David Marcus, the head of eBay’s payment service PayPal is moving on to “friendlier” pastures as he becomes the head of Facebook’s messaging products. This move follows Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of messaging service What’sApp earlier this year.
“We wish David well and thank him for his leadership and commitment to PayPal. As the head of PayPal for the past two years, David reinvigorated product design to deliver compelling consumer experiences and energized the team to make a great business better. An entrepreneur at heart, David has made a career decision to focus on what he loves most – leading smaller teams to create great product experiences,” said eBay Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe said in a statement announcing Marcus’s departure.
Apart from the grand scope of this personnel poach–stealing a company’s president is no small feat and came about only after extensive discussion between Marcus and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, reports Bloomberg the move can also be taken as an indication that FB plans to monetize its messaging products, given Marcus’ background in payments.
According to internal reports, Facebook processes 12 billion messages on its Facebook Messenger daily. It has 200 million active users of its app, which can be used apart from Facebook but is also highly intertwined with it.
In their own statement Facebook noted “We’re excited by the potential to continue developing great new messaging experiences that better serve the Facebook community and reach even more people, and David will be leading these efforts.
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