Article Summary

PayPal’s CEO on creating products for Undeserved Markets

The author and CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman starts the article by talking about
a very difficult challenge that he took up which was to live on the streets of
New York for 24hours with no money or food, just the clothes he was wearing.
This challenge was in relation to a charity for homeless people that PayPal had
been a part of. During one of those events an employee came up to Dan and
told him that he has to experience what actual homeless people go through on
a day to day basis to understand the real picture. Dan did so and ended up
having a new found empathy for people living on the street.

A few years later, while working at American Express he did a similar

experiment and realized the fact that “being poor is expensive” and thus he
wanted to make the lives of the less affluent section a lot easier. Dan was very
keen on pursuing two goals: serving shareholders and being a force of good in
the world. He was very determined to take both these goals hand in hand. The
article then talks about the circumstances that led Dan to join PayPal. Dan
clears the confusion about PayPal being a tech company or a financial services
company by answering that it is neither but a cutomer champion company.

Dan then talks about how re reorganized paypal products into just two
categories: consumer and merchant. Paypal introduced Venmo which blended
the aspect of social experience and interaction into the product. It later bought
Xoom which made international payments hassle free and then later
introduced paypal working capital for lending money to small businesses .Dan
concludes by talking about how money is an inefficient form of money and
how he aspires to transform and do some good to the world by helping the
less privileged avail the same services when it comes to money and financial
matters.