Afterpay, the buy now, pay later company that Jack Dorsey’s Square agreed to acquire for about US$29 billion in August 2021, began with a conversation between two Sydney neighbours at the kerbside bins.
The deal, valued at around A$39 billion, completed in January 2022 and left co-founders Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen with about US$2.7 billion in Square stock for their Afterpay shares, according to Wikipedia. The origin story is usually retold as a lucky break, but it rests on a business Molnar had already been running for years before the two men met.
The bedroom business
Molnar, born in 1990, started selling jewellery on eBay while still at Moriah College and became the top Australian jewellery seller on the platform. He later persuaded US online jeweller Ice.com to let him launch an Australian site, iceonline.com.au, which grew to around A$2 million in annual revenue. He went on to study commerce at the University of Sydney.
The operation ran out of his bedroom in the family home in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, and it was busy enough to be noticed from across the street.
The neighbour
Living opposite was Anthony Eisen, a former chief investment officer at Guinness Peat Group. According to SmartCompany, Eisen kept seeing the lights on late at night and parcels being loaded into the car, and he was curious about what was going on inside.
When Eisen and Molnar’s father, Ron, were both putting out the bins one evening, he asked. Ron explained the online jewellery business, and that exchange led to the introduction between the future co-founders.
From idea to takeover
The pair began talking about a generation of shoppers who had turned away from credit cards. Afterpay, which lets customers split a purchase into instalments, was founded in October 2014 and listed on the ASX in May 2016 through an A$25 million IPO.
Five years later, Square (since renamed Block) agreed to buy the company in an all-stock deal. The acquisition completed on 31 January 2022, ending Afterpay’s run as an independent ASX-listed company.
Jack’s take
It gets told as a luck story, and the bins part genuinely is luck. But Molnar had spent years building a real online business before anyone came knocking, so when the door opened he had something to show. Luck tends to find the people who are already doing the work.