We put people at the center of everything we do.
Dan Schulman
We believe digital payments are making financial services more universally affordable, accessible and, therefore, have the opportunity to drive financial inclusion and financial health for billions worldwide.
I do think that in a digital future, consumers will increasingly turn to brands that they trust. Trust, security, and service are even more important in a digital world.
As CEO, I believe my most important job is to both define reality and inspire hope for the PayPal team. Defining reality includes being realistic about all the things that could go wrong so that we are prepared to navigate those challenges.
When I first entered the corporate world, doing good and making money were seen as separate and contradictory threads. Challenging that notion set my career - and life - on a new course.
When you focus solely on valuation and market share, you win some and you lose some. When you focus on the needs of your customers and help them achieve their dreams, you win every time.
I think we operate in a very dynamic marketplace, and as such, we need to constantly innovate.
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.
No one can say that democratizing financial services is bad. It is good for communities, countries, the global economy, and educational progress.
I consider myself a good communicator and a good salesman.
I grew up in a progressive household with a family that believed in equality for all, and that leaves its mark on you. In the past, I planned to go into politics and never considered Wall Street as an option.
Digital payments have already made it easier to move and manage money. While there's more work to do, the potential is real and understood.
We have a very close relationship with Google. We extend our offerings to all the markets that we expand into.
PayPal benefited tremendously from having a close partnership with the eBay marketplace. It was a natural fit at the time.
India is among the leaders in thinking about how technology can solve some of the problems about financial inclusion. But if you think that financial inclusion as a problem has a solution rooted in technology, it's obviously not the only thing.
Managing and moving your money should be a right, not a privilege. This isn't about banking the unbanked. It's about re-imagining what consumer retail banking can be.
Online commerce is being replaced by mobile.
Our strategy is to provide even more value to users and tie the Venmo community into the PayPal merchant marketplace so that they can use Venmo to buy things.
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.
There is absolutely no room for discrimination against anyone in our country or anywhere in world.
I believe that companies that have the opportunity to improve the lives of their customers and communities have the responsibility to do so.
My mom pushed me in a baby carriage at Martin Luther King rallies. My grandfather was a union organizer. And to me, there is no room - no room - for discrimination of any kind. To me, it's just an anathema.
Most governments want their citizens to be part of the financial system, to be productive citizens as a result of having access to be able to manage and move money in a seamless way. But the traditional financial services infrastructure is not designed to handle that because, predominantly, it's an expensive infrastructure.
A lot of people say that I'm an activist CEO. I just think I'm a responsible leader of a business.
In the not-too-distant future, commerce is just going to be commerce. It won't be online commerce or offline commerce. It's just going to be commerce. And that will happen because of the phone.
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.
Our overriding mantra is to be customer champion.
The difference between online and offline commerce is basically blurring and disappearing.
The big problem retailers are facing is the world is moving to mobile.
PayPal is a strong business: it has a strong balance sheet and free cash flows, and it will help us take a look at where we want to independently invest.
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.
Most devices have been hacked in some way and are part of - part of a botnet network that can come after you in DDoS attacks.
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.
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 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.
I'm also the chairman of the board of Symantec, which is the world's largest cybersecurity - software cybersecurity company.
Merchants are eager to tap into the millennial Venmo shopper.
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.
Venmo is one of the jewels of Paypal.
There's always some potential vulnerabilities in any system.
If we can provide a benefit and make money, it's a chance for us to expand the population of customers we serve, expand the products we put in the marketplace, and reinvent ourselves going forward.
We are excited to see how PayPal's global payment platform can help small businesses in Cuba thrive and grow by making it easier to connect to international markets.
As we think about the future, one of the things we will do is to make sure PayPal becomes the central part of consumers' lives, how we enable consumers to manage and move their money more efficiently, easily, and less expensively than some traditional ways.
More people are using PayPal more frequently.
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.
We all have people who are literally one life shock away from going into a crisis. For many of us, we have a buffer in one way or another. We have a savings account, or we have credit that we can go to. The underserved don't have that luxury.
Too many people go into existing organizations and define success as recreating what is there. To be successful as a startup organization within a large, established culture, you really need to think about how you leverage the assets that are there.
On average, an underserved consumer spends 10% of their disposable income on unnecessary fees and interest rates.
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.
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.
