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Ex-PayPal president slams company, says it has 'Lost its mojo and ability to compete'
In his post, Marcus said that he broke his long silence after receiving “dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues”.
Nearly 12 years after leaving PayPal, former president David Marcus has raised concerns about the fintech giant, saying that the San Jose-based company has “lost its mojo” and its product edge amid years of strategic missteps. In a long post on X, Marcus spoke about several flaws in PayPal across its history. He left PayPal in 2014 and has since worked at Coinbase and Meta. He has also founded a payments company, Lightspark, where he is now CEO.
In his post, Marcus said that he broke his long silence after receiving “dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues”. “A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left… Twelve years of silence is long enough. And today’s news makes it clear the pattern I’ve watched unfold isn’t self-correcting,” he wrote.
His post comes after the company, during its latest earnings call on Tuesday, reported profit and sales misses. It also announced that its CEO, Alex Chriss, would be replaced by Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Enrique Lores.
In the post, Marcus said he left PayPal in 2014 out of “deep frustration,” despite what he described as a successful turnaround that brought back engineering talent, sped up product launches, and led to acquisitions such as Braintree and Venmo. However, he argued that the leadership approach later shifted from being product-led to financially driven.
“Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization,” Marcus wrote.
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What went wrong with PayPal?
According to Marcus, PayPal made a “fundamental miscalculation” by prioritising payment volume over margins and differentiation. He also pointed to growing competition from rivals like Apple Pay, which steadily eroded PayPal’s share of checkout among profitable customers. He said PayPal has lagged on buy-now-pay-later payment features, adding that the company has leaned too heavily on unbranded checkouts and lost transaction volume on eBay.
“Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature,” he wrote.
Further, Marcus said that PayPal also made some bad acquisition bets, citing the online rewards company Honey and the financial services company Xoom. “None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions,” he said.
The former executive also flagged leadership churn, noting that bringing in Intuit veteran Alex Chriss as CEO in 2023 was “the right instinct” but arguing that clearing out experienced payments executives weakened institutional knowledge. He said that PayPal was repeating the same mistake with its new CEO, Lores.
"I don't know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he's a hardware executive. For a payments company," Marcus wrote.
Reflecting on the company’s trajectory, he added that PayPal “had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time,” but instead “lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes”.
“That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about,” he concluded.
