President-elect Donald Trump's pick to run NASA, Jared Isaacman, is a 41-year-old space enthusiast, who just months ago commanded the world's first all-civilian mission to reach orbit.
Isaacman is the founder of Shift4, a fintech company that provides secure payment processing solutions for businesses. The company's stock price has jumped almost 40% this year, lifting its market cap to $9.3 billion. Isaacman started the business in 1999 at age 16 and took it public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2020.
In a Dec. 4 post on his Truth Social platform announcing the nomination, Trump wrote, "Jared has demonstrated exceptional leadership, building a trailblazing global financial technology company."
That success can be traced in part to a bold bet on crypto almost three years ago.
Inside Isaacman's New York residence near Central Park, around a lofted conference room with glass walls that sits above the apartment's living area, Isaacman and members of his executive team sat with Alex Wilson and Pat Duffy, two entrepreneurs who were in the final stages of selling their crypto donation marketplace to Shift4. It was early 2022.
With a whiteboard behind them, they spitballed on how blockchain-based technology could be applied across the payment company's business.
Bitcoin had hit a record a few months earlier, jumping sixfold from the end of 2019 through the close of 2021. A range of digital tokens were delivering outsized returns. The market was frothy; spirits were high and meme coins were in their prime.
But while Elon Musk was touting dogecoin and money was pouring into nonfungible tokens (NFTs), Wilson, Duffy, and Isaacman were focused on a far less glitzy corner of the digital asset world: stablecoins.
Stablecoins are a subset of cryptocurrencies matched to the value of a real-world asset and are virtually synonymous with U.S. dollar-pegged tokens. Today, they're collectively worth around $200 billion and are often used to move money across borders at a fraction of the cost of legacy payment systems.
Wilson, 31, said the group around the table at Isaacman's house "all agreed it was more likely that stablecoins would become a regular medium of exchange than bitcoin or ethereum." They wanted to build products that took advantage of blockchain but were token agnostic.
"We wanted to meet users where they were and equip our merchants to take payments in whatever ways their customers wanted to pay," Wilson said.
In front of the whiteboard with marker in hand, Isaacman walked through ways crypto could be applied to the broader Shift4 business. Wilson said Isaacman has an uncanny ability to get in the weeds despite being the CEO of a company that now has more than 3,000 employees.
Weeks later, on March 1, Shift4 announced it had purchased The Giving Block, Wilson and Duffy's company, and would pursue a "$45+ billion embedded cross-sell opportunity by bundling crypto donation capabilities with traditional card acceptance." Shift4 paid $54 million and included in the deal a potential earnout of up to $246 million.