I worked at PayPal on the China team. There were a lot of internal politics at the time and I know people on both sides of that internal fight. Needless to say,

I worked at PayPal on the China team. There were a lot of internal politics at the time and I know people on both sides of that internal fight. Needless to say, it was a battle that eBayPal wasn't going to win. From slow servers hosted in the US data centers having to traverse the GFW to the massive payment friction compared to Taobao's checkout flow. As for the politics, there were partially policy decisions and partially just a lot of internal infighting. Not to mention the time wasted making PPTs instead of fighting on the ground.