The CEO of Tencent and Sequoia-backed payments startup Airwallex said that if he had to start over, there are three things he would do differently.
Jack Zhang said his mistakes include not outsourcing to a good recruiter in the early days, expanding overseas too quickly, and not prioritizing company culture. The Airwallex cofounder and CEO spoke on an episode of the “20VC” podcast aired on Monday.
“I hired the first 100 people in Airwallex by myself on LinkedIn,” Zhang said of his first mistake. “Obviously, there’s a lot of benefit of doing that, but I could have hired a good recruiter just to help me to do the outreach and then give them access to my LinkedIn password.”
Zhang cofounded Airwallex with four friends in Melbourne in 2015. The Singapore-based fintech company provides cross-border payments and financial services through its banking network and protocols that allow different software components to communicate with each other.
Last week, the company announced that it raised $300 million in a series F funding round at a valuation of $6.2 billion.
Zhang said that his second mistake was that Airwallex overinvested in international expansion without having a product-market fit. He said the company got lucky, but doing this carried a lot of risk.
The CEO said the last thing he would change would be investing in company culture early.
“In the early first four, five years, we hired a lot of people with a lot of great experience — they’re from a bank, they’re from Citibank, they’ve built a Swift network before,” he said. “They join, they’re telling you, ‘you guys know nothing, what you’re going to do doesn’t work.’ None of those people worked.”
He said that experience matters less than other characteristics.
“We should just have hired those curious, determined, optimistic people from early on,” Zhang said. “But we didn’t, so we had to fire all of them,” he added, speaking of his challenging early hires.
Zhang is among tech CEOs who have looked back on their companies’ early days and said they waited too long before delegating.
Earlier this month, Luis von Ahn, the cofounder and CEO of language-learning app Duolingo, said that he micromanaged 50 employees in the early days of the company. He said he only learned to spread the responsibility once it became “impossible” to manage that many people.
“At this point, I also have learned that most of my job is culture carrier, mascot, and just making some of the kind of tough philosophical decisions,” von Ahn said in a talk at Stanford University.
“Two of my executive team are sitting here — head of people and head of finance. I am neither good at those things nor do I get energy from them, so they have all the freedom in the world,” he said.
Microsoft’s former CEO, Bill Gates, is also outspoken about delegation and how he learned that he could not be involved with every project or team member as the company grew.
“I had always been the taskmaster, the one who incessantly worried about losing our lead, and fearing that if we weren’t careful, we’d be sunk,” Gates wrote in his memoir.
