Valleywag
once you're lucky, twice you're good
Posts Tagged “
PayPal
”
once you're lucky, twice you're good
Everything but auctions boosts eBay's bottom line
Recently anointed eBay CEO John Donahoe thumped his chest over the auction giant's first-quarter earnings. He praised a "diverse portfolio of businesses" as revenues jumped 24 percent to $2.19 billion and earnings rose 22 percent to $459.7 million. The problem: Younger businesses like Skype and PayPal aren't as profitable as eBay's core e-commerce business, which is why profit margins dropped. [WSJ]
Recently anointed eBay CEO John Donahoe thumped his chest over the auction giant's first-quarter earnings. He praised a "diverse portfolio of businesses" as revenues jumped 24 percent to $2.19 billion and earnings rose 22 percent to $459.7 million. The problem: Younger businesses like Skype and PayPal aren't as profitable as eBay's core e-commerce business, which is why profit margins dropped. [WSJ]
antitrust
Australians question eBay's PayPal-only policy
Years ago, PayPal was an independent company which fought constantly with eBay to be allowed on the site as a way to settle accounts after an auction was won. Now, years after eBay bought PayPal, the payments service is elbowing out all manner of competition. In Australia, eBay is limiting purchases to either PayPal or cash on delivery — no checks or money orders allowed, let alone rival electronic payment methods. In the U.S., eBay was sued last year for tying PayPal too closely to its online marketplace. How soon they forget: PayPal is aiming to quash an economic freedom its founders, including noted libertarian Peter Thiel, fought for.
eBay, PayPal layoffs confirmed by CNN
Oh, look, Valleywag's tipsters came through — 125 laid off at eBay worldwide. [CNNMoney]
Oh, look, Valleywag's tipsters came through — 125 laid off at eBay worldwide. [CNNMoney]
rumormonger
Layoffs at eBay and PayPal?
In the last 24 hours, we've heard that eBay has laid off 40 members from its bloated middle-management ranks and that its PayPal subsidiary has let its entire branding department go. Has Wall Street already gotten word of these cutbacks? We all know how much the market loves "fat trimming," and EBAY is up nearly two points so far today. (Photo by AP/Tony Avelar)
explainer
Why PayPal finds your money of interest
eBay's PayPal division will start holding payments for up to three weeks for certain "high-risk transactions" next month. Some sellers are pissed, but it's totally legal. PayPal is not a bank. It is not insured by the FDIC — the government program which insures deposits should a bank go under. PayPal is a "deposit broker," meaning the company pools deposits from all its users and holds them in bank accounts under PayPal's name, collecting interest on the money — and deposit brokers are not federally regulated. More »
john donahoe
New eBay CEO: Search first step to fixing eBay
Whitman's out and the new guy in charge, John Donahoe, says step one to fixing eBay is fixing its internal search engine. "Our buyers tell us that we know you have unmatched selection, but we can't always find what we want," Donahoe told Bits. Unable to find what they want to buy using eBay's search, Donahoe's theory goes, these users go to Google instead. What Donahoe doesn't mention: eBay has been talking about improving its search for years.More »
e-commerce
Facebook wants your credit card
Facebook is looking for platform developers to test a payments system, an administrator announced on the Facebook Developers forum. Details are scant, but it's more likely than not built on the micropayments software Facebook developed for its virtual gifts. (Which, by the way, is a brilliant Trojan horse strategy: Charge people a token amount for something that costs you nothing, and get their credit-card numbers while you're at it.) The good news for the rest of us is that the new payment system might mean we'll see some Facebook apps that are meant to do something besides show us ads while we goof off.More »
great moments in pr
UK flack skewers big client eBay in press release
Like thousands of people around the world right now, Mark Jackson is peeved at eBay about some purchase gone sour. A Nintendo DS Lite, to be precise. Jackson was so peeved that he sent an email to several U.K. press outlets, copying eBay and demanding a response. This is only notable because Jackson is a high-ranking executive at Hill and Knowlton. And eBay does business with Hill and Knowlton all around the world — but substantially cut its budget in the last month. Here's Jackson's screed — and more about its curious timing.More »
breakdowns
PayPal Security Key not as secure as it could be
Earlier this year PayPal introduced a security fob that generates a six-digit code every 30 seconds, meant as an additional layer of protection against online identity thieves. However, one user discovered a bug that makes the key useless in certain situations. By entering his valid PayPal login and password, answering a security question and entering ANY six-digit number, he can make a purchase. eBay and PayPal have been unable to reproduce the flaw, but Romero stands by his statement, claiming the key doesn't work as advertised. "For someone who's paid money for a Security Key and is thinking their wife or brother can't get into their account because they don't have the key fob ... they're not getting the security that they assume they have."
e-commerce
PayPal recycles six-year-old idea
A former PayPal executive recently pointed out that PayPal, as a division of eBay, has swelled to 7,000 employees — vastly more than it ever had as an independent concern. "What do those people do?" he asked. The growth in headcount had not led to a concomitant increase in inventiveness. Take, for example, the news, breathlessly reported by TechCrunch, that PayPal would roll out a "virtual credit card" for shopping even at stores that don't take PayPal. This would be more impressive had PayPal not rolled out the same product six years ago.
paypal mafia
Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments company he sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He's now on the board of Facebook, with a stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and stakes in Yelp, LinkedIn, Slide, and others besides. He may not quite be the capo di tutti capi imagined by Fortune's photo editors — who cleverly staged a Godfather-inspired shoot, above — but he's created a gang that can run free from the rules of the traditional VC game. Sand Hill Road hates him for it. I say, more power to him — and the rest of his mafiosi. (Photo of Thiel and Levchin by Robyn Twomey/Fortune; Godfather still from IMDB)
Is Peter Thiel Silicon Valley's godfather?
Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments company he sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He's now on the board of Facebook, with a stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and stakes in Yelp, LinkedIn, Slide, and others besides. He may not quite be the capo di tutti capi imagined by Fortune's photo editors — who cleverly staged a Godfather-inspired shoot, above — but he's created a gang that can run free from the rules of the traditional VC game. Sand Hill Road hates him for it. I say, more power to him — and the rest of his mafiosi. (Photo of Thiel and Levchin by Robyn Twomey/Fortune; Godfather still from IMDB)
Bomb scare at eBay
eBay's campus in Campbell, near San Jose, has reportedly been evacuated due to a suspicious package. No word if this is related to last year's still unsolved PayPal bombing. Have any more details? Please let us know.
eBay's campus in Campbell, near San Jose, has reportedly been evacuated due to a suspicious package. No word if this is related to last year's still unsolved PayPal bombing. Have any more details? Please let us know.
jackpot
Max Levchin has more money, less sleep than you
Sunday's New York Times profile of PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin tackles the phenomena of serial entrepreneurs. What makes them start multiple companies after a multimillion-dollar IPO or sale? The short answer: Money, but not in the way that you think. Levchin talks about how Slide's exit needs to be more than the $1.5 billion PayPal received, plus inflation, for him to be pleased with the outcome. (Look no further than fellow PayPal Mafia membes Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who sold YouTube for a PayPal-topping $1.65 billion, for another example of this behavior.) Netcape cofounder Marc Andreessen, who was interviewed for the article, points out the obvious in Silicon Valley: No one here really cares about money in the consumption sense, but everyone cares about having more than the other guy. San Francisco society blog SF Luxe begs entrepreneurs to become conspicuous in their consumption, and we'd like to agree. It's more fun for the rest of us. More »
followup
More PayPal Mafia mugshots
Thanks to commenter yarbles, we were alerted to evidence of two more members of the PayPal Mafia posing, like YouTube founder Jawed Karim, in mafioso costumes. Pictured, above, Yelp cofounders Russell Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. (Stoppelman's the one with the fake mustache. At least, we hope it's fake.) Any more evidence out there? Join the gang.
picture of the day
The PayPal Mafia personified
Seen here, in YouTube founder Jawed Karim's Facebook profile page, the current Stanford grad student (and former PayPal engineer) dressed in disco-era gangster gear. The reason? Karim comments:lol — yes there is a story. basically a magazine is doing a story about the "PayPal mafia" — a group of ex-PayPal people who have worked together to create companies after PayPal. they took a group photo of us posing as mafia guys, so everyone underwent a full transformation for the photo ;)Why Karim? We've heard that YouTube's better-known founders, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, were missing from the shoot. We're sure that the magazine wanted at least one representative from last year's $1.65 billion acquisition — a purchase price, some have noted, that seems carefully calibrated to be 10 percent higher than the $1.5 billion PayPal went for. We bet Google's unimaginative PR drones nixed the gangster-gear appearance. More »
deals
MySpace, fearing Facebook, adds PayPal as friend
As rumors grow that social network Facebook will introduce its own payment system, News Corp.-owned MySpace, still the leading social network, is teaming up with PayPal, eBay's online payments division. The partnership amounts to an experiment at this point, focusing on donations to political campaigns and nonprofits — not exactly a hotbed of MySpace activity. Wake us when you can buy concert tickets on MySpace. But the move does speak to the partners' fears that Facebook will introduce its own payment system. How to respond? Become frenemies, of course. MySpace instantly has a proven payment system without months or years of development, and PayPal gains access to MySpace's millions of users. Nothing builds partnerships faster than fear of the competition.
deals
