eBay CEO John Donahoe will find himself filling in again as head of PayPal after President David Marcus handed in his resignation. Marcus is leaving PayPal on June 27 and will head to Facebook to head up its messaging products.
Donahoe had chosen Marcus for his entrepreneurial experience – Marcus would bring a “founder’s perspective” and “start-up energy” to PayPal, he said at the time.
But now it looks as though running a 14,000-employee subsidiary of a publicly held company may not be such a good fit for an entrepreneur after all. In a post on LinkedIn, Marcus explained how difficult his two years at PayPal were. “I realized that my role was becoming a real management one, vs. my passion of building products that hopefully matter to a lot of people.”
Pando Daily published the memo Marcus sent to employees crediting his leadership for a turnaround: “We achieved many great things together in the last 2 years, and made an already great business better. We reinvigorated product design and innovation and banded together to do the things necessary to deliver a better experience for our customers. Our numbers in Q1 2014 and the momentum we have across the business show that we did the right thing. This is the part I’m most proud of. With great collective effort, we’ve turned the ship in the right direction.”
Some of the reaction on Twitter included:
Wow. Facebook poached PayPal CEO David Marcus to be messaging VP. Seems almost like a self imposed demotion.
Major declaration of strategic intent/priority to get David Marcus to run of all FB messaging.
Safe to assume that Facebook’s “messaging products” will soon support payments?
eBay spokesperson Amanda Miller told EcommerceBytes that John Donahoe would lead the PayPal day-to-day operations, and said the company has a strong leadership team in place. “We just announced the news, we’ll conduct a search to find the best candidate.” The search for a new PayPal president will include internal and external candidates.
Marcus joined PayPal when it acquired his company Zong and in 2012 replaced former PayPal president Scott Thompson, who left PayPal to take the post of CEO at Yahoo.
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