Who is Charlie Javice?
That’s the question I set out to answer at the beginning of last month. For Fortune I had previously covered the young millennial founder who found herself publicly accused of fraud by the world’s biggest bank. I wrote about who at JPMorgan had their hand in the ill-fated deal to buy her student loan startup Frank. I even did a deep dive into the world of synthetic data, which JPMorgan claims Javice used to “fake” a customer list, and Javice has maintained is an acceptable way to protect individuals’ identities when someone is looking to buy your company.
But I (and the rest of the world) really didn’t know too much about who this woman was. How does a bright and ambitious and totally driven individual end up accused of fraud and hauled into jail for the night? How does someone who has strived their whole life to ‘make it’ end up in such legal peril? (The Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against Javice, while the Securities and Exchange Commission also sued her. Javice has pleaded not guilty to the charges.)
I spent weeks tracing her path from her childhood to Wharton, through her Thiel Fellowship application through the early days of her startup Frank, talking to dozens of people who knew her at all stages of her life.
One thing was clear from the start: The entrepreneur was preternaturally confident. Howard Finkelstein, an attorney who advises startups, remembers how in 2009 the teenage Javice attended a Microfinance event in New York City all by herself, easily holding her own against executives who were much older. Finkelstein helped Javice incorporate her first startup, PoverUp, while she was in high school.
Javice, now 31, hails from Westchester, a posh suburb of New York City, where the atmosphere was competitive and intense, with former Javice classmates describing it as “success at any cost.” Social status was very important in Westchester and the college application period for many teenagers was very high-stakes. Many of the French families didn’t know “how to play the U.S. college game,” they said. The Javice family did. “They were hyper-aware that you had to bulk up on the extracurriculars,” a classmate told Fortune. In addition to PoverUp, Javice also started a soup kitchen while at FASNY as well as a book drive.
Javice projected wealth and affluence—attending the elite French American School of New York, or FASNY, which costs about $34,000 a year for nursery students, and jumps to $41,000 for high school students. Later she spent summers abroad in Paris or Israel, Finkelstein said. She even rode a horse. But in a zip code where wealth is flaunted, her living arrangements were relatively modest. Her parents divorced, causing Javice and her brother to split their time between living at their father’s unassuming three-bedroom townhouse in Mamaroneck and her mother’s one-story home in Larchmont, N.Y.
I got the sense from reporting about her early years that Javice (and plenty of people around her) always knew she’d be in the headlines. But they couldn’t have predicted it would be for all the wrong reasons.
Whether you invest in founders, or just are fascinated by the magnetic personalities that relentlessly “sell” their story, the Charlie Javice saga is one for the books. You can read the whole story here.
See you tomorrow,
Luisa Beltran
Twitter: @LuisaRBeltran
Email: luisa.beltran@fortune.com
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