Jack Zhang is the co-founder and CEO of Airwallex.
Courtesy of Jack Zhang
The word “burnout” isn’t in the dictionary of Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of fintech company Airwallex.
“I never understand that terminology to be honest. I’ve worked 100 hours a week from [the] age of 16 for 20 plus years,” Zhang told CNBC Make It.
For Zhang, hard work meant survival. At age 15, he moved away from his hometown of Qingdao, China to Melbourne, Australia alone, to pursue better opportunities. He barely spoke English and stayed with an Australian host family.
Shortly after arriving, he learned that his parents had found themselves in financial hot water back in China, and that he would have to support himself through university.
“I [had] two choices: either I just return to China and try to go back to the education system there, or I continue to stay in Australia and figure out how to pay [for my] tuition and living [expenses] on my own,” said Zhang. He decided to stick with the latter and took whatever work he could find to make ends meet.
To pay for his computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, Zhang juggled four blue-collar jobs: washing dishes at a restaurant during the day, bartending in the evening, working the overnight shift at a petrol station and packing lemons in a factory over the summer.
Some weeks, he says, he clocked 80 to 100 hours of work on top of his coursework.
“When you’re … in that tough situation [where] you need to survive, you’re not really [thinking] about burnout. I mean, either you survive or not, right?” he said.
Not much has changed since then. Now in his 40s, Zhang still clocks 80 hours a week “easily,” he said, at his own fintech firm. As of December 2025, the company is valued at $8 billion.
From blue collar to millionaire
After graduating from university in 2007, Zhang went into the corporate world. His first job was at an insurance company called Aviva, before he entered the banking industry.
At the same time, he also built a few side businesses, from a shipping company where he exported olive oils and red wines from Australia to parts of Asia, to a real estate development firm.
His side hustles proved lucrative. By the time he reached his 20s, money was no longer an issue. However, although he had accumulated millions through his businesses and banking career, Zhang said he had yet to find his true passion.
Everything changed when he had his daughter at age 30.
“I remember I just looked at her, I [felt] like, I hadn’t done anything [to] make her feel proud. And I think that’s the moment I [decided] I need to stop just doing these side hustles, and I need to retire from my full time job and do something big, properly,” said Zhang.
“I realized that while I always wanted money, money alone doesn’t bring [me] the highest level of happiness,” he added. Instead, he said he wanted to build something that he was extremely passionate about.
“I always wanted to find something [where] no one needs to ever wake me up and … every day I feel extremely passionate, obligated, and willing to devote my entire survival towards,” said Zhang. So, in December 2015, he quit his banking job and started the next chapter of his life.
Starting Airwallex
The idea for Airwallex stemmed from one of Zhang’s side hustles, a Melbourne-based coffee shop that he ran alongside his co-founder and university friend, Max Li.
As part of running that business, the two would often import coffee beans and supplies from places like China and Brazil, which required them to wire money overseas. Through this process, they realized how expensive and inefficient cross-border payments and transfers were through the traditional SWIFT system.
“We thought, why can’t we build a … payment system in parallel to SWIFT and fundamentally change how money moves around the world?” said Zhang. They wanted to create a solution to streamline cross-border payments, and thus, the original idea for Airwallex was born.
Zhang and Li went on to bring together other friends from their university network to help work on the idea: Lucy Liu, Jacob Dai and Ki-lok Wong. Liu played a key role early on and invested the first $1 million into the startup.
By late 2015, the group officially founded Airwallex. After about a decade of more 80-hour work weeks, as of end last year, the company crossed $1 billion in annualized run rate revenue (ARR), which estimates a company’s future yearly earnings based on a shorter period of financial data.
“I’m still very excited about what’s ahead of us,” said Zhang. “I think there’s tons of opportunities ahead of us … we think we can generate [at least] $10 billion [in] revenue by 2030 so that is our next goal post.”
Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future.
