Lucy Liu
Co-Founder at Airwallex
23 Nov 2025etn. - LIVE from Slush
Airwallex's Lucy: Founding Story, Turning Down Stripe, and the $1B ARR Hockey Stick
Lucy, co-founder and president of Airwallex, recounts the Melbourne origins — meeting Jack at his cafe, throwing in her own money, and the founding team quitting their jobs within two weeks — and the early grind of no revenue for three years while raising and getting licenses. She details the hockey-stick curve: nine years to the first $500M ARR and one year to the next, with Europe doubling and the US growing around 200% last year. She explains why she rejected Stripe's 2018 acquisition offer ("Stripe is Stripe, Airwallex is Airwallex"), why Airwallex is doubling down on Europe, the US, UAE and LATAM, and its expansion into spend management, treasury and agentic finance, while staying IPO-ready without making it an internal milestone. The segment ends with banter about the new London office, the McLaren sponsorship and Arsenal.
Elias & Manny: Agency's AI Agents for Post-Sales (Live Raise Announcement)
Elias — a Boston-based repeat founder with HubSpot and Drift (sold to private equity) behind him, on company number five — announces live on the show that his new startup Agency has just raised. Agency uses AI agents to manage the full post-sale customer lifecycle, replacing CRMs that only store information. Manny, whose company Paid is an early Agency customer (he previously co-founded Outreach), joins the conversation, and the two riff on useless CSM handoffs, dreaded QBRs and health scores, arguing that context-rich, proactive agents will transform customer success. The chapter closes with jokes about Helsinki's November cold, the sauna and reindeer meat.
Stephen Whitworth of Incident.io: From Monzo Tooling to AI SRE
Stephen, CEO and co-founder of Incident.io, traces his path through a taxi app startup, fraud-detection company Ravelin and Monzo before building an all-in-one incident response platform used by everyone from Linear to Netflix and Etsy. He explains the founding story — co-founder Chris built the internal Monzo incident tooling that was open-sourced and drew 500 sign-ups on day one during COVID — plus current priorities: scaling the existing business, an AI SRE agent in early access, and moving upmarket to traditional enterprises like Walmart and JPMorgan. He also covers spending 30–40% of his time on hiring, why plans matter less than reacting well, his spin-out talk at Slush, and why Slush is the one European tech conference worth attending.