, three and a half years into running a startup, and sitting across from one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz of Sequoia had invited him to his home — a place with, Zhang recalls, a couple of floors and a view straight to the Golden Gate Bridge — to make the case for selling.

Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had around $2 million in annualized revenue. The math was almost pretty irresistable: a revenue multiple somewhere near 600 times. Patrick Collison, Moritz argued, was a generational founder. The deal would “compound” into something extraordinary. Zhang listened. He walked around San Francisco for two weeks, restless, unable to think straight. At one point, he said yes.

Then he flew nearly 8,000 miles back home.

“I really went deep on what motivates me to build Airwallex,” he said early this week, speaking to this editor from overseas. “I was three and a half years into the business. The business was growing 100 times in 2018. And I only just sort of tasted what it [was like] to be an entrepreneur. And that’s what I’d been dreaming about.”

Two of his three co-founders had voted against the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest signal came from looking at the whiteboard back in his office. The vision was still there, unfinished: to build the financial infrastructure that lets any business operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local company.

That decision is looking increasingly prescient. Airwallex now claims more than $1.3 billion in annualized revenue and is growing at 85% year-over-year. It processes approaching $300 billion in annualized transaction volume. None of it has come easily — and Zhang argues that’s precisely the point.

It’s a conviction that runs a lot deeper than business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at 15 without his parents, barely speaking English, living with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, he took on four jobs to get through a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review — bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a petrol station, picking lemons on a farm in the school holidays, which he has called the hardest job he ever had. He went on to spend years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well and never felt “deeply fulfilling.”

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