By Jenny Surane and Hannah Levitt | Bloomberg
The whispers kept swirling: PayPal Holdings Inc.’s visionary leader might leave.
It was late 2022, and shareholders were counting on Dan Schulman to pull the stock out of a yearlong slide that’s erased $279 billion in market value. But after he flew to Italy for his four-day wedding celebration on the banks of Lake Como, denizens of Silicon Valley and Wall Street began buzzing with the notion that PayPal’s longtime leader was ready for a change.
At the end of October, Chairman John Donahoe felt compelled to bat back the speculation: “The board has never discussed replacing Dan,” he said in a statement to Bloomberg. A few months later, Schulman himself announced his plans to go.
So goes the humbling of mighty PayPal — once worth more than Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. combined. After strategy missteps that risk squandering the company’s lead in the lucrative business of online payments, the company is now starting from scratch on a CEO search and a pivotal question: What kind of leader should take over — a cost-cutter or another manager with an ambitious plan for growth?
Schulman himself was once such a replacement for the firm’s legendary founders and early executives — the so-called PayPal Mafia that included billionaires-to-be Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, as well as tech luminaries Reid Hoffman and David Sacks.
But after the CEO signaled a slew of new products in 2021 challenging US banks, the firm suffered an eye-watering change in fortunes. A stock-market value that peaked at $362 billion as Schulman floated the possibility of more than doubling clients to 1 billion, has mostly melted away amid a slowdown in growth, a bungled attempt to buy Pinterest Inc. and the abandonment of key targets.
Now, headhunters are vying for the mandate to find a new CEO and privately conceding it’s an especially tough assignment. Across Silicon Valley and Wall Street, executives are buzzing about…
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