“My parents, being retail entrepreneurs, always taught me the intricacies of how to trade, how to operate in retail,” the 35-year-old told CNBC Make It. “So I truly feel that retail is in my blood.”
As a teenager, Molnar began selling his family’s jewelry on eBay and later through a dedicated website. Despite this early entrepreneurial spirit, after graduating college, he wasn’t sure if building businesses would be his long-term 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 recalls.
But his jewelry business ended up complicating those efforts. When Molnar applied for investment banking roles, recruiters saw his jewelry venture on his résumé and questioned why he wanted a traditional job.
“They’d say, ‘Well, why are you applying for a job? You already have a great business,’” he explains. “It was this strange paradox: the world was telling me to get a job, but in truth, I should have been an entrepreneur. Still, I chose the job.”
A push toward entrepreneurship
In 2011, Molnar began working at the Australian venture capital firm M.H. Carnegie & Co.. His boss, firm founder Mark Carnegie, soon became an unlikely champion of his entrepreneurial pursuits.
Carnegie would walk into the office “every morning” and ask Molnar how much jewelry he had sold that day. At that time, Molnar’s online business was already generating around 2 million Australian dollars—just over $2 million USD annually.
As a thought exercise, Carnegie once asked Molnar what he would do if he had $1 million to invest into his jewelry company.
“He really pushed me to be an entrepreneur,” Molnar says. “He basically told me, ‘Look, I think your talents are wasted here at my company. I’ll save your job for a year to give you the confidence to become an entrepreneur—but you’ll never come back.’”
In 2012, Molnar left the firm. Carnegie’s prediction proved true: Molnar never returned to venture capital. Instead, he continued managing his online jewelry business while collaborating with his neighbor, Anthony Eisen. Together, in 2014, they launched Afterpay, a “buy now, pay later” payments company.
Just seven years later, in August 2021, their startup was acquired by Jack Dorsey’s fintech services company, Square (which soon rebranded as Block), for a staggering $29 billion.
Why he chose the Job Route first
Despite his entrepreneurial instincts, Molnar initially pursued a stable job because he valued the predictability of a salary and the security it provided for his family.
“Early on, other founders I asked for advice told me the success rate for startups is really low,” he says. At the time, “buy now, pay later” lenders were rare worldwide and virtually nonexistent in Australia. Convincing consumers to embrace a completely new way to shop was no small task.
“I knew millennials needed another option,” Molnar recalls. “Credit cards were not going to be the way they wanted to manage their spending. And every time I shared this vision and opportunity with people, I became more and more convinced that we had to bring it to life.”
Still, it took Carnegie’s challenge—and his assurance—to give Molnar the courage to take the leap.
“Even though I’ve always felt like an entrepreneur at heart, it took the right people to give me the confidence,” Molnar says.
Lessons from the journey
Looking back, Molnar insists he wouldn’t change his path. His time working in venture capital gave him valuable experience, and he believes the trial-and-error phase that many early entrepreneurs face might have discouraged him had he jumped straight into startups.
Beyond that, Carnegie’s encouragement instilled in him the confidence to build something world-changing. Not knowing what could go wrong, he says, actually worked to his advantage.
“This lack of hindsight was a superpower,” Molnar explains. “I had nothing telling me ‘no.’ I had no past failures giving me muscle memory that said this shouldn’t work. I think you make the wrong decisions when you stop trusting your intuition—when you let moments in your life sway you in ways they wouldn’t have before.”
