His boss said his talents were 'wasted' at work—so he co-founded a company that sold for $29 billion

CNBC

8 hours ago

Growing up around his family's jewelry business in Sydney, Australia gave Nick Molnar an early interest in entrepreneurship.
"My parents being retail entrepreneurs always taught me the intricacies of how to trade, how to run in retail," 35-year-old tells CNBC Make It. "So I do really feel retail is in my blood."
As a teenager, he started selling jewelry from his family's company on eBay and eventually on a standalone website for the business. But after college, Molnar wasn't sold on entrepreneurship as his career path.
"The universe told me that I should get a finance job given my commerce degree, my business degree, and so I really tried to make that a reality," he says.
His jewelry business became something of an obstacle in that pursuit, however. Molnar says he would apply for investment banking jobs and companies would see his jewelry business listed on his CV and ask why he would bother doing anything else.
"They'd say, 'Well, but why are you coming to get a job? You have a great business,'" he says. "It's like this weird paradigm that the world told me to get a job. But actually the truth was, I should have been an entrepreneur, but I got the job."
After he started working at Australian venture capital firm, M.H. Carnegie & Co. in 2011, his boss became an outspoken champion for Molnar's entrepreneurial pursuits.
Mark Carnegie, the firm's founder, would come in "every morning" and ask Molnar how much jewelry he had sold that day, he says. The website was bringing in around 2 million Australian dollars, or just over 2 million USD in annual revenue at the time, Molnar says.
As a thought exercise, Carnegie asked Molnar what he would do if he gave him a million dollars to grow his jewelry business, Molnar says.
"He really pushed me to be an entrepreneur," he says. "He basically said to me, 'Look, I think you're wasted right now being at my company. I will save your job for a year to give you the confidence to go and be an entrepreneur, but you will never come back.'"
So he left the firm in 2012 and Carnegie was right — Molnar didn't return to working in venture capital. Instead, he continued running his online jewelry business and started working on a new venture with his neighbor, Anthony Eisen. Together they launched Afterpay, a buy now, pay later company, in 2014.
Just seven years later in August 2021, their company was acquired by Jack Dorsey's fintech services company, Square, which would soon rebrand to Block. The firm purchased Afterpay for $29 billion.
Though he had early entrepreneurial inclinations, Molnar chose the regular job route at first because he wanted the stability, regular income and "security of knowing that you're going to be able to take care of your family" a full-time job can provide.
Early in his entrepreneurial journey, founders he tapped for advice told him the success rate for new businesses is "really low," he says. Buy now, pay later lenders are fairly ubiquitous in retail now, but back in 2014 they were rare, and virtually nonexistent in Australia. Afterpay would have to sell consumers on a new way to shop and spend.
"I knew millennials needed another option," Molnar says. "Credit cards were not going to be the way they wanted to manage their spending and each time I shared the vision and opportunity with people, I was more and more convinced that we had to bring the idea to life."
Still, it took Carnegie's challenge — and assurance — for Molnar to take the leap.
"Even though I feel like an entrepreneur through and through...it took the right people to give me the confidence," he says.
He wouldn't go back and change his trajectory if he could, he says. He learned a lot working at the venture capital firm and says the trial-and-error period of many early entrepreneurs may have discouraged him or held him back. On top of the confidence Carnegie helped instill in him, this lack of hindsight was a "superpower," he says.
"I had nothing telling me no, I had no past that was giving me muscle memory to say that like this shouldn't work," Molnar says. "I think you make the wrong decision sometimes when you stop trusting your intuition — when you're swayed by moments in your life and your journey, that probably wouldn't have swayed you before."