Jack Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Airwallex.
Courtesy of Jack Chan
Jack Chan, co-founder and CEO of fintech company Airwallex, doesn’t have the word “burnout” in his dictionary.
“To be honest, I don’t understand that term at all. I’ve been working 100 hours a week for over 20 years since I was 16,” Chan told CNBC Make It.
For Chan, hard work meant survival. At the age of 15, he left his hometown of Qingdao, China, and moved alone to Melbourne, Australia, in search of better opportunities. He spoke little English and lived with an Australian host family.
Shortly after arriving, he learned that his parents had returned to China and were in dire financial straits, and that he would have to support himself through college.
“I had two options: I could go back to China and try to reintegrate into the local education system, or I could stay in Australia and find a way to pay my own tuition and living expenses,” Zhang said. He decided to stick to the latter and took any job he could find to make a living.
Zhang worked four blue-collar jobs to earn a degree in computer science from the University of Melbourne. I washed dishes at a restaurant during the day, bartended in the evenings, worked the night shift at a gas station, and packed lemons at a factory during the summer.
Some weeks, he says, he studied for 80 to 100 hours on top of his classes.
“When you’re in a tough situation where you have to…survive, you don’t really think about burnout. I mean, you either survive or you don’t, right?” he said.
Not much has changed since then. Now in his 40s, Zhang said he still “comfortably” earns 80 hours a week at his fintech company. As of December 2025, the company is valued at $8 billion.
From blue collar to millionaire
After graduating from university in 2007, Mr. Zhang entered the corporate world. His first job before entering banking was with an insurance company called Aviva.
At the same time, he started several side businesses, from a shipping company exporting olive oil and red wine from Australia to parts of Asia to a property development company.
His side hustle turned out to be lucrative. By the time I was in my 20s, money was no longer an issue. However, although Mr Chan has amassed millions of dollars through his career in business and banking, he said he has yet to find his true passion.
Everything changed when my daughter was born at age 30.
“I remember just looking at her and (feeling) that I hadn’t done anything to make her proud. And I think that was the moment I decided I should stop doing all these side hustles, quit my full-time job and do something big properly,” Chan said.
“I always wanted money, but I realized that money alone does not bring you the highest level of happiness,” he added. Instead, he said he wanted to create something he was extremely passionate about.
“I’ve always wanted to find something (a place) where I don’t have to be woken up by anyone, and… every day I feel so passionate and duty-bound that I want to dedicate my entire existence to it,” Chan said. So in December 2015, he quit his banking job and began the next chapter of his life.
Get started with Airwallex
The idea for Airwallex came from one of Zhang’s side businesses, a Melbourne-based coffee shop he ran with co-founder and university friend Max Lee.
As part of running the business, the pair often imported coffee beans and equipment from countries such as China and Brazil, which required them to send money overseas. Through this process, they realized how expensive and inefficient cross-border payments and transfers through the traditional SWIFT system were.
“We thought, why can’t we build a payment system in parallel with SWIFT and fundamentally change the way money moves around the world?” said Zhang. They wanted to create a solution to streamline cross-border payments, and the initial idea for Airwallex was born.
Zhang and Li gathered other friends from their university network, Lucy Liu, Jacob Dai, and Ki-lok Wong, to help them work on the idea. Liu played a key role early on, investing the first $1 million into the startup.
By the end of 2015, the group officially founded Airwallex. After nearly a decade of 80-plus hour workweeks, the company achieved annual run rate revenue (ARR) of more than $1 billion at the end of last year, which estimates a company’s future annual revenue based on shorter-term financial data.
“We’re still very excited about what’s going to happen,” Chan said. “I think there’s a lot of opportunity in front of us…We think we can generate (at least) $10 billion in revenue by 2030. That’s our next goal.”
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