.jpg)
Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Taylor Lauber, CEO of Shift4 | Episode 424
Ever wonder what it takes to transform a basement startup into a global payments powerhouse processing over a quarter trillion dollars annually? In this fascinating conversation, Taylor Lauber, CEO of Shift4, reveals the remarkable journey that's taken the company from a small payment processor to an innovative force reimagining commerce across 75 countries worldwide.
Taylor's own path to leadership wasn't straightforward. After beginning his career at Merrill Lynch and Blackstone, he initially resisted joining Shift4 despite his teenage connection to founder Jared Isaacman. His skepticism about the sustainability of the payments business model eventually gave way when he recognized that Shift4 wasn't just riding a fintech wave but actively creating their future through strategic innovation and problem-solving. "This was not luck," Taylor explains. "This is a team that can identify opportunities and manufacture success."
What sets Shift4 apart in the crowded payments landscape? According to Taylor, it starts with humility – "If we stand still, we will not survive" – coupled with the ambition to tackle problems others avoid. Unlike competitors who choose a single strategy, Shift4 employs a three-pronged approach: building proprietary solutions when necessary, acquiring strategic assets that shouldn't be standalone features, and partnering intelligently where ownership might alienate collaborators. This flexibility has allowed them to serve diverse markets from single-location restaurants to massive enterprises like casinos and stadiums.
Taylor offers particularly valuable insights about global expansion opportunities. While integrated payments have reached relative maturity in the United States, international markets remain in the "early innings," with payment experiences often resembling those in the U.S. from 15-20 years ago. This represents an enormous opportunity for companies that can adapt proven solutions to new cultural contexts.
Listen now to discover how Shift4 balances innovation with execution, and how Taylor maintains his own equilibrium between leading a global enterprise and preserving sacred family time around the dinner table.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Meyers, and on today's show we have a very special guest. Payments Podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and on today's show we have a very special guest, taylor Lauber, who is the CEO of Shift4. So, taylor, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show. Oh, thanks for having me. So, if you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you're born, where you grew up, where you went to school, a few things like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure. So I grew up in really central Jersey and a buddy of mine founded what would become Shift4 in his parents' basement when we were teenagers. So I got a little bit of exposure to this boom that was the payments industry back in the late 90s, early 2000s. And then was the idiot that left and went to college, so I thought my career would be on Wall Street. I went to a school called Bentley, which really focused on business and technology, ultimately landed a job at Merrill Lynch supporting companies through their public journey, whether that was issuing equity to their employees and the lifecycle of a public company from the standpoint of the employees and the executives.
Speaker 3:Got to know Blackstone through their IPO and the CFO and the head of HR at Blackstone recruited me to come over and work full-time for them, which started an entirely new journey. It was very different. It was how do we think about growth as a company and how do we think about adding customers and adding products and all that stuff? And I got shoved into a lot of really cool projects, first of which was building a new fundraising arm for Blackstone so they can attract new investors into their own funds. Spent eight years there and really loved it Highly entrepreneurial, despite the glossy brand name and the reputation. You had license to build whatever you thought would grow and create a lot of value for the company.
Speaker 3:But more or less every year, jared asked me to come back and work for the business and I was, quite frankly, the biggest critic, I think, of the industry and the business and was it luck or was it skill, and how does all this stuff even work? And finally relented about eight years ago when he, I think the phrase was I'm not going to ask you, I'm telling you, I want your help and come join me. And I've been with Shifor ever since and I can tell you that that eight years has eclipsed kind of the entirety of all the years prior in terms of just learning. I mean, went from probably a 300 person business to now a 6,000 operating in one country, to over 75 today, and so it's been a heck of a journey, but also a heck of a lot more complicated than I ever imagined it could be in terms of just how commerce works all over the world.
Speaker 2:Okay, I think that's a great segue into the next question. For those in the audience that may not know who Shift4 is and what you do, do you mind giving us kind of the high-level overview of the company? Yeah, of course.
Speaker 3:So we are a software and payments provider for a lot of different industries and, up until recently, primarily focused on what we would call card present. So you'd find us in about a third of the table service restaurants in the United States. You'd find us in roughly 40% of the hotels in the United States, an overwhelming number of stadiums, theme parks and entertainment venues, etc. And what's really exciting is these kind of solutions we've been able to bring to these industries have yet to exist all over the world, and so if you think about going to a pub in London, it kind of looks like a payment experience from 15 or 20 years ago in the United States, which is that they pull out this bank terminal and they look up what you owe and they punch it in. And so today we're actually much more defined by introducing what's made us successful for the last 25 years from a technology standpoint into all of these new markets all over the world.
Speaker 3:And maybe, just to cover the headlines, we are, as I mentioned, about 6,000 people. We process well over a quarter trillion dollars of payment volume or commerce around the world in different capacities, and beyond those verticals served, we've got a hell of an interesting customer base, kind of forcing us to evolve all over the world. So we're enabling payments in places like Africa and places like Asia for a lot of emerging companies. We've been able to leverage our used technology to solve difficult problems, mindset to not just enter those verticals that I mentioned but also build franchises to start to support other huge verticals of commerce where complexity is a challenge. So if you think about one end of the spectrum being a square giving that small business owner everything they need to run their business, we try to deliver a similar set of capabilities to the New York Yankees, who have a whole different set of challenges.
Speaker 2:Okay, and is your customer base? All the way from small to super regional? I mean national or international businesses, yeah, so what would have?
Speaker 3:started as a typical shift for a customer maybe 10 years ago, would have been the owner-operated bar and grill in boise, idaho. Hypothetically, all the way to today, put that bar and grill inside of like the wind casino resort in Las Vegas and it's one of hundreds of revenue centers. And that operator needs to know that it needs world-class software to run that food and beverage location. But it also needs common reconciliation across hundreds of these revenue centers. And it's not just a restaurant, it's also a spa, it's also a golf course, it's also a front desk times as many revenue centers as I mentioned. So, yeah, it's been an incredible journey because the typical customer of Shift4 would have looked pretty ubiquitous 10 years ago and now we have single locations that do hundreds of billions of payment volume, if not billions, and, quite frankly, conduct commerce very differently. Right, like the New York Yankees have to sell their ticket online and they need our solutions to help enable that but also fulfill the journey as you kind of go to the game and watch the experience.
Speaker 2:So did you have your customers that seemed to pull you into doing the international growth side? Or was that a decision, a strategic decision?
Speaker 3:I'd actually like to pull it a step back and philosophically, why do we embrace these problems? And it started 25 years ago. It started with if all we're doing as a payments company is an approval, a decline, a refund and putting a terminal on a countertop, we're not adding a heck of a lot of value. And let's not kid ourselves, the fact that digital payments acceptance was such a gold rush should not lull ourselves into complacency, thinking we're smart or good, we're probably lucky and there's not a lot of technology here in this countertop terminal. And if we want to command value and we want to win the hearts and minds of merchants, it's not going to be through approvals to clients and refunds. It's going to be through technology that helps them run their business better.
Speaker 3:So it was a 20-year journey where we started combining what at the time were three cottage industries of hardware, software and payments into a single ecosystem and delivering that to the merchant, and it was immensely successful. We learned a heck of a lot about what it means to be a technology provider. Beyond that payment experience, you need to think about software coding, you need to think about implementation. You need to think about lifecycle support. That's far more intense. Did the money arrive or not.
Speaker 3:And it was those learnings that taught us that the bigger the problem, the thinner the air from a competitive standpoint. And why can't we do what we've done in restaurants for hotels who have not three vendors they're working with, but maybe six or more, or stadiums who have potentially even more than that? And to your point, when we started to solve those problems, customers started to say I want this solution for my locations outside the United States. And it makes perfect sense, although they were telling us that seven, eight years ago, when we didn't have an ounce of capabilities and it started what's now been a journey of that length to start to build the capabilities that let us deliver that simplification in as many markets as possible.
Speaker 2:Okay. So if you let's say in the US, with the integrated payments with software technology payments together, let's just say maybe we're in the fourth or fifth inning, I don't know kind of making that up, but let's just say we're there, we've been doing it for 10 years in the US. Where would you kind of say they are? In other parts of the world? Are they just like at the top of the first or kind of? Where is the maturity of that?
Speaker 3:So very much the early days. I mean, it is still, by and large, the bank terminal that is delivered to help accept payments, and this can be a point of confusion for consumers because there has been investment, there's not like. This is a lost opportunity. The consumer payment experience can look somewhat modern if you're tapping or they're bringing a device over to the table, but it's, by and large, a bank terminal that offers very little utility to that merchant. It's still not connected to the software they use to run their business and the other management systems that they have, and so, in that regard, it is very much the early innings, and what's exciting for us about it is the idea that we've solved these problems before. These aren't new and they're not unique. There's certainly geographic differences and there's cultural differences they have to adapt to, but I learned a long time ago that if you can find the same problem in a different place that you've already solved before, it's a recipe for success.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, what would you say? Differentiates Shift4 from your?
Speaker 3:competitors. Well, what, would you say, differentiates Shift4 from your competitors? It starts with a humility If we stand still, we will not survive. And that comes from the early days of Jared saying if I don't embrace technology and emergency value, I'm going to be worthless to my merchants. So we start with this humility that we're never going to be doing it perfectly, and then an ambition that we're going to seek out problems that others haven't solved yet, and maybe a motivation that the bigger the problem, the more eager we are to take it on.
Speaker 3:There's another philosophy that's somewhat unique to fintech companies, at least from our perspective, which is we didn't take outside capital in the business for the first 15 years it existed. And to think about what that does to an institution, it means you are immensely disciplined about how your dollars get spent and you will not do something without, ultimately, the aim of profitability. And I think that for us, as we look across the competitive landscape throughout various market cycles, is a huge differentiator. I mean we have many competitors that had a license to light money on fire and no plan to ever kind of become profitable. So, as a public company, that the ultimate goal of a public company is to deliver a return on capital to your shareholders.
Speaker 3:We've got a kind of we were forged in a way that I think has that entrepreneurial live within your means but also make your dollar go really, really far when you plan to invest it. We have that mindset. And the last thing I'd say and I'm really I'm glad the world has gotten glimpses of this is we have a founder that, like went to space and then immediately decided to go back again and make the mission a lot more challenging and accomplish a lot more. That ambition can't be understated and obviously that ambition has been on display professionally long before the public could see the goals he sets for himself and the company. So I think that is another really really unique testament to the problems we try to solve.
Speaker 2:Right, right, okay. Well, one kind of final question about the company. A lot of payments companies decided to sell to SaaS companies, who are the software, and you guys, I think, decided strategically to take another route. Could you maybe talk about that decision-making process? What were you guys thinking when you decided to own all of it as opposed to just stick to the payment side?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a great question. It comes to the heart of who's winning and who's losing in the current operating environment. It starts with Jared and the team recognizing 20 years ago that technology was what was going to win, not payments. Payments, payments was much more of a utility that a merchant was required to purchase than something that they were excited to purchase or something that actually helped run their business better. And so that framework of we have to deliver technology is something that I you know Jared caught on to a decade before any of the traditional payments companies did.
Speaker 3:The wave of how does payments and software fit together that we saw over the last 10 years had been worked on for 10 years and already at Shift4. And so what did we learn? We learned that there are areas you build, there are areas you buy and there are areas you partner. And if you want to be in multiple verticals, you can't have a monolithic strategy, because you cannot possibly own all of the software that a large casino resort in Las Vegas needs to run their business and, quite frankly, if you own certain pieces of that software, you might alienate the rest and they'll never want to work with you. And so those are areas where partnership makes obvious sense and it creates a differentiated approach where partnership makes obvious sense and it creates a differentiated approach.
Speaker 3:Similarly, there are solutions that don't exist and yet merchants need them. So pay at the table and mobile delivery and payment solutions became an urgent need through the pandemic and there wasn't a good solution, so we went out and built something. And then, lastly, there are assets that shouldn't be standalone companies. They are features as part of a broader offering, and the idea that a merchant needs to stitch five or six of them together to get commerce to work is not that's a bug, it's not a feature, and so it is unique because we do all three of those things. And I would think, if you look across the landscape, most of our competitors and, just simply, most companies in the industry pick one of those things. And I would think, if you look across the landscape, most of our competitors and, just simply, most companies in the industry pick one of those three and they stick to that, which constrains their growth and their flexibility, in our opinion.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay. Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about you. You sort of walked us through your professional journey earlier and you said that basically, jared said you're coming to work here, but you had to convince yourself that Shift4 was a place you wanted to build a career. So maybe walk us through that decision-making. Why did you say yes? And you know, obviously the rest is history, but tell us maybe how you were thinking about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, I'll start with where the skepticism came in. The skepticism in the early years was that the business was tremendously successful from its infancy and life's not supposed to be that easy. It was a gold rush to enable merchants with this capability. This was, keep in mind, it sounds like ancient history, but no, giving a merchant the ability to accept a credit card was innovative 25 years ago. I mean, we were 16 and we were getting sent credit cards in the mail to our attention by the card issuers, and yet the average business didn't have the capability to accept them. And so enablement were the early days, and simply enablement, and innovation and go-to-market created a ton of success, and I questioned the durability of that. Now, interestingly, jared did too, and that's why he evolved the business through delivering all these technologies over the years. But that was one thing. Blackstone was an incredible place to be. It is still an incredible company. If you want to work in asset management, there's nowhere better and so that obviously creates its own inertia, and I really enjoyed my time there and I still have great relationships there.
Speaker 3:Two things really distinctly changed my thinking in the equation from a career perspective. One was Jared had just completed a wave of acquisitions, that was assembling. It was combining a lot of parts that had traditionally been their own industry, and the wave of growth was obvious. It was like what I saw at Blackstone when I joined in 2010. It was this company is going to quadruple, even with mediocre execution. That's how much success we've got in front of us. And, sure enough, it did far better than that. And then, lastly, I saw the team and it was a small group at Shift4, building an air defense business.
Speaker 3:Like Jared built a completely different business, kind of in his spare time, and it dawned on me that this was not luck. I mean, this was not right place at the right time. This is a team that can identify opportunities and manufacture success, and the industry doesn't matter, the customer doesn't matter, the product doesn't matter, it's just that mindset and skillset. And so when I saw that Jared's a persuasive guy, he actually took me on a trip to go purchase a bunch of fighter jets from the Spanish government and I said, wow, this is something truly special. And it actually doesn't matter what the product is. The team that is executing against it will pivot as often as the world necessitates it. So in that regard, it's been exceptional and I would not have expected that we'd be a company of the scale we are and a public company and all those things, but it's certainly the byproduct of an excellent team and a mindset that you pivot as often as the world requires you to.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what is something you're passionate about? So, maybe one work-related passion and one personal passion.
Speaker 3:So, it's hard to say this as a passion. It's just kind of a philosophy I've learned professionally and as a young person trying to innovate and trying to create success. I got really frustrated when I was at Blackstone because we try to build these investment products and the senior management team we're all running the company today would constantly send us back to the drawing board and say this is too complicated, it doesn't scale in the way that you think it should Start over. Think bigger, think simpler. If you want it to be huge, it can't be complicated. So think about scale. Before you want it to be huge, it can't be complicated. So think about scale before you build it. Don't build something that can't scale beyond a billion in assets under management in their industry or something like that. I didn't have an appreciation for it. So this product in isolation, with the resources we need to make it work, is going to generate a lot of profit on a standalone basis and that's entirely uninteresting to the leader of a big and growing business. What it takes to move the needle is really really hard in a fast growing business. To calibrate to A million dollar idea when I joined, shift4 was a great idea. Now a hundred million dollar idea is kind of an okay idea, and so I gained an appreciation for just thinking about what moves the needle and scale and using that framework to approach kind of problems and innovation, as opposed to just what sounds like a good idea, because there's a niche that you can fill.
Speaker 3:On the personal side, I met my wife when we started dating when we were teenagers. We've been together ever since. We've got four kids. That doesn't allow for a lot of hobbies. My sacred time is the Sunday family dinner and I love to cook and put on a show and spend time with my family, incorporate a complicated large family life into the necessity of traveling around the world and making sure that employees and our customers know that they've got as much focus as they need, and so it's meant for a lot of interesting engagements. We closed on Global Blue while I was in Paris with my family on vacation, which meant I had to drag my kids into the Global Blue lounge and introduce them to all the employees and attend the customer cocktail event that night. But it's fun as hell when you can make all that work in the same equation.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what's your number one dish that you're cooking these days?
Speaker 3:In summer it obviously has to be on the grill. But I love paella. My Spanish colleagues tell me I do it. Okay, I think they're just indulging the boss, but I really kind of like cooking whatever feels seasonal at the time. I'm not married to a particular dish. Perfecting the roast chicken is a hell of a lot harder than building a multi-billion dollar company, believe it or not. So I'll probably be on that journey for as long as I'm on my career. But no, just the time with the family and some nourishment is more important than what's on the plate.
Speaker 2:Gotcha, gotcha. So one final question. So, Taylor, if someone comes to you maybe they just graduated from college, or maybe they're changing industries and they want to get into payments or Finintech and they come to you and say hey, Taylor, what should I do to help be successful, what advice would you give them?
Speaker 3:I'd start with this industry is tremendously complicated. If you could pick one that's less complicated that you have passion for, get after it, because it's not payments, it's not technology, it's commerce. And when you use the word commerce, it evokes the complexity of commerce, which is it's all over the world, it's in lots of different forms, everyone needs to engage with it and it's fundamentally different from industry to industry and place to place. But we're trying to solve that problem. So commerce is complicated. If you can find simpler places to do business in your career, go after it. It's a heck of a lot more complicated than asset management. I tell you that. But more importantly, there's some fundamental things, which is you gotta really have a passion for what you're doing.
Speaker 3:I would tell young people all the time if reading about our industry isn't the first thing you do when you pick up your phone in the morning, whether it's vacation or you don't have a job yet then it's probably not the right industry.
Speaker 3:You need to align something to your passions.
Speaker 3:We've had incredibly talented people do very poorly simply because they thought the industry was an important place to be, but they didn't have the passion to put the work in.
Speaker 3:And so align to your passion, because the work becomes very easy, and by that I mean to be successful. It's not going to be overnight, it's going, and it's not going to be 12-hour days, by the way. It's going to be like 14 and 16-hour days, and that's really hard to do if you don't love what you're doing. So start with that fundamental, have a genuine curiosity and passion for the industry, and then the hard work just becomes a byproduct of trying to fulfill that emotional connection that you have, and then it all falls in place. I guess I'm somewhat unique because I've interviewed for one job my entire life and that was to be an administrative assistant at Merrill Lynch. But a passion for what I was doing and a focus and a willingness to do anything I was told to do, regardless of what was on my business card, has led me to a collection of awesome companies and increasing responsibility each time.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, taylor, it's been a great discussion, but before we go, just wanted to see if you had any final comments, anything you wanted to leave with the audience before we go.
Speaker 3:No, just thank you for the time and the interest. It's a fascinating place meeting the financial technology and the payments industry because you learn all the time it's like commerce does not stand still and therefore you're not going to be doing the same thing you were doing yesterday on any given day, which is incredibly cool. So thank you all for the interest.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, taylor, thank you so much for being on the show today. I know your time is very valuable. So, being on the show today, I know your time is very valuable, so again, thank you for being here. Yeah, of course, good to see you all and to all you listeners out there.
Speaker 1:I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story. Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.