Amy Porter and the Art of Getting Paid

In September 2016, Amy Porter walked into a Texas football game wearing a uniform she had last worn more than twenty years earlier. Her daughter, Morgan Baker, was already on the sidelines, cheering for the Longhorns. Porter had come to surprise her. There was a hug, then a pair of poms, then mother and daughter cheering together. For once, the family business involved neither a board meeting nor a payment processor.

By then, Porter had spent eleven years building AffiniPay. She had made a career out of helping professionals collect money, a task with considerably less applause attached. The return to the sidelines made a certain sense. Cheerleading had given her an early job selling uniforms. Selling uniforms had put payment machines in her hands. A route into financial technology can be surprisingly literal.

The customer who arrived through someone else

Porter founded AffiniPay in Austin in 2005. Its early customers included associations moving member dues and conference registrations online. These were organizations with fairly ordinary administrative needs: accept a payment, record it and let somebody get on with the rest of the day. But professional associations also offered something valuable to an observant supplier. Their members had businesses of their own.

Bar associations began raising a related problem. Their lawyers needed online payments, too. The associations understood legal practice and trust accounts. Porter understood payment processing. Building LawPay meant getting those kinds of knowledge into the same conversation. She described the product as a collaboration with the associations and their practice management and ethics groups.

The company dates LawPay’s launch to 2007. Its appeal rested on a detail that could easily disappear inside a broad pitch about making commerce easier: law firms handle different kinds of money. Funds held for clients need particular care. A product intended for that work had to fit the profession’s arrangements, including the distinction between trust and operating accounts.

That made the professional relationship part of the business. Lawyers could encounter the service through an organization they already knew. Porter’s company learned from the people whose confidence it needed to earn. The resulting product had a specific audience and a way to reach it. Neither was an incidental feature.

The invoice had to catch up

When Porter talked about payments, she talked about the habits surrounding them. In a 2015 conversation, she described lawyers reconsidering credit cards during the financial pressures of 2008 and 2009. Clients needed ways to pay. Firms needed cash flow. The idea of accepting a card became easier to consider when the alternative involved waiting for money already earned.

There was also a change in who was asking for convenience. Clients accustomed to paying online elsewhere wanted to do the same with their lawyers. Paper invoices and mailed checks placed another chore between a finished piece of work and a settled bill. Porter understood the complaint from both sides of the transaction.

This is the human scale of her business: someone has done the work; someone else intends to pay; the machinery between them makes the exchange awkward. Payment technology has an impressive vocabulary. A missing stamp remains a formidable competitor.

Another profession supplied the next clue. Accountants were using LawPay. Porter recognized that they represented a market with its own requirements, and CPACharge followed. The company’s history places its debut in 2016. Customers had effectively sent an invitation by using a product designed for somebody else. She paid attention to where it had landed.

A decade before the investment

Porter bootstrapped AffiniPay for its first ten years. By September 2015, when the company announced an investment from Great Hill Partners, it said it processed more than $1.5 billion in payments for approximately 20,000 clients. Its annual revenue had grown more than 35 percent since inception. These were the figures of a business already operating at scale.

LawPay’s relationships were visible in the announcement, too: 42 state bar associations and the American Bar Association were endorsement partners. Porter wanted to expand into additional professional service markets, with investment in sales, marketing and product development. The next stage required more people and more capacity.

She chose an investor with experience in payments and in companies that reached customers through partners. Great Hill had invested in eight payment businesses. The match mattered because AffiniPay’s route to market was tied to professional relationships. Growth capital would enter a company whose distribution already had a particular shape.

Great Hill’s account of the partnership describes investment in product development and recruitment, including senior finance, technology, product and operations roles. Head count increased more than fivefold during its ownership. Building the organization around the product became a substantial piece of the work.

In June 2016, Porter received the Central Texas EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award in Financial Technology. Her response distributed the credit across the company and its partners. “I’m so proud of the work we do, the team we’ve built, and the success of our partners.” For someone whose business depended on introductions and collaboration, it was a fitting list of people to thank.

Hiring the person who would take her chair

Porter’s eventual successor had first worked with her on a website. In 2013, she hired Tom West and his team at Springbox to help build LawPay’s online presence. West later recalled a time when signing up for a payments account online still carried uncertainty. They were working on making that process easier.

The relationship lasted. When Porter began looking for someone to lead AffiniPay’s next stage, West knew the company from years of working alongside it. His background in digital commerce and marketing also matched the business’s ambitions. By the time he became CEO, the two had a working history that preceded the title by roughly six years.

The change took effect on June 1, 2019. Porter became executive chairman, with a remit encompassing strategic guidance, board governance and support for the company’s purpose and values. West took responsibility for its operating and organizational processes. At the announcement, AffiniPay reported more than 60,000 users and a staff of 160.

A founder’s handover can look abrupt when reduced to a date. This one included an extended period of getting to know the person on the other side of the desk. Porter had helped build the business. She now had to give another executive room to run it.

The question after the title

TA Associates acquired a majority stake in AffiniPay in February 2020, and Great Hill exited its investment. By that June, a board appointment announcement reported that AffiniPay processed more than $6 billion annually for 150,000 professionals. Revenue had grown more than fourfold during Great Hill’s investment period. The company Porter had started was carrying on at a different size.

That month, she joined the board of Paytronix, bringing payments and company-building experience to a business serving restaurants and convenience stores. It was a way to apply what she had learned in another setting. Her next professional identity could include advising a leadership team as well as having led one herself.

She was candid about the personal adjustment. In 2020, she reflected on how much of her social world and identity had been tied to the office and the CEO role. Earlier financial milestones had helped her pay debts and student loans. Later success brought questions about how to spend her time and energy. She participated in UT’s TOWER Fellows Program while considering what should follow.

“I’m still a bit of a work in progress.”

Amy Porter, reflecting on life after the CEO role, 2020

Today, Skylark Private Equity Partners lists Porter as an executive partner. The firm describes an approach built around working with founders and executives, with partners staying involved in their companies. It is familiar territory approached from another seat: the founder who once chose an investment partner can now help other business owners work through their decisions.

Back to the people on the sidelines

Her university connection has also become a practical commitment. Porter established the Amy Morgan Porter and Morgan Baker Cheer Leadership Scholarship for Texas Cheer and Pom captains and co-captains. The scholarship recognizes the time and responsibility involved in leading the teams while pursuing a degree. Her daughter’s name sits beside hers.

There is a direct line between the student activity she valued and the students she now supports. The scholarship gives that relationship a durable form. It also treats cheerleading as a place where people learn to lead, organize and show up for others, skills Porter has carried into her working life.

In 2025, she joined Austin Habitat for Humanity’s Women Build 10×10 class. The group collectively offered a $100,000 match for contributions to that year’s campaign supporting affordable housing. Its profile also identified her as president of the Texas Cheer and Pom Alumni Association. The commitments keep her involved in the city where she built her career.

Meanwhile, AffiniPay became 8am in August 2025. At the launch, the company reported serving more than 250,000 professionals in the United States and Canada, with over 600 employees. Its products had expanded into a broader business platform. Porter’s founding company had acquired a new name, while the work of helping professionals run their firms continued.

The sideline reunion offers a smaller picture to keep alongside those numbers. A mother returns to an old uniform and finds her daughter already at work. Porter has spent years building things that other people use, run and carry forward. Sometimes she gets to stand beside them and join in.