Few people outside Silicon Valley have heard of Roelof Botha. But the former CFO of PayPal is famous here. His two claims to fame: negotiating that company's $1.5 billion sale to eBay, and later, as a partner at Sequoia Capital, investing in YouTube and quickly flipping the startup to Google for $1.65 billion. Is it…
Recently anointed eBay CEO John Donahoe thumped his chest over the auction giant's first-quarter earnings. He praised a "diverse portfolio of businesses" as revenues jumped 24 percent to $2.19 billion and earnings rose 22 percent to $459.7 million. The problem: Younger businesses like Skype and PayPal aren't as…
Years ago, PayPal was an independent company which fought constantly with eBay to be allowed on the site as a way to settle accounts after an auction was won. Now, years after eBay bought PayPal, the payments service is elbowing out all manner of competition. In Australia, eBay is limiting purchases to either PayPal…
Oh, look, Valleywag's tipsters came through — 125 laid off at eBay worldwide. [CNNMoney]
In the last 24 hours, we've heard that eBay has laid off 40 members from its bloated middle-management ranks and that its PayPal subsidiary has let its entire branding department go. Has Wall Street already gotten word of these cutbacks? We all know how much the market loves "fat trimming," and EBAY is up nearly two…
eBay's PayPal division will start holding payments for up to three weeks for certain "high-risk transactions" next month. Some sellers are pissed, but it's totally legal. PayPal is not a bank. It is not insured by the FDIC — the government program which insures deposits should a bank go under. PayPal is a "deposit…
Whitman's out and the new guy in charge, John Donahoe, says step one to fixing eBay is fixing its internal search engine. "Our buyers tell us that we know you have unmatched selection, but we can't always find what we want," Donahoe told Bits. Unable to find what they want to buy using eBay's search, Donahoe's theory…
Facebook is looking for platform developers to test a payments system, an administrator announced on the Facebook Developers forum. Details are scant, but it's more likely than not built on the micropayments software Facebook developed for its virtual gifts. (Which, by the way, is a brilliant Trojan horse strategy:…
Like thousands of people around the world right now, Mark Jackson is peeved at eBay about some purchase gone sour. A Nintendo DS Lite, to be precise. Jackson was so peeved that he sent an email to several U.K. press outlets, copying eBay and demanding a response. This is only notable because Jackson is a…
Earlier this year PayPal introduced a security fob that generates a six-digit code every 30 seconds, meant as an additional layer of protection against online identity thieves. However, one user discovered a bug that makes the key useless in certain situations. By entering his valid PayPal login and password,…
A former PayPal executive recently pointed out that PayPal, as a division of eBay, has swelled to 7,000 employees — vastly more than it ever had as an independent concern. "What do those people do?" he asked. The growth in headcount had not led to a concomitant increase in inventiveness. Take, for example, the news, …
Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments…
eBay's campus in Campbell, near San Jose, has reportedly been evacuated due to a suspicious package. No word if this is related to last year's still unsolved PayPal bombing. Have any more details? Please let us know.
Sunday's New York Times profile of PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin tackles the phenomena of serial entrepreneurs. What makes them start multiple companies after a multimillion-dollar IPO or sale? The short answer: Money, but not in the way that you think. Levchin talks about how Slide's exit needs to be more…
Thanks to commenter yarbles, we were alerted to evidence of two more members of the PayPal Mafia posing, like YouTube founder Jawed Karim, in mafioso costumes. Pictured, above, Yelp cofounders Russell Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. (Stoppelman's the one with the fake mustache. At least, we hope it's fake.) Any more…
Seen here, in YouTube founder Jawed Karim's Facebook profile page, the current Stanford grad student (and former PayPal engineer) dressed in disco-era gangster gear. The reason? Karim comments:
As rumors grow that social network Facebook will introduce its own payment system, News Corp.-owned MySpace, still the leading social network, is teaming up with PayPal, eBay's online payments division. The partnership amounts to an experiment at this point, focusing on donations to political campaigns and…
When it rains, it pours. And eBay's recent billion-dollar writeoff of Skype, the VOIP startup it bought two years ago, could have an impact on Facebook's negotiations to sell a stake in the social network, at a high valuation, to Microsoft or another large backer. (Both Bernhard Warner and Kara Swisher make this…
Amazon.com has, as expected, revealed the details of its new payment service in a lengthy, meandering blog post. Don't bother reading it: The geeks in Seattle take forever to get to the very sharp point. The short version? Jeff Bezos is planning to plunge a long knife right into the heart of eBay CEO Meg Whitman's…
The first time I met Jeff Bezos, he was trying to sell me something. It was April 1999, and he'd just bought Accept.com, a person-to-person payments business. Bezos was vague about his plans, but my understanding was that he was planning to do to the money-transfer business what he'd already done to booksellers. Of…
