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Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

techcrunch.com

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Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#51

Post by rehabindian »

jacquesm wrote: post #14

How long before Facebook will attack paypal on its home turf? They could do a pretty good job of it too, what with facebook knowing who you are (within reason) and who your friends are they could set this up in such a way that they could side-step the biggest problems with payments through paypal. The tell-tale will be when facebook registers as a bank somewhere. Edit: hello downvoter, feel free to disagree a bit mor…

Tell tale achieved: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/14/facebook-e...

Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#52

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #14

How long before Facebook will attack paypal on its home turf? They could do a pretty good job of it too, what with facebook knowing who you are (within reason) and who your friends are they could set this up in such a way that they could side-step the biggest problems with payments through paypal. The tell-tale will be when facebook registers as a bank somewhere. Edit: hello downvoter, feel free to disagree a bit mor…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#53

Post by jacquesm »

rehabindian wrote: post #51
jacquesm wrote: post #14

How long before Facebook will attack paypal on its home turf? They could do a pretty good job of it too, what with facebook knowing who you are (within reason) and who your friends are they could set this up in such a way that they could side-step the biggest problems with payments through paypal. The tell-tale will be when facebook registers as a bank somewhere. Edit: hello downvoter, feel free to disagree a bit mor…

Tell tale achieved: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/14/facebook-e...

I totally missed that. Thanks!

Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#54

Post by LandoCalrissian »

rtx wrote: post #37
panarky wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal and eBay are hugely vulnerable. They've underinvested in infrastructure, their technology is old, and they've become slow and bureaucratic. Worst of all, their ideas are stale and the user experience is dreadful. PayPal's fat margins aren't justified by the service they provide, only by the lack of alternatives. But new alternatives are launching much faster than eBay can respond. Square has become a well-run,…

So why are there no alternatives to Paypal. It's been fifteen years. Cost you are talking about is in built in money transfer business. Fraud prevention alone will kill most of the start-ups.

Square, Stripe and maybe even Coinbase to an extent. You could even throw in Amazon payments and Google wallet as well. They are in a tough spot, and their brand is always taking damage from how they run things.

I think they will die from not one big dog taking over, but a bunch of smaller companies each taking bites out of their market share.

Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#57

Post by benihana »

bmm6o wrote: post #11

Maybe I'm being nit-picky, I wish we would stop using "poaching" to refer to the (legal) hiring of a person already employed at another company. Actual poaching is illegal, conversely anti-"poaching" pacts are collusive and illegal.

I hate the term poached here. It implies that PayPal owns the person, and that Facebook sneakily took their property. Why do we say "Facebook Poached David Marcus" and not "David Marcus chooses to work at Facebook."?

Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#58

Post by rehabindian »

yuhong wrote: post #50
rehabindian wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can only speculate. I would refer you to his statement, seems like he is more interested in "getting shit done" than getting drained by bureaucracy. As for Bill Scott, its a 2 edged sword. I think he runs a good ship, and great guy if you are part of his team or enjoy his patronage or benefit his goals/vision. Him and his team understand technology, appreciate doing what they do. They are one of the forward looki…

One can only speculate. I would refer you to his statement, seems like he is more interested in "getting shit done" than getting drained by bureaucracy. I know, but why couldn't he fix it? That is the real question.

Like cancer, mediocrity, incompetence, and resistance to ideas (new products etc) was endemic at PayPal when I was there. The easiest way to become irrelevant was to challenge their confirmation bias. In other words, you try to fix it it blows over on you, Similar to the the third rail in politics.

the smartest move will be to move out, create a different world, and show them how its done. (Refer: Exit, voice, & Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman). Hence I believe going to a better shore is in line with this spirit of california. Hope that helps.

Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#59

Post by mcintyre1994 »

ama729 wrote: post #43
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #9

It's interesting that according to the FT article mentioned [0] the license is for Europe - and they're talking with UK payments companies. I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but in the UK I don't imagine a lot of interest - payments are easy by bank transfer. Paying to other European countries isn't great via the banks, I imagine most people use something like Paypal now. But I don't think international payments…

> Paying to other European countries isn't great via the banks How so? With SEPA[1] it's both easy (European wide bank account number) and free (might not be the case if both accounts use different currencies though, but in euros it's free). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

That was definitely an oversight on my part, sorry. I'm in the UK and while we have free payments to UK banks we don't to Europe. My bank charges £22 and takes 2-4 days to make a payment in Euros to Europe, from GBP. We do have EBANs though. Paypal was much better but SEPA sounds like a much better approach.

That just makes me wonder more why they went for Europe first, it seems to be impossible to monetise pretty much anything except cross currency.

Re: Facebook poaches PayPal president David Marcus to run Messenger

#60

Post by rehabindian »

panarky wrote: post #26
tehwebguy wrote: post #15

How is it that so many seemingly incredible people come out of PayPal, and PayPal still sucks so much? The all-star list is insane, it keeps growing, and yet PayPal still that can't seem to do anything new.

PayPal and eBay are hugely vulnerable. They've underinvested in infrastructure, their technology is old, and they've become slow and bureaucratic. Worst of all, their ideas are stale and the user experience is dreadful. PayPal's fat margins aren't justified by the service they provide, only by the lack of alternatives. But new alternatives are launching much faster than eBay can respond. Square has become a well-run,…

|If Facebook/Whatsapp can payment-enable messaging and do it at a lower cost, PayPal's raison d'etre starts looking pretty questionable.

PayPal's raison d'etre is not in Peer to Peer money exchange. Its more on strong merchant integrations, partnerships, and relationships. In fact PayPal draws a small loss on p2p products. If you want to compete with PayPal its through strong merchant integrations which many startups have not succeeded in doing. When braintree made inroads into a segment of b2b products, PayPal acquired Braintree.

P2P is more or less a adoption hack/growth hack for a payments company. Merchant integrations and risk models are where its at.

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