‘We listed too early’: Afterpay boss Anthony Eisen admits

Anthony Eisen is now worth an estimated $2.3bn but says his buy now, pay later company has used up ‘about nine lives’ over its high-profile journey.

Afterpay co-CEO Anthony Eisen. Picture: Natalie Grono

Investors have built Afterpay into a $34bn market darling and one of the ASX’s hottest stocks but the company listed too early according to its co-founder, who says he never wanted to take the company public.

The buy now, pay later outfit has used up “about nine lives” over its six-year history, according to co-CEO Anthony Eisen, who has revealed the company has come close to failing multiple times.

“There have been quite a few instances where I’d come home and just say, ‘Look, I think this is it’,” Mr Eisen told a STK business network lunch in Melbourne.

“One of the most pervasive instances of feeling like it was all over was when we needed capital the most, which is when we wanted to list out our business. I actually never wanted to go public, I really thought that that was going to be very difficult for us as a start-up company very much in the public eye, at a very early stage. We were too early to go public in hindsight.”

Afterpay co-CEOs Nick Molnar, right, and Anthony Eisen.

The executive, who is now worth about $2.3bn, said Afterpay would have had to cease operating had it not received a vital capital injection before its March 2016 ASX debut.

“And having begged, borrowed and all the other things in between to convince a retailer that you ­really should take us on and have a go, the last thing that you could ever do is tell them ‘Look, can we just stop for a little while now’. You can’t do that,” he said.

“We had to list before Easter, otherwise it was going to get really tight, and we’d have to start having conversations with merchants.”

The company also faced further tumult from corporate regulator ASIC, which put a stop order on Afterpay's prospectus weeks before it was set to list.

“They halted the whole thing around (the question) ‘what are you as a business?’,” Mr Eisen said. “Should you be considered a financial services business, should it be considered an e-commerce business? And we went through a period of two to three weeks where we actually didn’t know if we were going to be our issue our prospectus. And of course all this is playing out in the press.

“It got us through but literally there was a couple of days in it.”

Mr Eisen also used the event to lift the lid on the company‘s expansion plans. Afterpay recently declared its intentions to list in the US and announced a $300m deal with Chinese tech giant Tencent in 2020, paving the way for a push into China.

“It’s always interesting when you try and dip your toes outside Australia.

“Because the question is, does what works here work there? And I think Australian business is littered with examples that as soon as you get too ambitious, for whatever reason, the best laid plans don’t come to fruition,” he said.

“The key thing for us was actually just to focus back on looking at consumers and what they wanted as actually being a global movement, and seeing if that came to fruition. It was a bit of a bet.”

The company’s international push came from global brands that sold into Australia and were asking Afterpay to bring its services to other countries, Mr Eisen said.

“If you’re not going to do it, we’ll go and ask someone else to do it,” was the message.

“That was the inspiration, so to go to the US, which obviously is miles bigger than Australia in terms of number of consumers and merchants. It presents an enormous opportunity but also a risk.

“But it was just relationship by relationship that allowed us to get our footing and our grounding, and we‘ve found that this movement from customers, who want a different way of engaging and how they pay and how they budget, is pretty universal.”