PayPal's "Staff Infection"
Marcus's mistakes notwithstanding, his point wasn't wrong.
by Rod D. Martin
February 18, 2014
Recently PayPal CEO David Marcus wrote an email to his staff that has spread far beyond San Jose, resulting (at least) in two Venture Beat stories and today an editorial at Fox Business. The gist of it is that a bunch of PayPal employees were seen out and about forgetting their PayPal passwords, failing to use a PayPal mobile app, and in some cases outright refusing to download the thing.
This hacked off their boss. So he sent an email to "All Staff" suggesting rather strongly that people who don't believe in the company's products enough to use them shouldn't work there.
There's a been a lot of disagreement over this, and I should note that one of the people who was particularly and publicly unimpressed was Keith Rabois, a friend and former PayPalian for whom I have great respect. Keith's take is (roughly) that Marcus is engaging in the John Scully model of leadership, and that if your employees won't use your app you have a problem with your product…