While PayPal is still the largest ecommerce payment gateway in global volume, they’re not trading at any multiples compared to their competitors (Adyen, square, theoretically stripe). When it comes to offline transactions they’re nowhere near fis or fiserv. What happened here? Was it just margins? Braintree was the first mover and for a while was the online developer first checkout rail. I understand stripe invested heavily in early stage facilitators like Shopify before it became who it is, and adyen built its moat around mega enterprise, but PayPal had eBay (Adyen claimed it a few years ago). Now we’re watching a new ceo announce things everyone else had for years as new features. Seems crazy it couldn’t keep up.
Problem with PayPal is simple they had lot of innovative folks & products but in ebay days they decided to start bringing over lot of offshore engineers (from India) onshore as full time employees as they were cheaper. They eventually made up most of company that strategy worked as long as you had solid product leadership to guide them. Eventually lot of folks from product leadership left as they got pouched by fintech startups like Square, Stripe etc. Rest of employee have no industry experience and as a result they are simply keeping the lights on. As a result they have fallen behind the likes Square, Stripe, Toast, Affirm etc inspite of being the first to market in every one of those segments.
To be fair, they acquired their way into each of those segments but did indeed buy the first movers. Loss of innovation by just keeping the lights on is a really salient theory. I definitely see it all over
Adyen is based in Europe and pays 🥜
When Elon leaves, the company sucks.... But not anymore.... Elon is messing x
Elon went from having golden hands to shit-holding hands
Lack of innovation and creativity. What innovation they think they’re creating is only innovative in the minds of the leadership. Ancient infrastructure.
stripe went through ycombinator, and naturally now all new ycombinator start-ups also have to use stripe
Bad ceo
No respect to engineers. Only hires cheap engineers
Most of the good engineers I know at PayPal have either left on their own or were laid off because of cheap politics. What remains is only a very few good engineers, and the rest is useless.
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Payment processing is a commodity
I agree. But why is the largest supplier of online payment processing trading at multiples lower than adyen, square and (maybe) stripe? Usually commoditized services skew to the largest owner of the commodity with the most distribution
Because they are losing share to business that have lower cost base