11 ms·

PayPal CTO Resigns

504 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

lifeisstillgood 11y ago
It's hard to read between the lines here. - 2 months is a odd notice period (one would expect three). So was he pushed? - the role is being split in two from his departure. This usually means the role had more power than was comfortable. - but it's still two Months. Any signs of gardening leave?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Senior VP Payment Services and CTO seem to be two roles that one person may have been right to fill in a special case (with a very special person), but where usually the best person to fill one wouldn't be the best person to fill the other.
- ori_b 11y ago
  It's likely that it's been planned for much longer than 2 months, and is only being publicized now, after everyone has prepared for the transition.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
minimaxir 11y ago
PayPal had good earnings last quarter (http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/paypal-shares-up-on-earnings-revenue-rises-17/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/paypal-shares-up-on-earning...), so bad performance may not be the reason.
- paulftw 11y ago
  He was CTO, why would infrastructure guy ever be held responsible for poor overall performance? It's not rocket science, nor F1 team
  - kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
    Shit flows downhill and they needed a scapegoat to make the board happy. The general public doesn't know what a CTO does so problem solved nice and neat.
    - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
      I would disagree along the lines that the general public didn't even know there was a problem. I'm still not even sure what the issue was, myself(besides the usual complaints about paypal).
  - tyingq 11y ago
    From his bio page: "In 2011, James moved over to PayPal, first as vice president of global product development and, beginning in 2012, as chief technology officer. In 2015, he expanded his role to also lead the Payment Services business in PayPal, a global team that powers the efficient movement of money and rewards into, out of, and within the PayPal network." So, he was CTO/Infrastructure Guy, then they added on SVP Payment Services some time last year, which sounds like it has a lot to do with overall performance.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > He was CTO ...and Senior VP Payment Services. > why would infrastructure guy ever be held responsible for poor overall performance? Payment Services is a pretty central business function for PayPal.
  - Swannie 11y ago
    CTO can also be a product person, or at the very least they should be tightly integrated into the product development lifecycle. A CTO that is just an "infrastructure guy" is not a CTO by any measure I've seen. ALL C-level's are responsible for company results.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
fuck paypal
muyfine 11y ago
New Money needs a New CTO
- 27182818284 11y ago
  When you call their tech support and their own tech support gives up on their products and just recommends the now PayPal owned Braintree...well that wasn't the only bad sign I guess.
  - bbcbasic 11y ago
    I wonder what the downvote rationale is here?
  - happywolf 11y ago
    BT has much less technical debt and thus more modern design. Most new merchants are encouraged to use v.zero (BT's xo product)
- coleca 11y ago
  Ah you beat me to it. I was going to say he must have watched their Super Bowl commercial and figured it was all downhill from there.
- jeffasinger 11y ago
  Makes sense. I recently tried to send someone money on PayPal. They froze my account, and then CS suggested I wait 2 to 3 weeks for the account to unfreeze itself. Welcome to new money.
meritt 11y ago
Zenefits just canned their CEO (ironically, over a benefits dispute), while their COO steps up to take over that role. Maybe James is leaving Paypal to become COO of Zenefits?
- metasean 11y ago
  Definitely related, from http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-conrad-resigns-coo-david-sacks-takes-over/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-conrad... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992 >Also today, Zenefits announced that venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel has joined the startup’s board of directors. In addition to relinquishing his role as chief executive, Conrad has also given up his board seat.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    Definitely not related. David Sacks and Peter Thiel are best friends from college.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
pizzasynthesis 11y ago
Adopters of the 'new' PayPal interface can probably attest to the poor quality, redirects and unexplained errors that have been popping up. After talking on the phone with two service reps, one of whom refused to let me talk to a technical expert as to why my email confirmation token wouldn't work and another who had to enable automated billing on my account manually (because it's totally broken in the client interface) I can only conclude the problems are widespread and currently still at large. I'm not surprised they have made a high-profile canning.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Yeah, PayPal works nice for the simple case, but it seems like any minimally complex payment structure, even simple recurrences, are a complete train wreck.
- coderdude 11y ago
  I transitioned back to the old interface almost immediately. The search interface for past orders is less powerful because you now need to know when an order was placed in addition to having the transaction ID. The old interface can pull up an order without having the approximate order date as long as you can provide either your own txnid or the customer's txnid. Additionally, I was no longer able to pull up orders using the customer's txnid. So, that was a bummer.
  - speleding 11y ago
    Same here. They probably have an index on the txn ID, search is pretty quick that way, but on the new interface where they force you to search within a time span, it takes forever when its more than a few days. So the decision to force people to pick a time span is probably hurting their DB select as much as it is hurting the user experience.
dangrossman 11y ago
PayPal's redesigned their UI two or three times in the past decade or so. None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet. I still log in and see the same site I did in the early 2000s. I really, really understand that their business is enormously complex, operating in hundreds of different markets, but... you'd think some of the improvements would trickle down eventually. It's a real challenge for their support staff that has to figure out which of several completely different interfaces a customer is seeing before they can provide any help with it. http://i.imgur.com/a1pYK8a.png http://i.imgur.com/a1pYK8a.png
- tyingq 11y ago
  They do a lot of things with business accounts that is irritating. For example: - they should be able to remove the annoying "USE PAYPAL CREDIT FOR THIS??!?!?!?!?!" overlay. - show transaction ids on the payment confirmation page, rather than making us navigate to a 2 more pages after paying Oh, and not sure if this is related to just business accounts, but I have to log in twice to get logged in. Some kind of cookie bug that's fixed exactly once if I clear cookies, then starts happening again. And, lastly, since I see you have a few disputes/chargebacks...their chargeback handling process is horrid.
  - dangrossman 11y ago
    > I have to log in twice to get logged in. I've had to log in twice for months as well. I can't comprehend their leaving something so basic broken this long. > And, lastly, since I see you have a few disputes/chargebacks...their chargeback handling process is horrid. I have no beef with their chargeback handling myself. It's something more ridiculous actually. Those 5 "open cases" are cases I opened against a hosting company 12 years ago, in 2004. They stopped paying their colo bills and the DC cut power to their racks, including all the servers they rented to customers. PayPal decided the best course of action, given no money in their account or linked bank accounts to pay any refunds, was to leave the disputes open forever. I can't even view the cases any more. If I try to search that far back in time, the dispute search times out and the site dies with no response (white screen), like some overloaded WordPress blog on shared hosting.
jorgecurio 11y ago
Is this coincidence or what? Yelp CFO also resigned. Two executives from two different sinking ships. Paypal is getting murdered by Stripe. Yelp thought it could raise stock prices by buying traffic. Something had to give, someone has to take the blame.
- eloff 11y ago
  PayPal a sinking ship? Getting murdered by stripe? I call bullshit - do you have numbers to back you up?
  - DonHopkins 11y ago
    Here's a documentary about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSO9OFJNMBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSO9OFJNMBA
- npizzolato 11y ago
  Looking at Paypal's Q4 2015 statement, they made $500 million in profit on $2.5 billion in revenue, up from $400 million in profit on $2.1 billion in revenue from Q4 2014. If that's what a sinking ship looks like, I'd love to be on board! http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-4BS3R8/1480311098x0x871870/9563A23D-53A8-4641-BC7A-C495B16E715C/Q4_15_Investor_Update.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-4BS3R8/148031109...
- justin_vanw 11y ago
  In the first down market Stripe will no longer exist. They are losing money at an incredible rate and no where near profitable. They are losing money at a rate of about $100MM per year, and having to raise the same. Perhaps they can make it to IPO, but even at a 3.5B valuation, they have to find profitability very quickly, a 3.5B market cap can turn into a $250M market cap very quickly, just ask GroupOn. When you are losing more per year than you can book in revenue, this is not a good business, and certainly isn't going to take over the market. This is doubly true if Paypal is firing their CTO, who is in the end responsible for their situation, poor usability, and very poor APIs. If Paypal wakes up and starts fixing their issues, they are closing the one and only thing that is giving companies like Stripe an opening.
lwhalen 11y ago
Couldn't happen to a nicer sleazeball. I have nothing but disdain for Paypal (and Square, at this point), their customer service is terrible, their limits (even for businesses) are laughably low, and their processes for increasing the limits are slow, opaque, and unable to be appealed. Nothing but the back of my hand for these chuckleheads, I hope they trip and fall on their megayachts.
- nightpool 11y ago
  I know of a lot of valid complaints against PayPal (bad support, poor policies, many unjust closures) but I haven't heard a whole ton about Square—certainly nothing to drop them into the same bucket as PayPal. Mind expanding on that a little?
grubles 11y ago
"Pop." https://twitter.com/djcapelis/status/696869166960095232 https://twitter.com/djcapelis/status/696869166960095232
- m3rc 11y ago
  Am I very dense or is this a reference to the tech bubble?
  - zrail 11y ago
    Congratulations you got the reference. Gold stars for everyone!
    - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
      I assumed people would be drawing this conclusion when I saw the top 3 threads right now. How do we know that is the case and not just statistical anomaly, though?
      - losteric 11y ago
        That was just a joke, for now. The idea that we're in a bubble on the cusp of collapse has been building over the past year, spiking when the feds raised interest rates, but there's no concrete evidence of a bubble popping. Yet. Get worried when we see (multiple) high-level execs also resigning from Facebook/Twitter/etc. Especially if it's of their own accord...
        djcapelis 11y ago
        http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Are-Twitter-s-exec-departures-a-sign-of-doom-6783246.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Are-Twitter-s-ex...
        bjacobel 11y ago
        Multiple high-level execs left Twitter about two weeks ago - four at once. http://recode.net/2016/01/24/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-confirms-key-executive-departures/ http://recode.net/2016/01/24/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-confirm...
arthurcolle 11y ago
Tomorrow's top post: Zenefits CEO, Yelp CFO, PayPal CTO team up to Big Data the Internet of Things
- meritt 11y ago
  It'll be an insurance company that holds hostage provider payments until you delete your negative review.
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    Oh bravo!
  - thomasjudge 11y ago
    That was very funny :)
  - mangeletti 11y ago
    You win! I literally laughed out loud for what seems like a while.
  - petervandijck 11y ago
    You could probably raise 10$M on that idea a few months back.
- minionslave 11y ago
  Yelp CFO just resigned. What's going on?
  - protomyth 11y ago
    A lot of companies need scapegoats this quarter. I would imagine a lot of envelopes are being stuffed today - http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes.html http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes....
- hindsightbias 11y ago
  Unicornco?
jusben1369 11y ago
The role of CTO varies so greatly from company to compan . Some are hands on making major decisions. Others are almost academic; looking 18+ months out and responsible for understanding big trends et . Not sure which is the case here. Does anyone know?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nowarninglabel 11y ago
  I can at least agree that it varies greatly company to company. I've got some blog posts lined up relating to being a CTO, but it really is a varied position, and interchangeable with being a VP of Engineering.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
He was pro "Old Money"
pbreit 11y ago
So who's more senior after this? The new CTO or Bill Ready?
shmerl 11y ago
PayPal is being really obnoxious lately (like banning payments to VPN services and such). Or were they always that way?
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  They have been like that from the start. I don't blame them, there was a lot of fraud going on and it meant they had to develop a very defensive attitude to things just to stay in business. It's hard to shake those things off once they are established.
free2rhyme214 11y ago
I switched to Google Wallet. PayPal would take forever to send money and has done nothing for years to innovate. All they do is buy startups (Braintree). I think this is entirely true - when the founders leave, companies stop innovating.
lossolo 11y ago
Worst ever support i have experienced. I do not contact support unless there is something i can't operate myself. They just copy paste things from their support FAQ... didn't receive answer to my question ever... Such incompetence.
novapioneer 11y ago
http://recode.net/2015/08/31/top-paypal-executive-hill-ferguson-out-in-management-shakeup/ http://recode.net/2015/08/31/top-paypal-executive-hill-fergu... > Hill Ferguson, a top executive and officer who was SVP of PayPal’s consumer business, has stepped down, he announced in a post on Facebook earlier today. Bill Ready, who was Ferguson’s counterpart for the merchant side of PayPal’s ecosystem, is gaining more control and will now run product and engineering for the entire company, a spokesman said in a statement. http://www.zdnet.com/article/paypal-cto-james-barrese-resigns/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/paypal-cto-james-barrese-resign... > William Ready, the company's Global Head of Product & Engineering, will take over the "payment services functions" currently handled by Barrese, Is it really that big a mystery what is happening?
- dhimes 11y ago
  Well, it's a mystery to me. What do you see?
  - novapioneer 11y ago
    politics? power grab? the new guys coming in and pushing out the old? even battlehack, which started in 2013, which is probably one of the best things PP did for developers in recent years is awfully quiet now
bitcuration 11y ago
Oh, finally. For a couple years, I can't pass authentication of PayPal on my iPhone no matter how I tried. While almost all the credit card and banks are now using fingerprint on iPhone, I need a hardware token device to really get in PayPal on iPhone. According to the rep the logic is I can use my phone number to receive 2 factor text code, then why advertised it. The new web has been continued puzzled me often prompt to go back to old UI for more details. This is in 2015, decades after online banking started and PayPal is not a government agency. However you put it, it doesn't add up.
- somesay 11y ago
  In my case using SMS for 2FA only works within their new interface. Whenever an online shop is redirecting to PayPal, it's the old login page (and doesn't notice when already logged in on PayPal), so I basically never receive 2FA codes in that step. Not sure if just broken or they are using a different SMS gateway that has a problem with my country. It also doesn't really help that 2FA is still only known as hardware tokens within their documentation. It doesn't raise any trust for the PayPal website either.
systemz 11y ago
About that Paypal stability... https://i.imgur.com/PCkXnQu.png https://i.imgur.com/PCkXnQu.png

504 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

It's hard to read between the lines here. - 2 months is a odd notice period (one would expect three). So was he pushed? - the role is being split in two from his departure. This usually means the role had more power than was comfortable. - but it's still two Months. Any signs of gardening leave?

dragonwriter 11y ago
Senior VP Payment Services and CTO seem to be two roles that one person may have been right to fill in a special case (with a very special person), but where usually the best person to fill one wouldn't be the best person to fill the other.
ori_b 11y ago
It's likely that it's been planned for much longer than 2 months, and is only being publicized now, after everyone has prepared for the transition.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

minimaxir 11y ago

PayPal had good earnings last quarter (http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/paypal-shares-up-on-earnings-revenue-rises-17/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/paypal-shares-up-on-earning...), so bad performance may not be the reason.

paulftw 11y ago
He was CTO, why would infrastructure guy ever be held responsible for poor overall performance? It's not rocket science, nor F1 team
- kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
  Shit flows downhill and they needed a scapegoat to make the board happy. The general public doesn't know what a CTO does so problem solved nice and neat.
  - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
    I would disagree along the lines that the general public didn't even know there was a problem. I'm still not even sure what the issue was, myself(besides the usual complaints about paypal).
- tyingq 11y ago
  From his bio page: "In 2011, James moved over to PayPal, first as vice president of global product development and, beginning in 2012, as chief technology officer. In 2015, he expanded his role to also lead the Payment Services business in PayPal, a global team that powers the efficient movement of money and rewards into, out of, and within the PayPal network." So, he was CTO/Infrastructure Guy, then they added on SVP Payment Services some time last year, which sounds like it has a lot to do with overall performance.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > He was CTO ...and Senior VP Payment Services. > why would infrastructure guy ever be held responsible for poor overall performance? Payment Services is a pretty central business function for PayPal.
- Swannie 11y ago
  CTO can also be a product person, or at the very least they should be tightly integrated into the product development lifecycle. A CTO that is just an "infrastructure guy" is not a CTO by any measure I've seen. ALL C-level's are responsible for company results.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

fuck paypal

muyfine 11y ago

New Money needs a New CTO

27182818284 11y ago
When you call their tech support and their own tech support gives up on their products and just recommends the now PayPal owned Braintree...well that wasn't the only bad sign I guess.
- bbcbasic 11y ago
  I wonder what the downvote rationale is here?
- happywolf 11y ago
  BT has much less technical debt and thus more modern design. Most new merchants are encouraged to use v.zero (BT's xo product)
coleca 11y ago
Ah you beat me to it. I was going to say he must have watched their Super Bowl commercial and figured it was all downhill from there.
jeffasinger 11y ago
Makes sense. I recently tried to send someone money on PayPal. They froze my account, and then CS suggested I wait 2 to 3 weeks for the account to unfreeze itself. Welcome to new money.

meritt 11y ago

Zenefits just canned their CEO (ironically, over a benefits dispute), while their COO steps up to take over that role. Maybe James is leaving Paypal to become COO of Zenefits?

metasean 11y ago
Definitely related, from http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-conrad-resigns-coo-david-sacks-takes-over/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/08/zenefits-ceo-parker-conrad... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11061992 >Also today, Zenefits announced that venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel has joined the startup’s board of directors. In addition to relinquishing his role as chief executive, Conrad has also given up his board seat.
- pbreit 11y ago
  Definitely not related. David Sacks and Peter Thiel are best friends from college.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

pizzasynthesis 11y ago

Adopters of the 'new' PayPal interface can probably attest to the poor quality, redirects and unexplained errors that have been popping up. After talking on the phone with two service reps, one of whom refused to let me talk to a technical expert as to why my email confirmation token wouldn't work and another who had to enable automated billing on my account manually (because it's totally broken in the client interface) I can only conclude the problems are widespread and currently still at large. I'm not surprised they have made a high-profile canning.

Pxtl 11y ago
Yeah, PayPal works nice for the simple case, but it seems like any minimally complex payment structure, even simple recurrences, are a complete train wreck.
coderdude 11y ago
I transitioned back to the old interface almost immediately. The search interface for past orders is less powerful because you now need to know when an order was placed in addition to having the transaction ID. The old interface can pull up an order without having the approximate order date as long as you can provide either your own txnid or the customer's txnid. Additionally, I was no longer able to pull up orders using the customer's txnid. So, that was a bummer.
- speleding 11y ago
  Same here. They probably have an index on the txn ID, search is pretty quick that way, but on the new interface where they force you to search within a time span, it takes forever when its more than a few days. So the decision to force people to pick a time span is probably hurting their DB select as much as it is hurting the user experience.

dangrossman 11y ago

PayPal's redesigned their UI two or three times in the past decade or so. None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet. I still log in and see the same site I did in the early 2000s. I really, really understand that their business is enormously complex, operating in hundreds of different markets, but... you'd think some of the improvements would trickle down eventually. It's a real challenge for their support staff that has to figure out which of several completely different interfaces a customer is seeing before they can provide any help with it. http://i.imgur.com/a1pYK8a.png http://i.imgur.com/a1pYK8a.png

tyingq 11y ago
They do a lot of things with business accounts that is irritating. For example: - they should be able to remove the annoying "USE PAYPAL CREDIT FOR THIS??!?!?!?!?!" overlay. - show transaction ids on the payment confirmation page, rather than making us navigate to a 2 more pages after paying Oh, and not sure if this is related to just business accounts, but I have to log in twice to get logged in. Some kind of cookie bug that's fixed exactly once if I clear cookies, then starts happening again. And, lastly, since I see you have a few disputes/chargebacks...their chargeback handling process is horrid.
- dangrossman 11y ago
  > I have to log in twice to get logged in. I've had to log in twice for months as well. I can't comprehend their leaving something so basic broken this long. > And, lastly, since I see you have a few disputes/chargebacks...their chargeback handling process is horrid. I have no beef with their chargeback handling myself. It's something more ridiculous actually. Those 5 "open cases" are cases I opened against a hosting company 12 years ago, in 2004. They stopped paying their colo bills and the DC cut power to their racks, including all the servers they rented to customers. PayPal decided the best course of action, given no money in their account or linked bank accounts to pay any refunds, was to leave the disputes open forever. I can't even view the cases any more. If I try to search that far back in time, the dispute search times out and the site dies with no response (white screen), like some overloaded WordPress blog on shared hosting.

jorgecurio 11y ago

Is this coincidence or what? Yelp CFO also resigned. Two executives from two different sinking ships. Paypal is getting murdered by Stripe. Yelp thought it could raise stock prices by buying traffic. Something had to give, someone has to take the blame.

eloff 11y ago
PayPal a sinking ship? Getting murdered by stripe? I call bullshit - do you have numbers to back you up?
- DonHopkins 11y ago
  Here's a documentary about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSO9OFJNMBA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSO9OFJNMBA
npizzolato 11y ago
Looking at Paypal's Q4 2015 statement, they made $500 million in profit on $2.5 billion in revenue, up from $400 million in profit on $2.1 billion in revenue from Q4 2014. If that's what a sinking ship looks like, I'd love to be on board! http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-4BS3R8/1480311098x0x871870/9563A23D-53A8-4641-BC7A-C495B16E715C/Q4_15_Investor_Update.pdf http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-4BS3R8/148031109...
justin_vanw 11y ago
In the first down market Stripe will no longer exist. They are losing money at an incredible rate and no where near profitable. They are losing money at a rate of about $100MM per year, and having to raise the same. Perhaps they can make it to IPO, but even at a 3.5B valuation, they have to find profitability very quickly, a 3.5B market cap can turn into a $250M market cap very quickly, just ask GroupOn. When you are losing more per year than you can book in revenue, this is not a good business, and certainly isn't going to take over the market. This is doubly true if Paypal is firing their CTO, who is in the end responsible for their situation, poor usability, and very poor APIs. If Paypal wakes up and starts fixing their issues, they are closing the one and only thing that is giving companies like Stripe an opening.

lwhalen 11y ago

Couldn't happen to a nicer sleazeball. I have nothing but disdain for Paypal (and Square, at this point), their customer service is terrible, their limits (even for businesses) are laughably low, and their processes for increasing the limits are slow, opaque, and unable to be appealed. Nothing but the back of my hand for these chuckleheads, I hope they trip and fall on their megayachts.

nightpool 11y ago
I know of a lot of valid complaints against PayPal (bad support, poor policies, many unjust closures) but I haven't heard a whole ton about Square—certainly nothing to drop them into the same bucket as PayPal. Mind expanding on that a little?

grubles 11y ago

"Pop." https://twitter.com/djcapelis/status/696869166960095232 https://twitter.com/djcapelis/status/696869166960095232

m3rc 11y ago
Am I very dense or is this a reference to the tech bubble?
- zrail 11y ago
  Congratulations you got the reference. Gold stars for everyone!
  - knowaveragejoe 11y ago
    I assumed people would be drawing this conclusion when I saw the top 3 threads right now. How do we know that is the case and not just statistical anomaly, though?
    - losteric 11y ago
      That was just a joke, for now. The idea that we're in a bubble on the cusp of collapse has been building over the past year, spiking when the feds raised interest rates, but there's no concrete evidence of a bubble popping. Yet. Get worried when we see (multiple) high-level execs also resigning from Facebook/Twitter/etc. Especially if it's of their own accord...
      - djcapelis 11y ago
        http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Are-Twitter-s-exec-departures-a-sign-of-doom-6783246.php http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Are-Twitter-s-ex...
      - bjacobel 11y ago
        Multiple high-level execs left Twitter about two weeks ago - four at once. http://recode.net/2016/01/24/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-confirms-key-executive-departures/ http://recode.net/2016/01/24/twitter-ceo-jack-dorsey-confirm...

arthurcolle 11y ago

Tomorrow's top post: Zenefits CEO, Yelp CFO, PayPal CTO team up to Big Data the Internet of Things

meritt 11y ago
It'll be an insurance company that holds hostage provider payments until you delete your negative review.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  Oh bravo!
- thomasjudge 11y ago
  That was very funny :)
- mangeletti 11y ago
  You win! I literally laughed out loud for what seems like a while.
- petervandijck 11y ago
  You could probably raise 10$M on that idea a few months back.
minionslave 11y ago
Yelp CFO just resigned. What's going on?
- protomyth 11y ago
  A lot of companies need scapegoats this quarter. I would imagine a lot of envelopes are being stuffed today - http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes.html http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Prepare_3_Envelopes....
hindsightbias 11y ago
Unicornco?

jusben1369 11y ago

The role of CTO varies so greatly from company to compan . Some are hands on making major decisions. Others are almost academic; looking 18+ months out and responsible for understanding big trends et . Not sure which is the case here. Does anyone know?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nowarninglabel 11y ago
I can at least agree that it varies greatly company to company. I've got some blog posts lined up relating to being a CTO, but it really is a varied position, and interchangeable with being a VP of Engineering.

bitmapbrother 11y ago

He was pro "Old Money"

pbreit 11y ago

So who's more senior after this? The new CTO or Bill Ready?

shmerl 11y ago

PayPal is being really obnoxious lately (like banning payments to VPN services and such). Or were they always that way?

tonyedgecombe 11y ago
They have been like that from the start. I don't blame them, there was a lot of fraud going on and it meant they had to develop a very defensive attitude to things just to stay in business. It's hard to shake those things off once they are established.

free2rhyme214 11y ago

I switched to Google Wallet. PayPal would take forever to send money and has done nothing for years to innovate. All they do is buy startups (Braintree). I think this is entirely true - when the founders leave, companies stop innovating.

lossolo 11y ago

Worst ever support i have experienced. I do not contact support unless there is something i can't operate myself. They just copy paste things from their support FAQ... didn't receive answer to my question ever... Such incompetence.

novapioneer 11y ago

http://recode.net/2015/08/31/top-paypal-executive-hill-ferguson-out-in-management-shakeup/ http://recode.net/2015/08/31/top-paypal-executive-hill-fergu... > Hill Ferguson, a top executive and officer who was SVP of PayPal’s consumer business, has stepped down, he announced in a post on Facebook earlier today. Bill Ready, who was Ferguson’s counterpart for the merchant side of PayPal’s ecosystem, is gaining more control and will now run product and engineering for the entire company, a spokesman said in a statement. http://www.zdnet.com/article/paypal-cto-james-barrese-resigns/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/paypal-cto-james-barrese-resign... > William Ready, the company's Global Head of Product & Engineering, will take over the "payment services functions" currently handled by Barrese, Is it really that big a mystery what is happening?

dhimes 11y ago
Well, it's a mystery to me. What do you see?
- novapioneer 11y ago
  politics? power grab? the new guys coming in and pushing out the old? even battlehack, which started in 2013, which is probably one of the best things PP did for developers in recent years is awfully quiet now

bitcuration 11y ago

Oh, finally. For a couple years, I can't pass authentication of PayPal on my iPhone no matter how I tried. While almost all the credit card and banks are now using fingerprint on iPhone, I need a hardware token device to really get in PayPal on iPhone. According to the rep the logic is I can use my phone number to receive 2 factor text code, then why advertised it. The new web has been continued puzzled me often prompt to go back to old UI for more details. This is in 2015, decades after online banking started and PayPal is not a government agency. However you put it, it doesn't add up.

somesay 11y ago
In my case using SMS for 2FA only works within their new interface. Whenever an online shop is redirecting to PayPal, it's the old login page (and doesn't notice when already logged in on PayPal), so I basically never receive 2FA codes in that step. Not sure if just broken or they are using a different SMS gateway that has a problem with my country. It also doesn't really help that 2FA is still only known as hardware tokens within their documentation. It doesn't raise any trust for the PayPal website either.

systemz 11y ago

About that Paypal stability... https://i.imgur.com/PCkXnQu.png https://i.imgur.com/PCkXnQu.png