Former eBay CEO Still Wields Influence over PayPal as It Names New CEO

Nine years ago, former eBay CEO John Donahoe named Dan Schulman head of PayPal prior to the companies’ split in 2015, and in his current role as Chairman of the PayPal Board, Donahoe had a say in naming Schulman’s replacement this week.

Intuit executive Alex Chriss will take over from Schulman as PayPal CEO on September 27, while Schulman will remain on the PayPal Board until its next annual shareholder meeting in May 2024.

Chriss joined Intuit 19 years ago and was most recently the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intuit’s Small Business and Self-Employed Group and was credited with leading “a global organization of thousands of colleagues that delivered QuickBooks and Mailchimp to millions of users around the world.”

“During the five years that Chriss led the Small Business segment, he grew its customers and revenues at a compound annual growth rate of 20% and 23%, respectively,” PayPal said in Monday’s press release, which also noted he had led Intuit’s $12 billion acquisition of Mailchimp in 2021.

Activist investor Elliot Management had reportedly targeted PayPal last summer, and in January of this year, PayPal announced plans to lay off 2,000 full time employees (about 7% of its total workforce). A month later, Schulman announced his plans to step down by the end of the year, but he waited until PayPal’s big crypto announcement last week before naming his replacement.

Donahoe, who became CEO of Nike in 2020 after serving on its board since 2014, said of Chriss in today’s announcement; “With his depth of experience in product development, his passion for serving customers and his longstanding commitment to empowering and enabling small businesses, and his proven track record of developing and inspiring his team, Alex is the perfect leader to take PayPal forward and accelerate the company’s growth opportunities.”

Chriss was quoted in the announcement: “PayPal is an extraordinary company that plays a critical role in the lives of consumers and merchants all over the world. Throughout my career, I have championed small and medium businesses and entrepreneurs, who are the backbone of every economy in the world. I am proud to take the baton from Dan and thrilled to have the opportunity to work with PayPal’s talented and committed team to build on PayPal’s remarkable history and draw on its unique capabilities to deliver outstanding products and services to businesses and consumers.”

Interestingly Intuit’s founder had played a role in the eBay-PayPal split of 2015. Scott Cook joined the eBay Board of Directors in 1998, and when activist investor Carl Icahn targeted eBay in 2014, he criticized eBay for allowing Cook to remain on its board, accusing Cook and fellow board member Marc Andreessen of having conflicts of interest. As we reported at the time, “Icahn noted Cook was a large shareholder and current board member of Intuit, a direct competitor in payment processing.”

Icahn had also referenced the “no-poach” agreement eBay and Intuit had allegedly entered into that prevented either company from recruiting employees from each other. (The companies settled a lawsuit over the allegations in 2015.)

eBay’s board capitulated to Icahn’s pressure to split eBay and PayPal in 2015, leading to eBay’s eventual adoption of Managed Payments as a replacement to PayPal’s payment processing. (PayPal is still allowed as a payment method, but buyers pay eBay rather than sellers directly.)

As for Schulman, he said in February that after 8 1/2 years at PayPal, “I’m at a point in my life where I want to devote more time to my passions outside the workplace.”