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- Jack Zhang on why he said no to Stripe’s $1.2 billion offer to buy Airwallex
Jack Zhang on why he said no to Stripe’s $1.2 billion offer to buy Airwallex
“In October 2018, Stripe reached out to buy us,” Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang begins.
Patrick Collison flew out to Shanghai to meet Jack and his co-founder, and they spent the day together. After the meeting, Patrick sent over a Google Doc that was 10-20 pages long and asked Jack to make comments.
“I was like, ‘Wow, the vision of the companies over the next decade is very much the same.’ We both wanted to build the AWS of financial services, and obviously Stripe was much further ahead of us. But this was before COVID. Stripe was like a $9 billion company — very similar to the scale of Airwallex today. I also really liked Patrick. It was like this guy is so smart.”
Asked what makes Patrick Collison so smart, Jack replies:
“He’s intellectually honest about everything, and he’s able to go deep in multiple dimensions.”
Eventually Stripe offered $1.2 billion for Airwallex, and according to Jack, he and his co-founders would’ve walked away with $350 million.
“I met with the whole team, and I was really impressed,” Jack recalls. “I basically said I think we’re going to do it.”
But when he flew back to Melbourne, Jack decided against it. And it was actually Patrick Collison who inspired him to reject the offer. Jack explains:
“So one of the things that really inspired me from talking and spending time with Patrick was I asked, ‘What’s the long-term thing for Stripe and yourself? Are you going to be here forever?’ And Patrick said to me that he’s going to build Stripe for the next 20-40 years. And I just never heard a founder tell me they will dedicate their entire life to building a business. And so that was inspiring to me, and I’m like that’s what I want to do.”
Today, Airwallex is an $8B company, with more than $1B in ARR.