Airwallex founder Jack Zhang on why he turned down Stripe's $1.2 billion offer to buy his company: In October 2018, Stripe reached out. Patrick Collison wanted to catch up, and the two founders ended up spending a whole day together. The proposal was direct: they should either work together, or Stripe should buy Airwallex. Jack's instinct was to slow things down. "Let's just spend more time together," he said. What followed was an unusual courtship. Patrick built out a 10-to-20-page document in a Google Sheet laying out his thinking and asked @awxjack to comment on it. As they worked through it together, Jack had a realisation: "I was like, wow! The vision of the company in the next decade is kind of very much the same. We all wanted to build AWS for financial services." Stripe was far ahead of them. At the time, before Covid it was around a $9 billion company, which Jack notes is similar to the scale of Airwallex today. He was also struck by Patrick himself: "This guy is so smart. The Collisons are always held as geniuses. He's just so intellectually honest about everything, and also able to go deep in multiple dimensions." Then came the offer. Jack breaks down the structure: around $800 million on the cap table, $350 million to him and his co-founders, and roughly $25 million to core employees, close to $1.2 billion in total. Jack met with the whole team, came away impressed, and verbally told them: "I think we're going to do it." But the decision wouldn't settle: "On the back of your mind, are you really going to do it? I flew back and I was walking around San Francisco for two weeks trying to figure it out. I couldn't figure it out." What finally tipped him came from a question he'd asked Patrick about the long term whether he planned to be at Stripe forever: "Patrick said he's going to build Stripe for the next 20, 30, 40 years. I've just never heard a founder tell me that people would dedicate their entire life to building a business. That was so inspiring to me. I'm like that's what I want to do."

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