From Small City to Global Leader

Jack Zhang landed in Melbourne at 15 with no money, no English, and no one to lean on.

By 30, he was turning down a billion-dollar offer from Stripe.

In this episode of HD in HD, I sit down with the co-founder and CEO of Airwallex to trace his zero-to-borderless journey—from small-town China to building one of the biggest tech stories ever to come out of Australia.

We get into:

• What Airwallex did differently that Stripe couldn’t in APAC

• The $100,000 mistake that nearly derailed their first client

• How Jack handled 2022’s valuation reset (and why he didn’t panic)

• The AI opportunity he thinks everyone is sleeping on

• how Airwallex hit $1B in volume before raising a proper Series A

00:00 Trailer

00:46 Introduction

01:18 Airwallex

04:58 No English from China to Australia

15:15 My first business, no financial support

23:06 All work, no fun

31:03 Development and coffee

36:26 Nothing is that hard

40:05 Startups

45:40 Brex

46:29 Starting Airwallex

53:27 The whole thing fell apart

57:20 Sequoia Capital and Tencent

1:05:41 Billion-dollar acquisition offer

1:11:59 Managing globally

1:16:20 Motivation and efficiency

1:23:26 Worth billions, hard to turn

1:24:58 Lessons from China

1:29:38 Outro