“I didn’t really come out and expose my age,” Isaacman recalls. A lot of thoughts were going through my mind: ‘are people ever coming back to the office? Is this company even going to be here?’ ” “That was a pretty big life-altering moment. Don used his skills as a salesman to convince local businesses to take a chance on the upstart, led by a kid who was barely old enough to drive. It was the apex of the first internet boom, and the two friends built web applications to simplify the process of getting a terminal and accepting cards. “I’m no oracle, but at the time I knew that this kid’s the real deal.” “It didn’t take a whole lot of arm-twisting,” says Lauber, who now runs Shift4’s “Harbortouch” touchscreen software division. Next he hired Lauber, his buddy from Decho, who dropped out of the Rochester Institute of Technology to join the new business. Using his connections from MSI and a $10,000 loan from his grandfather, Isaacman convinced a bank to give him an identification number, which he needed to sell the credit-card terminals. His first hire was his father, Don, who would soon leave his sales job as vice president of a home-security company. So he quit to start United Bank Card, the progenitor of Shift4, in his parents’ basement. Six months into his job at MSI, he decided he could make the process faster, easier and cheaper. “It was very intense, it was burdensome, it was entirely unnecessary.” “To sign up to take credit cards 21 years ago, it was the same amount of paperwork as getting a commercial mortgage,” Isaacman says. If a local pizza joint wanted to start accepting credit cards, it would take two weeks and mountains of forms and fees before it could start swiping. Even from his perch in the IT department, Isaacman could see that the process was cumbersome and expensive. Banks issued cards to consumers and expected small businesses to accept them without any help, outsourcing the process to third parties like MSI. MSI’s main business was selling the clunky terminals that swipe credit cards with magnetic strips. The world will come back to life,” says Isaacman. June 2020: Jared Isaacman (center) rings the opening bell at Shift4 Payments’ IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, three months into the pandemic. When that gig turned into a full-time job offer, he jumped at the chance to drop out of high school at age 16 and got his GED instead. In addition to the website work, MSI needed help with computer security, so Isaacman offered himself as an in-house consultant. (MSI), a payment processor based in nearby New Providence, New Jersey. One of their first clients was Merchant Services Inc. In 1998, along with his friend Brendan Lauber, who was two years older, he set up a small company called Decho Systems to design websites for local businesses. “I was always very motivated to get to their lifestyle and not very motivated about high school life,” he says. The only one still stuck at home with Mom and Dad, Isaacman wanted out. Tiffany and Marc, the eldest of the four Isaacman siblings, were 27 and 30, respectively, and both working. When he was still in high school in the quiet suburb of Far Hills, New Jersey, his brother Michael, eight years older, was buying his first house. Isaacman has been chasing an adrenaline rush since childhood. He had to turn back 500 feet from the summit due to dehydration, but he vows to try again. Vinson, a 16,000-foot wall of snow and ice 800 miles from the South Pole. He spent New Year’s Day in Antarctica scaling Mt. He retains a small stake in Draken as part of an estimated $100 million worth of additional assets, including a MiG jet and nine other planes.įor fun, Isaacman bullets the MiG faster than the speed of sound and climbs mountains to unwind from nonstop, intense 80-plus-hour weeks. Isaacman is now worth $1.4 billion, thanks almost entirely to his 38% stake in Shift4 Payments. It’s not a whole lot of time, so it really just comes down to maximizing it while you can,” says Isaacman. Jared Isaacman, his older brother Michael, and former Draken colleagues Sean “Stroker” Gustafson and Scott “Kidd” Poteet (from left to right) prepare to summit Mt.
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