The Founder Effect: From Washing Dishes to an $8B Fintech

There’s a popular narrative in tech that success comes from brilliance, timing, and a dash of luck. Occasionally, you’ll hear about “burnout,” work-life balance, or the mythical four-hour workweek.

Jack Zhang doesn’t buy any of it.

Before he was the co-founder and CEO of Airwallex — now valued at roughly $8 billion — Zhang was a teenager working four blue-collar jobs just to survive. Not to “get ahead.” Not to “build a personal brand.” To survive.

At 15, Zhang left his hometown of Qingdao, China, and moved alone to Melbourne, Australia. He barely spoke English. He lived with a host family. And shortly after arriving, he learned his parents were in serious financial trouble back home.

From that moment on, there was no safety net.

He could return to China and start over — or figure out how to pay for tuition, rent, and food in one of the most expensive cities in the world. He chose the harder path.

To fund his computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, Zhang stacked jobs like building blocks: washing dishes during the day, bartending at night, working graveyard shifts at a petrol station, and packing lemons in a factory during the summers. Some weeks, he clocked close to 100 hours of work, on top of his coursework.

Burnout wasn’t a concept. It was a luxury.

“When you’re in survival mode,” Zhang later said, “you’re not thinking about burnout. Either you survive or you don’t.”

The kind of grit you can’t fake

Fast-forward two decades and not much has changed — except the stakes.

Zhang, now in his 40s, still works around 80 hours a week. The difference is that today, that effort fuels one of the most important fintech infrastructure companies in the world.

After graduating in 2007, Zhang followed a fairly traditional path on paper. He worked at Aviva, then moved into banking. But he also couldn’t sit still. On the side, he built businesses — exporting Australian olive oil and wine into Asia, investing in real estate development, and experimenting with other ventures.

By his mid-to-late 20s, money was no longer the problem.

And that’s where things get interesting.

Despite financial success, Zhang felt unfulfilled. The hustle paid — but it didn’t mean anything yet.

That changed when he became a father at 30.

“I looked at my daughter,” Zhang has said, “and realized I hadn’t built anything that would make her proud.”

That moment is deeply relatable — and deeply dangerous. It’s the point where many founders either double down on comfort… or bet everything on purpose.

Zhang chose purpose.

The real origin story of Airwallex

Airwallex didn’t start with a pitch deck or a vision statement. It started with a coffee shop.

Zhang and his university friend (and now co-founder) Max Li ran a café in Melbourne. Like many small business owners, they sourced beans and supplies internationally — from China, Brazil, and beyond.

And every time they sent money overseas, they ran into the same problem: cross-border payments were slow, opaque, and painfully expensive.

The SWIFT system worked — but barely. Fees stacked up. Transfers dragged on. FX spreads were brutal.

So they asked a question that defines great fintech founders:

Why does this still work this way?

What if money could move globally as easily as information?
What if cross-border payments weren’t a tax on ambition?

That question became the seed of Airwallex.

By late 2015, Zhang, Li, and a tight-knit group of university friends — Lucy Liu, Jacob Dai, and Ki-lok Wong — officially founded the company. Liu made an early $1 million investment that helped turn an idea into an institution.

Their ambition was audacious: build a modern, parallel financial infrastructure to SWIFT — faster, cheaper, and designed for a global-first economy.

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Fintech isn’t built overnight

Airwallex wasn’t an overnight success. It was a decade of compounding effort.

Years of regulatory battles.
Years of infrastructure work no one sees.
Years of explaining why payments rails matter — until they suddenly do.

As of late 2025, Airwallex crossed $1 billion in annualized run-rate revenue. Zhang believes the company can reach $10 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

That’s not just a fintech success story — it’s an infrastructure story. And those are the hardest ones to tell, fund, and build.

The Founder Effect

What makes this story powerful isn’t the valuation. It’s the throughline.

Zhang’s teenage years working overnight shifts didn’t disappear when he became wealthy. They shaped how he thinks about effort, urgency, and responsibility. The same survival mindset that kept him afloat at 16 is what drives him to outwork competitors at 40.

This is what I think of as The Founder Effect:

Founders don’t leave their past behind — they carry it forward.
Hard years become operating systems.
Early constraints become unfair advantages.

In fintech especially, this matters. The best founders aren’t chasing hype cycles. They’re solving problems they’ve personally felt — broken payments, inaccessible systems, financial friction that quietly punishes anyone operating across borders.

Airwallex exists because its founders needed it to exist.

Why this matters for fintech builders

If you’re building in fintech — or thinking about it — Zhang’s story offers a few quiet lessons:

1. Infrastructure beats flash. Payments, rails, compliance — they’re unsexy until they’re indispensable.

2. Survival sharpens focus. The clearest founders often come from the messiest beginnings.

3. Money isn’t the end goal. Purpose scales further than profit.

4. Global-first is the future. Borders are a tax. The best fintech removes them.

Jack Zhang didn’t chase balance. He chased meaning. And in doing so, he helped reshape how money moves around the world.

That’s not burnout.
That’s conviction.

— Fintech Forward