PayPal CTO Resigns

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1633917/000163391716000110/a8-kbarrese.htm

by coloneltcb • 10 years ago

504 114 10 years ago

sec.gov

lifeisstillgood• 10 years 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?

dragonwriter2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

minimaxir• 10 years ago

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

paulftw• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

tyingq3• 10 years 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.

dragonwriter2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

muyfine• 10 years ago

New Money needs a New CTO

27182818284• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

I wonder what the downvote rationale is here?

happywolf2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

meritt2• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

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.

pbreit3• 10 years ago

Definitely not related. David Sacks and Peter Thiel are best friends from college.

pizzasynthesis• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

speleding2• 10 years 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.

dangrossman2• 10 years 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

tyingq3• 10 years 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.

dangrossman2• 10 years 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.

true_religion• 10 years ago

Hm, that's odd. I have a Paypal business account and I've been seeing the new layout for at least a year now.

Are you using PayPal pro? I'm not, since AFAIK the only difference is the website redirect + accepting the full credit card information.

You can take payments in person without having a Paypal Pro account, just their swiper reader.

robryan• 10 years ago

There is definitely a split, one of our newer accounts has a new interface but the older ones don't. Not sure if it is age or location causing it.

aytekin• 10 years ago

My biggest pain: It is 2016 but we still have to log into PayPal to cancel subscriptions manually when someone requests to downgrade their account. API does not support it because our subscription numbers start with "S-" which seems to happen with old PayPal accounts.

filsmick• 10 years ago

Couldn't you automate it anyway?

Mechanize and PhantomJS can be really helpful to script things that aren't covered by a public API.

anupamsr3• 10 years ago

The thing is, PayPal code is a mess. And it is a mess that responds well to resources being thrown at it. For as long as PayPal keeps seeing growth, nobody wants to fix that mess.

Internally it really works like a bank - there are a couple of dev teams that are always under time crunch and rest of the company is basically busy politicking over the pie.

hinkley2• 10 years ago

And when that growth stops, it's too late to fix the problems. If you can keep things teetering along for a couple more years you can get a few bonuses cash out and leave before it all falls over.

It's the same story everywhere. I wish that it weren't.

cperciva• 10 years ago

None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet.

Tarsnap got the latest updated interface a few months ago. Maybe they're rolling it out to non-US businesses first?

mrweasel• 10 years ago

None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet.

We get sort of half old, half new, depending on where you click. Neither interfaces are any good though.

happywolf2• 10 years ago

It depends on where you are, and for some countries only certain % of the population will get it as it ramps up slowly. For some products, the new isn't ready so it falls back to the old stack. It could be due to the ramp, WIP, or just that the old code is too old to the extent no one wants/dares to modify it.

hobarrera• 10 years ago

I see that same UI on a normal user account.

Maybe the fact that I'm in Argentina is somehow related? (we have some additional restrictions due to government restrictions, so the functionality is different too).

zongitsrinzler• 10 years ago

Not to mention that all FAQs have been updated to NEW UIs.

fareesh• 10 years ago

This reminds me of a React/Flux talk by Facebook's Jing Chen about how there were pieces of code within the product that literally nobody wanted to touch because they were so fragile and complex. I suspect there is something similarly messy in the PayPal business accounts, and for whatever reason a ground-up rewrite was also a challenge.

ascorbic• 10 years ago

The staged rollout has been ridiculously slow. I had it on my business account before my personal one, well over a year ago I think. The biggest problem was that it was activated before all of the features were available, so either it would throw you back into an old-site page when you clicked on something, or you'd need to manually switch to the old design to find a certain tool or setting that wasn't yet exposed in the new site. As of the last month or so it looks finally like they've gotten all of the features I use onto the new site, and it definitely better than the early-noughties design of the old site.

andygambles• 10 years ago

Continues to use the VeriSign logo (discontinued 2 years ago)

MarkMc• 10 years ago

Tangentally, does anyone know how to show a running balance in PayPal, similar to a bank statement. I can get a list of transactions, but there doesn't seem to be a 'Balance' column, and it's not obvious which transactions affect the balance.

imron2• 10 years ago

Switch back to the 'classic' view. That's the only way I could find to do it.

dhimes2• 10 years ago

I thought there was a balance option on that same table.

Edit: Link on mine is: All Activity (with balance)

dontscale• 10 years ago

No. You'd have to roll your own using nvp TransactionSearch api with BalanceAffecting transaction. Also you'd have to do currency conversions on your own

chadscira• 10 years ago

You can call them and ask them to upgrade your profile. I was seeing this UI until I requested they upgrade me a few months ago.

imron2• 10 years ago

They keep upgrading my business account to use the new version and I invariably have to switch it back after a couple of days because it's missing (or I can't easily find) various features that I rely upon.

I'm very grateful that unlike some other services they at least give me the option to keep switching back to the 'classic' view.

jorgecurio• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

PayPal a sinking ship? Getting murdered by stripe? I call bullshit - do you have numbers to back you up?

DonHopkins• 10 years ago

Here's a documentary about that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSO9OFJNMBA

npizzolato• 10 years 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-4BS3R8/148031109...

justin_vanw2• 10 years 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.

malisper• 10 years ago

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.

Do you have a citation for that? I couldn't find anything when I tried searching.

jdross• 10 years ago

Groupon ($GRPN) is valued at 1.3 Billion, roughly its all time low. So I'm not sure that's the metaphor you wanted?

lwhalen• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

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

m3rc2• 10 years ago

Am I very dense or is this a reference to the tech bubble?

zrail• 10 years ago

Congratulations you got the reference. Gold stars for everyone!

pbreit3• 10 years ago

I guess that's the reference but it doesn't make any sense.

astronautameya• 10 years ago

The bubble is obv there, but that doesn't mean it has to go bust. We still have time

ronnier• 10 years ago

Have you figured out why some people gloat over it?

rpgmaker• 10 years ago

Is this supposed to be a clever comment? Paypal doesn't belong to that group of companies.

argonaut• 10 years ago

Except that PayPal posted a strong earnings report in Q4 2015 (http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/27/paypal-shares-up-on-earning...). So this is just a coincidence of timing (new year, etc.).

My point is, I seriously doubt the CTO was forced out or left because he thought his stock was worthless. He is most likely leaving for any of the million other reasons people leave companies every day.

hammock2• 10 years ago

Earnings is a lagging indicator

20years• 10 years ago

It all seriousness - allowing another mega-bubble to get created just to burst again should be prevented. This is what regulatory safeguards are supposed to prevent but like the housing bubble and financial bubble, the nefarious types always find a way to game the system.

When this happens it so harmful to the little guy and all of the employees stuck in the middle.

SixSigma• 10 years ago

You can't boil water without bubbles.

arthurcolle• 10 years ago

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

meritt2• 10 years ago

It'll be an insurance company that holds hostage provider payments until you delete your negative review.

jusben13692• 10 years ago

Oh bravo!

thomasjudge• 10 years ago

That was very funny :)

mangeletti• 10 years ago

You win!

I literally laughed out loud for what seems like a while.

petervandijck• 10 years ago

You could probably raise 10$M on that idea a few months back.

minionslave• 10 years ago

Yelp CFO just resigned. What's going on?

protomyth• 10 years 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....

hindsightbias• 10 years ago

Unicornco?

hammock2• 10 years ago

"It's like Uber for AI," said Apple's former Self-Driving Car guy who also joined the team.

jusben13692• 10 years 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?

nowarninglabel• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

He was pro "Old Money"

pbreit3• 10 years ago

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

shmerl• 10 years ago

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

tonyedgecombe• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

novapioneer2• 10 years ago

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-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?

dhimes2• 10 years ago

Well, it's a mystery to me. What do you see?

novapioneer2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

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

PayPal CTO Resigns

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