Giant Ideas

What did it take to build an $11 billion company, Airwallex?

Jack moved from rural northeast China to Melbourne at 15 and now runs Airwallex, the global payments and business banking platform.

Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen talk to Jack about what it took to get there: the jobs he worked to put himself through college, why he thought he'd be happy with a $100 million business, and why he turned down Stripe's $1.2 billion offer. He also explains why he believes the future of banking is agentic, and why the big banks are too far behind to build it.

He speaks about:

• What he learned about work ethic: washing dishes, bar shifts and overnights at a petrol station
• The difference between anxiety and survival 
• Running ten side businesses, and still feeling irrelevant
• The angel who wired $1 million into his personal account before signing anything 
• Pulled term sheets, and a $100 million cheque from Yuri Milner
• Being targeted as a Silicon Valley outsider (and why he thinks the facts are on his side)
• Agentic banking and the end of vertical finance software
• And lots more...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

What did it take to build an $11 billion company, Airwallex?

Jack moved from rural northeast China to Melbourne at 15 and now runs Airwallex, the global payments and business banking platform.

Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen talk to Jack about what it took to get there: the jobs he worked to put himself through college, why he thought he'd be happy with a $100 million business, and why he turned down Stripe's $1.2 billion offer. He also explains why he believes the future of banking is agentic, and why the big banks are too far behind to build it.

He speaks about:

• What he learned about work ethic: washing dishes, bar shifts and overnights at a petrol station
• The difference between anxiety and survival 
• Running ten side businesses, and still feeling irrelevant
• The angel who wired $1 million into his personal account before signing anything 
• Pulled term sheets, and a $100 million cheque from Yuri Milner
• Being targeted as a Silicon Valley outsider (and why he thinks the facts are on his side)
• Agentic banking and the end of vertical finance software
• And lots more...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're back with Max Jaderberg, president of Isomorphic Labs, to talk about his life lessons.

After years at DeepMind working on deep learning, generative models and reinforcement learning, Max helped launch Isomorphic in 2021 to turn the promise of AlphaFold into new medicine. Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen talk to Max about why he rejected a consultancy contract to do a PhD at Oxford, and why he later left core AI research after writing a pro/con list on a whiteboard in his loft. He also explains how Isomorphic keeps a startup's hunger (even with Alphabet's backing), and what nearly 15 years of working with Demis Hassabis has taught him.

He speaks about:

• Deciding what "superpower" his research could create
• Whether DeepMind could ever have done it alone, without selling, and how Alphabet backs its investments
• Keeping a startup culture, with a giant's backing 
• Why Isomorphic wanted a global investor base in its latest round
• Trusting Demis Hassabis's vision (including an early Nobel Prize prediction he didn't believe)
• Rejecting a job contract to do a PhD 
• Working 24/7 in his head, but making time for Counter-Strike - and needing plenty of sleep...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're joined by Max Jaderberg, President of Isomorphic Labs.

Isomorphic Labs, the Alphabet-backed company spun out of DeepMind, is using AI to design new medicines, with the mission of solving all disease. 

Tommy Stadlen and Cameron McLain talk to Max about why he believes no future exists where medicines aren't designed with AI, and why he'd be "severely disappointed" if disease doesn't mean something completely different 30 years from now.

He speaks about:

• What "solve all disease" means in practice 
• How a medicine actually gets made today, and why it's "very, very fancy trial and error"
• Why earlier AI drug discovery overpromised, and what AlphaFold changed
• Why you can't download the data this field needs off the internet
• The 90% clinical failure rate 
• Bio-resilience, bad actors, and why Isomorphic keeps its models in-house

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

After more than 50 episodes interviewing founders, investors and leaders, Giant co-founders Tommy Stadlen and Cameron McLain turn the mic on themselves to ask what the best entrepreneurs have in common.

From resilience, storytelling, obsession and self-awareness, to the power of control. They speak about:

• Cameron's four founder traits, and why three out of four is the bar
• Why Tommy added control to his list (and what Alex Ferguson has to do with it)
• Producing under fire vs simply enduring
• The case for benign dictatorship in early-stage companies
• "Trauma showcasing" in pitch meetings, and what drives founders
• The four burners: what founders give up, and why the greats might not call it sacrifice
• Why intelligence might not make the top three
• Agentic founders, 16-year-olds pitching from Sweden and 10-person teams building huge revenue...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're joined by Steve Case, the co-founder of AOL, to talk about what the first internet boom can tell us about this one.

Steve started AOL in 1985, when 3% of people were online. He took it public in 1992 as the first internet company to list, and now runs Revolution, the firm behind Rise of the Rest and more than 200 investments across 100 American cities. 

Cameron McLain talks to Steve about why AOL raised just $10 million over seven years (while today's AI companies are seeded with a billion), why he still thinks the Time Warner merger was the right call, and why he thinks AI needs to be very carefully deployed to avoid a revolution.

He speaks about:

• The nine years it took AOL to reach a million users (ChatGPT took three months)
• Arguing with IBM and Apple about whether to build modems into computers
• Being 26 and taking on AT&T, GE and Microsoft with just $10 million
• Whether he'd do the Time Warner merger again
• The industries AI can't disrupt

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're joined by Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange.

Eric wrote the book that taught a generation of founders how to build under uncertainty, and he has spent the years since trying to fix what happens to those companies once they grow.

His new book, Incorruptible, is about a double mystery: why successful companies so often get ruined, and why a handful avoid that fate.

Tommy Stadlen and Cameron McLain talk to Eric about why he thinks the best practices of modern corporate governance destroy value, why he believes a strong founder is not enough to protect a company, and what he'd change about The Lean Startup if he could go back.

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're back with Michael Moritz, the Sequoia investor who backed Google, Yahoo and PayPal, to talk about his family and his latest book.

Moritz has written a memoir, Ausländer, out in the US this month. It began with papers found when they cleared out their mother's house in Wales, and grew into an account of how his grandparents were murdered and how his father got out during the Nazi Regime.

We talk to him about what he found in the archives, why he thinks a stable society is a much more fragile thing than most people assume, his experience of anti-semitism, and if he thinks Silicon Valley is befriending Trump (and what he thinks of the US president).

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're joined by Michael Moritz, the former chairman of Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time.

Michael Moritz is a venture capitalist and philanthropist renowned for backing early tech giants like Google, PayPal, and YouTube during his 38-year career, first as Partner then Chairman of the firm. 

Cameron McLain and Tommy Stadlen talk to Michael about why he thinks the first 16 years of a founder's life tell you more than you can find anywhere is, why he still wears the cap of the company that lost Sequoia more money than any other, and why he shivered every time anyone called Sequoia an institution.

He speaks about:

• the phone call that brought Sequoia to Google
• why he asks founders about their first 15 or 16 years
• meeting the Collison brothers at 20 and 18, and what was obvious within minutes
• why founding pairs make each other better
• why Bill Gates took the radio taken out of his Mercedes 
• the $44m Webvan loss, and going back to the same idea 20 years later as Instacart
• and lots more...

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.

Today, we're back for our FINAL episode before a 3 week summer break! We're back the first week of September.

Today we're joined by Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition and former COO of Y Combinator, to talk about his life lessons & career advice.

He speaks about:

• The rule he got from a Harvard professor: a mediocre person in a high-growth industry beats the best person in a mediocre one
• The most useful advice of his career
• Optimising for the people you'll learn from over title and pay (at any cost)
• The four life-burners problem, and which one he switched off
• Working seven days a week since he was 14, and what his routine is on the weekend
• Why you can't become Nirvana by copying Kurt Cobain
• The three eras of Y Combinator, and why the old YC wouldn't work today
• "We Make Mistakes" — the only post he wrote as COO, and why it matters

Building a purpose driven company? Read more about Giant Ventures at www.Giant.vc.

Music credits: Bubble King written and produced by Cameron McLain and Stevan Cablayan aka Vector_XING.

Please note: The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It should not be considered financial, legal, or investment advice. Always consult a licensed professional before making any investment decisions.