What we want to do to monetize Venmo is to add more and more capabilities. Anywhere you see a PayPal merchant, you can click on that button and actually use your Venmo account to check out at that merchant. Then we'll monetize that transaction exactly the same way we monetize a PayPal transaction.
— Dan Schulman
A lot of people say that I'm an activist CEO. I just think I'm a responsible leader of a business.
It's been with us for a millennium, and we'll still be carrying around cash for a long time to come. There'll just be less of it.
I am a huge mixed martial arts practitioner.
I think a lot of people have predicted the demise of cash, and they've frequently been wrong. But there's no question that the smartphone is leading to the digitization of money. You really now have all the power of a bank branch in the palm of your hand.
The difference between online and offline commerce is basically blurring and disappearing.
Everyone has all the power of a bank branch in the palm of their hand. And so in that world of software at scale, theoretically the incremental unit cost of something at scale approaches zero.
Before I became the president of AT&T's consumer division, I was running strategy and our internet services, so I was the president of one of the first internet service providers, ISPs, AT&T Worldnet, and running our internet protocol product development as well. So I knew a lot about what was going on with the internet.
I spent the first 18 years of my career at AT&T, and it was a wonderful place that kept me moving all the time. I mean, I started off as entry level a position as you can get at AT&T.
On average, an underserved consumer spends 10% of their disposable income on unnecessary fees and interest rates.
It's so hard to predict the political environment. I think that business can't sit on the sidelines and just watch. I think we need to be a force for the values that we believe in. We need to partner with government and regulators.
When we were associated with eBay, it was surprising to me how many merchants were very reluctant to work with PayPal because we were accessing their data and their information, and they felt in some way, shape, or form they were competing with eBay.
There's always some potential vulnerabilities in any system.
If you want to have the best employees, there really needs to be a vision and a mission. Talent looks for a mission. And if you have the best talent, that's the single biggest competitive advantage any company can have.
If you think about the under-30 generation, the millennial generation - GenTech, as I call them - they grew up with a screen in front of them. And so they think about everyday processes, like payments, differently than you and I do.
I think what we really need to think about is how do we reimagine the management and movement of money in an era where everyone will have a smartphone.
In many ways, leadership is about defining reality and inspiring hope, but if you have these great people around you and they know that what they do is going to be recognized, it can be incredibly powerful.
Our overriding mantra is to be customer champion.
We cannot just rely on the public sector or the private sector. We all need to work together.
Monetizing by creating more value for a Venmo user makes a ton of sense to me. But other forms of monetization that are more intrusive, like in advertising or something like that, the jury is really still out for me.
We're trying to democratise financial services, to ensure that management and movement of money is a right for all citizens, not the privilege of the affluent.
We take the privacy of our consumers' information as one of the most trusted things that people look to Paypal for, because when it comes to financial services, the single most important brand attribute you can have is trust.
We're really thinking how do we re-imagine PayPal almost as a service. PayPal as a SaaS platform.
When I first went into financial services, people told me not to be too over-optimistic about change.
I think that sometimes people talk about disruption, and I've seen tons of startups come in as disruptors and then disappear. And I think what we need to do as an industry is think about a world that is dominated by mobile and software and not extrapolate from what was. And I think a lot of big companies tend to want to do that.
I do think there's no substitute for really hard work. But I think the thing that launched my career at AT&T, I had a pretty tragic thing happen in my family. My sister died, and I was leading a big team at the time, and I had to take time off.
