Airwallex CEO: Hire for personality traits, not experience

Jack Zhang has built from scratch a global payments platform that is valued at $5.6bn by investors. Airwallex has created a system that lets businesses handle international payments across different currencies more efficiently.

The business was founded in Melbourne in 2015 but is now headquartered in Singapore. It has more than 1700 employees with 37 offices around the world, with a major London office leading its EMEA expansion. In 2018 it resisted a buyout from Stripe that valued it at more than $1bn.

Zhang grew up in Shandong, China but moved to Australia at the age of 16. He graduated in Computer Science before working for several large companies, including Aviva and National Australia Bank. He founded Airwallex at the age of 30.

He realised, after running several side-hustle businesses, that international payments across currencies were an expensive pain point for businesses. So, he built a platform to reimagine how this could be done.

Software companies can famously scale quickly once they’ve found a winning formula. But a key lesson for Zhang has been to look at what kind of people to hire when growing his international footprint.

“I think when a smaller business tries to scale initially, especially in the early stage, you have a lot of problems,” says Zhang, “you tend to look for experienced people to help you build the business.

“But generally what we found is that finding people with certain personality traits is far more important than the experience. [You need] people who have intellectual curiosity, people able to think deep, people who have hustle and grit.

“Those personality traits tend to work out a lot better than people who just have the experience.”