Buy Now, Pay Later by James Eyers

Author:James Eyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2021-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

11

HOUSE OF CARDS

‘WHEN YOU ARE growing so fast, it is very hard to get caught up in that stuff,’ Nick Molnar told The Weekend Australian’s Damon Kitney, who had asked about his $400 million paper fortune. ‘You are trying to hold on when the snowball is rolling down the mountain.’1

The interview for the paper, published in January 2019, recapped a tumultuous year in which Afterpay had fended off regulators, short-sellers and critical governance reports—yet had still emerged with a business that had doubled in value.

For Molnar and Eisen, 2018 had been a roller-coaster both personally and professionally. In San Francisco in late December, Nick’s wife, Gabi, had given birth to Ella. The month before, Anthony Eisen had splashed out $7.6 million on a holiday home: the White House on Wategos Beach, near Byron Bay. The iconic five-bedroom hilltop mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean had been rented to supermodels Kate Moss and Elle Macpherson; Eisen bought it from Charlie Arnott of the Arnott’s biscuit company.

In the newspaper profile, Molnar spoke about how he’d been warned that fatherhood would change his life, while the intensely private Eisen spoke of the ‘cringe-worthiness’ of wealth and unwanted attention.

Afterpay was now a big team, with a staff of around 400, split between Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney crew had moved from its initial digs in the inner-city suburb of Surry Hills and was now based in a larger warehouse space up the hill. The area that had housed the city’s rag trade was now a hub for tech firms and creative types. The digs had the start-up feel: the stairwell up to the office was adorned with graffiti, while a set of Technics vinyl decks sat on a table in the centre of the open-plan space. (Eisen is a decent DJ.) But there were also signs the business was getting more professional: motivational values about the importance of hard work and customer centrism had been fixed to the main wall. ‘Do things differently’, ‘Hustle every day’ and ‘Borrow less and live more’ were written in coloured chalk on a blackboard near the entrance. The glass surrounding the conference room was adorned with the logos of hundreds of the biggest retail brands in Australia.

Eisen, based in Melbourne, had also come to appreciate that a presence in the nation’s capital, Canberra, was crucial to Afterpay’s long-term prosperity: they would need to bolster their lobbying efforts. He and David Hancock took meetings with whoever would accept them. The networking was relentless. The logic was that when issues arose, people would know of Afterpay, and know who to call to explain what was going on. Early encounters with the banks had alerted them to the fact that the carpet wasn’t always rolled out to new players. Quite the opposite. Lobbying was a dark art, but Afterpay wasn’t above it.

The banking industry was being represented in Canberra by Anna Bligh, a former premier of Queensland, who had performed with distinction as the Banking Royal Commission hearings unfolded during 2018, and

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