Here's How Guillaume Pousaz Made His 23-Billion-Dollar Fortune
How often do you come across self-made billionaires? Sometimes, the richest people are not made by being heirs to family wealth or company, they are made by toiling and putting in the extra work required. Such is the case of Guillaume Pousaz, a self-made entrepreneur who happens to be the richest person in Switzerland. This Swiss man single-handedly made himself via the entrepreneurship route and he is currently worth a whopping sum of $23 billion. Who is this remarkable self-made man? How did he become Switzerland's richest person? What did he do differently to achieve this milestone? Let’s unravel this mystery Swiss man!
Guillaume Pousaz was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on the first day of August in the year 1982. He is of Swiss origin and unlike most billionaires in the world today, he wasn’t born to rich parents, he didn’t get to be an heir or get some inheritance to give him a head start in life.
Guillaume Pousaz went on to study Mathematical Engineering in Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne which was one of the top engineering schools in the world, before enrolling in Economics for his bachelor’s degree in HEC University of Lausanne. This was only until his father had pancreatic cancer and passed away in 2005. This event forced Guillaume Pousaz to drop out of school and move to California.
Prior to dropping out from school, his dream was to become an investment banker, but instead, he went on to become a surfer for three months in California shortly after moving to California, Guillaume Pousaz started working in a payments firm situated in the US called International Payments Consultants. He then resigned to launch his first business, Opus Payments which was founded in 2009, Opus Payments was a fintech company that handled payments for merchants in Hong Kong.
Through a tech gadget trading with a Chinese E-commerce website Dealextreme.com in 2011, Opus Payments became profitable and in 2012, Guillaume Pousaz renamed Opus Payment, changing its name to what is currently known as Checkout and acquired his license to be a payment institution in the same year. Checkout was registered in the U.K in 2013 and Guillaume Pousaz immediately moved on to the acquisition of another business in the industry in Mauritius.
Guillaume Pousaz was smart enough to spend the first 7 years working on his fintech company before finally accepting external funding for the startup. Getting external funding warranted him organizing a series of fundraisings in 2019 which enabled the fintech company to get about $230 million in investments. That deal was achieved over a few handshakes and it earned Checkout the much sought-after “Unicorn” status with a valuation of $2 billion.
Then, in 2020, another fundraising took place, which took Guillaume Pousaz’s fintech company valuation to $5.5 billion barely 10 years after he founded his fintech company. In the 2021 fundraiser, Checkout received about $15 billion in valuation. This fundraising was organized by Tiger Global Management and it scaled Checkout so high that Checkout became Europe’s biggest start-up that year. Today, Checkout is globally recognized as one of the most valuable fintech unicorns in the world considering its exponential growth and achievement; in the last year, its transaction volume increased by up to 250% while picking up big-name clients like the popular Singaporean cab-hailing app “Grab”, Netflix, Pizzahut, Coinbase, Sony, and the Swedish fintech company “Klarna”.
After achieving such great results with Checkout despite the fintech company being just about a decade old, Guillaume Pousaz went on to partner with other top fintech companies in the game like Visa and Mastercard, he also partnered with Alipay and WeChat. In January 2022, Checkout made a massive sum of $1 billion from fundraising, this surpassed what even their competitors, Revolut and Wise had earlier raised. This $1 billion was raised to be used as an investment into Web3 applications.
Checkout also acquired a French startup that provides a remote identity verification system, Ubble in May 2022. Guillaume Pousaz is the Chief Executive Officer of Checkout, he owns about 65% shares of Checkout, the fintech company is valued at about $40 billion, while Guillaume Pousaz himself is worth $23 billion which makes him the richest person in Switzerland and 5th richest person in the UK.
His philanthropy focuses on improving access and outcomes in education, he is also a mentor for the Endeavour network. Despite being a billionaire, Guillaume Pousaz works at least 80 hours a week and he has a habit of flying economy class during family vacations. He currently resides in Dubai with his wife and three kids while nursing plans to relocate to London later.
Sources: CEO World, Bloomberg, and Forbes.
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