Then COVID hit and wiped out 40 per cent of our revenue in a single week. It was our third near-death experience, and each time we had a choice – to learn and keep moving or fold.Jack Zhang, co-founder & CEO, Airwallex. We kept moving and built a single platform to replace them all.Every time we hit a wall, we went deeper into the infrastructure. We realised we were building a parallel financial system. Not another app sitting on top of the SWIFT system of cross-border banking transfers, but our own global network connected to local real-time payment rails. Today that network connects to local rails in 120+ countries, backed by 85+ regulatory licences.The fintech industry loves to assign categories to companies like payment processor, FX provider and card issuer. We collapsed those categories into one. Today, an Australian business using Airwallex can open multi-currency accounts, accept payments, convert and hold currencies, issue corporate cards, pay vendors and manage their spend; all on a single platform, in real time, and at a fraction of what a bank charges.From day one, you can hold multi-currency business accounts, convert and manage funds in multiple currencies from a single account, without having to open a foreign account. You can manage borderless corporate cards, paying bills and analysing expenses in one platform with AI automations and controls, replacing outdated tools that finance teams still rely on.You can use platform APIs to integrate payments, treasury and financial workflows into your product. Globally, we have 234,000 accounts that utilise this capability, and we’re growing 149 per cent year-on-year.Using our Yield product, a business can earn competitive returns on multi-currency balances through a J.P. Morgan Asset Management AAA-rated money market fund. Globally, Yield has over $US1 billion in assets under administration.Each product took years to get right. Each one started from a real pain point, ours or a customer’s. And each one is more powerful because it sits on the same infrastructure as the others.AI was never an afterthought at Airwallex. We were an AI-native company before that phrase became a buzzword. Today over 90 per cent of our people use AI tools daily. The speed at which we deploy products has increased by 95 per cent and AI is embedded in over 75 per cent of our core operational workflows.When you disrupt the status quo, the learning curve is steep, and pushback from the competition can be intense. We’ve made many mistakes and learnt many hard lessons from the criticism we received.The most surprising criticism is related to my Chinese heritage. I was born in China and moved to Australia at the age of 15 and became a proud Australian citizen. Some of our competitors have falsely suggested we are a Chinese company. It’s a claim with no foundation, but still made its way into the public domain.To any founder reading this, the messy version of building a company is the pivots, the near misses, and the 40 per cent revenue drops. The startups that make it are the ones that keep going despite the hard moments, who block out the noise from self-interested parties, who surround themselves with people who tell them the truth rather than what they want to hear, and who show up every day with conviction.Our north star is to enable 1 million businesses globally and generate $US10 billion in revenue. The next decade starts now.Jack Zhang is co-founder & CEO, Airwallex.