Deb Liu: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, wow. And before I joined, I actually had had a sale dinner, so Peter Thiel and David Sacks took me to dinner. I said, "Is any chance we're going to get acquired by eBay? Because it would be really awkward. I actually interned at eBay, had an offer there, and I turned it down." And they said, "Absolutely not. We're going to stay independent." And about two weeks later, we were acquired by eBay, and I actually started working with the same colleagues that I had worked before. It was an incredible journey. I think PayPal is such a small scrappy company trying to do so many amazing things with a few hundred employees and it was just the adventure of a lifetime, but it was really different being bought by a company that was run in such a corporate way. It was a very corporate tech company. eBay was a wonderful product, and I had worked there and so I really loved the people there as well. But it was the culture clash between the two experiences, between the two cultures, between the two teams. It was very alien, I think to really have one culture, and at one point they called it the mothership. It was that kind of culture. PayPal was the smaller scrappier cousin, and it was just a very different vibe. I think looking back, what made the product successful was the two things just belonged together, right? Commerce and payments and I think that it really unlocked a lot of value, but I think most people saw the value unlocked. I mean the value that you've looked at PayPal is now larger than eBay from market cap perspective, which was what Meg had wanted at some point. But at the same time. So she was very prescient in a lot of ways, but I think the differences were, the culture differences were really hard to overcome. And now, even as we talk about acquisitions, as I advise companies who do acquisitions, it's to remember that there are people and cultures and real human beings behind each of these products, that it's not just you buy a company and you slot them in like it's a stock. It is a completely different thing. There were a few of us who became very close during the integration. Ha Nguyen, who now heads of customer experience at Swimply, she and I stayed friends over the last 20 years. We talk about those days and how crazy it was, and how we kept our teams from fighting it out and how successful it ultimately was. But I think that people look at the story, and it's very easy to just gloss over the details, but there were real humans that, and a lot of detailed, how do we make this work? Are there any stories that stand out of culture clash and how different these two companies work? And then also just how did you as a leader help people through that? Because I imagine many people are like, "I'm out of here. I'm not going to go work at eBay." How did you keep people excited and sticking around?…

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