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FinTech & Crypto & Travel & Algo de Política

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left.

I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up.

I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet.

But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting.

I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn.

It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team.

This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time.

In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back.

After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization.

Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses.

During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived.

Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well.

The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails.

On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else.

The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature.

The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails.

More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it.

Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype.

None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions.

The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct.

But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure.

In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year.

This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years.

I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company.

The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction.

I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability.

Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes.

That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

[blas @blascar]

@roberto_ruarte Clase

[Demian Reidel @dreidel1]

Voy a compartir una reflexión sobre el ajuste fiscal. Es un poco larga pero prometo que es más corta que Cien años de soledad (o cien años de empobrecimiento nacional, con perdón de García Márquez).

Cuando un gobierno se queda sin un peso, no hay misterio: toca hacer ajuste fiscal. La idea de que pueden elegir entre ajustar o no es, francamente, un delirio. El ajuste va a llegar, nos guste o no. La única decisión que realmente puede tomar el gobierno es sobre el “cuándo” y el “cómo”.

Hay dos caminos: el primero, que lleva adelante el presidente @JMilei , es tomar el toro por las astas y hacer el ajuste voluntariamente. Así se decide cómo ajustar, y como resultado los mercados se calman, bajan el riesgo país y la inflación.

El otro camino es a lo cavernícola, cuando ya no queda un peso, los mercados se cierran, el riesgo país explota, y hay peligro de default. Ahí es cuando empiezan a darle a la mquinita de imprimir billetes para tapar el agujero. ¿Les suena? Y, como siempre, ese impuesto inflacionario lo pagan principalmente los más pobres.

Las consecuencias a largo plazo de este ajuste forzado son aún peores: más pobreza y menos crecimiento,. Es así de simple.

¿Adivinen cómo ajustaron los K? Porque, seamos claros, los K ajustaron. Ajustaron a los jubilados, a las universidades y al pueblo entero. Pero sobre todo a los más pobres. ¿El resultado? Lo tenemos frente a nuestros ojos. Se dan una vuelta por La Matanza (o tantos otros lugares) y después me cuentan.

Y esto sin siquiera entrar en el tema de la corrupción, que bien merecería un capítulo aparte. Mejor dicho, una biblioteca entera. Pero esta biblioteca la dejamos para otro momento. (Es un montón).

En resumen, no nos dejemos engañar: los K ajustaron. ¡Y cono ajustaron!

La Kleptocracia Cavernícola Kirchnerista se patinó la guita y después ajustó, por las malas, haciéndole pagar el costo a los más vulnerables. ¿Por qué? Porque es más fácil seguir de joda hasta que alguien corta la música y echarle la culpa a otro.

El presidente Milei decidió hacer lo contrario: el ajuste empezó desde el primer día.
No porque teníamos ganas sino porque no había alternativa: o lo hacíamos ordenadamente o a lo cavernícola.
Al hacerlo de forma voluntaria, bajamos la inflación y el riesgo país, y el país empieza a crecer.

Esto no hace falta imaginarlo. Está pasando hoy.

Quieren volver a la Kleptocracia Cavernícola? ¿O nos apoyan para seguir por este camino y así sacamos al país de este destino miserable y lo convertimos en el país próspero que todos queremos?

Para mí la elección es obvia. El pueblo la ve.

VIVA LA LIBERTAD CARAJO!

[blas @blascar]

@npgiudice Excel

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

I wrote this 8 years ago
https://t.co/r9GdXpUDe2

[Hernán Lacunza @hernanlacunza]

Pobreza UCA vs Indec
1. Coinciden durante NK
2. Empiezan a divergir durante CFK I y UCA subestima pobreza durante CFK II (Indec estimado por IPC CABA y San Luis)
4. UCA sobreestima durante MM y AF
5. Volverá a sobreestimar con JM 2024. Y además decide publicar mensualmente

[blas @blascar]

@todonoticias Payaso

[blas @blascar]

Y si… es como que el CEO de Marriott te diga que no uses Airbnb…

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says his "personal advice" is to not get involved with #Bitcoin.

JPMorgan is an authorized participant for BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF.

[Franklin Templeton @FTI_US]

#NewProfilePic

[blas @blascar]

@danyscht Concepción

[blas @blascar]

@GarbarzAriel Muy bien!

[blas @blascar]

@GaboAir Nivel de ocupacion?

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

Congratulations to new Argentina President Javier Milei @JMilei. Let’s talk about how we can help achieve economic freedom for the people of Argentina.

Living in Buenos Aires for a year, and learning about the history of Argentina, was part of what got me excited about Bitcoin.

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. #Bitcoin

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@EndWokeness Prosperity is ahead for Argentina

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

🇦🇷!

[Don Ricardo Salinas Pliego @RicardoBSalinas]

Felicidades a @JMilei por un triunfo histórico que le da esperanza a millones de personas en todo el continente, si se puede y si se pudo.

¡Que Viva La Libertad y la prosperidad incluyente!

[Marcos Galperin @marcos_galperin]

Libres.

[blas @blascar]

@sudanalytics_ 4 años perdidos.

[blas @blascar]

@A24COM @trebuquero Y si… no nos olvidemos q el papá le regalo la reeleccion a Menem, le regalo un pseudoballotage con el 45% en lugar del 50% al peronismo y operó para voltear a De la Rua y darle la presidenci a Duhalde…