🎧PayPal President & CEO Alex Chriss: Agentic Commerce, Stablecoins, AI, and Transforming a Global Tech Giant

The views expressed in this podcast are the Speaker's own and are not the views of this we can fintech or any other person or entity. The content provided in this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or recommendation, solicitation, endorsement, or offering by me or anyone else for the sale, subscription or purchase of securities or for investment advisory services of any kind. Hello to our global audience and welcome to today's episode of the this month and fintech podcast. I'm your host Ryan Zauk and today I sit down with an executive at the epicenter of some of the biggest trends in global technology, PayPal CEO Alex Chris. Alex took over his PayPal CEO in September 2023 after nearly 20 year run it into it. Since joining PayPal less than two years ago, his tenure has turned a lot of heads in the industry. PayPal seems reinvigorated and on the offensive, working to take advantage of the several platform shifts we're seeing in global technology and commerce. We've seen new hires, a company reorganization, startup-like release cycles, willveral branding campaigns, and so much more. Alex comes on the show at the perfect time in his tenure as he approaches the two-year mark and his bold vision for PayPal his turning into reality. In this episode, we discuss his internal rally and cry customer back, the future of agentic commerce. PayPal's adoption of AI both internally and externally, his take on stablecoin's real potential in how he views PayPal's innovators dilemma as opportunity, and a fun rapid fire round covering everything from his most important question for executive interviews to Will Ferrell jokes. We could have talked for hours, Alex was phenomenal, but perhaps we'll save that for a future episode. Enjoy the show. Alex, welcome to today's episode of this month in FinTech podcast. It's great to have you on the show today at this crucible moment in FinTech. Ryan, thanks for having me. It's really good to be here. So I want to start with this new chapter in PayPal's history that you're stewarding. There's a lot to cover here, which we'll get to, but and speaking to a lot of employees about you, I heard one phrase that came up more than any other, and I think it'll help set the scene for this episode. That phrase was customer back. What is customer back that you're bringing to PayPal? Yeah, well, it's been 20 months or so since I joined the company. It is just such an incredible company and such a privilege to be part of PayPal. But one of the things that is really important to me that I've learned over my career and that I tried to bring to PayPal and I think we're seeing some momentum is really that obsession around the customer. And we talk about it as customer back internally, you know, like every company serves lots of stakeholders, right? You've got investors and cheerholders that are talking to you all the time. You've got partners that are talking to you all the time. You've got employees that, you know, you're serving all of them are very vocal. Customers are usually the ones that actually drive the business results. And yet they're the ones that sometimes are the quiet ones. They'll quit if they if you're not delivering for them, then they just leave and they're not the ones calling you after unearnings and saying, hey, this is what I needed from the stock. When we talk about customer back, it's ensuring that the customers are actually the root of everything that we do. They're the ones that have a seat at the table when we're making decisions. It's so easy to think about what the cheerholder outcome is going to be. It's actually really hard. And it requires practice and discipline to think about what a decision, a product decision, a financial decision, a pricing decision is going to do to the customer. And so it's just a reminder that in every conversation and every meeting that we're having in every discussion that we're putting the customer at the center of the problem, we're putting the customer at the center of the conversation and we're falling in love with their problem. And you know, I had a leader that many years ago said, fall in love with the customer's problem and not your solution. And so often as leaders, it's easy to fall in love with the solution because it's so true. It fits to a spreadsheet that delivers a great outcome. And then you get it to market and you realize, well, how come nobody adopted this? And you realize, well, you didn't actually understand what the customer problem was. So it's just a reminder, there's no secret sauce on how to make it work. You just got to keep reminding everybody of the organization top to bottom that we're here to serve customers. When we serve customers really well, then all the other stakeholders actually get taken down very, very good advice. And so going a level deeper there, so you joined PayPal over the last two or so years, how did you reconfigure the organization? Is it now consumer, SMD, enterprise division? How did you define customer? Because you serve so many. As you just described, organizing around the customers, organizing customer back was one of the first moves that we made. So when I came in, we reorganized so that we actually were serving very clearly our consumer base, our small business base, and our enterprise base, our large emergence. And each of them has very different needs. And so having a general manager and a product leader who's thinking about what are the specific needs that the consumer has, what are the specific needs that large enterprises have, and how am I building products and services to be able to deliver them? So that was one of the first moves that we made. Yeah, to be transparent, we made a lot of leadership changes. And again, everyone on I address F is new, either new to the company or certainly new to the C-suite and new to the role. And to be transparent when I was looking for is real product leaders, ill operators, and innovators that we're looking to fight and compete, right? I mean, FinTech is an incredibly competitive space. PayPal, we're sort of the old guard in FinTech, right? It's a 25 year old company. But I came in, you know, I'm less than two years in. I want to take the assets that we have, the advantages that we have, and reinvent for the future. So we changed the mission to be all about revolutionizing commerce globally, and really thinking about, hey, we're not going to rest on what's made us successful for the last 25 years. We're thinking about what the future holds. So we reinvented the mission, rebuilt the leadership team, and then organize the company customer back, and really put a focus on innovation and velocity. And I think if you've seen what we put out into the market in the last year and a half, I'm really proud of the focused energy, the innovation and the velocity at which we're we're starting to lead. Yeah, and the entire industry has taken note, I think every FinTech group chat that I'm in over the last year or two has been my God, PayPal is shipping, shipping, shipping, agent of commerce, quantum leap advertising, new products, it just continues to grow. And we'll get to those in just a second. There's one thing I want to touch on is we have a lot of founders and growth stage executives that listen to this show. You came into this multi multi-billion dollar organization from another massive org as a new CEO. What were some tactical lessons or tips that you implemented to bring in this much dramatic change without rocking the boat too much in losing PayPal's core? You have to be humble enough to realize that what you're doing is standing on the shoulders of giants. And there's just a whole train of unbelievable executives that have built the company to where it is. That said, you know, I told the board and the conversation I had when they hired me was if you're looking for a caretaker to just continue the business, please don't choose me. I am not that is not the role that I want and that's not what I'm good at. If you want someone that's kind of transformed and compete and figure out what the future looks like, that's what gets me jumping out of bed every morning. So in order to do that, first I went on a very comprehensive listening tour, which included deep conversations with customers on a global basis, conversations with investors, conversations with partners, really talking to all the stakeholders, and then obviously talking to employees and understanding what makes PayPal special. What is the secret sauce that is working? And then what's getting in your way? What is really slowing you down? What's making your job as an employee harder? When we talked to shareholders, there was what are you excited about? What's getting in the way? And just having that deep listening tour, you really start to see patterns. And for any leader, we all know that being curious and asking great questions gives us the ability to then see patterns across themes, across stakeholders. And then at some point, you got to put your stamp on it and you got to have some conviction and write it down and say, this is the direction we're going to go. And I think one of the things that's most important, especially early in any leader's tenure, is having real clarity and conviction of the direction of the organization. So we narrowed down the priorities from what felt like a few dozen to five. And we said, this is what we're going to focus on. You know, the time of horizons shrink for everyone. And that made things uncomfortable. But we were going to say, look, we're going to put the weight of the organization behind these five things. And we're going to go after it. And you know, it's allowed us to be very focused. It's allowed us to put our energy. It's allowed us to be very transparent with the external market. So they can hold us accountable for what we've said we were going to do. And we're starting to really see the results there. And quickly, what are those five? Yeah. Well, ensuring that our branded checkout was front and center. You know, this is something that's been clear to the organization that we needed to focus on. So ensuring that praying to check out is where we wanted to be. And we could talk about lots of different gaps in the product there. But I feel really good about the momentum there. I'm moving into Omni Channel, which is a big change from where the organization has been in the past, but serving customers where they are again, topping customer back. We've been known for serving e-commerce, but really being able to deliver for customers everywhere that they want to buy really improving the value proposition. So from a rewards perspective, from a loyalty perspective, just making it more obvious as to why you would want to use paper. pal or use Venmo, exactly where you wanted to be. So a real loyalty and rewards program. And then thinking about the future, like what is the future rails? How does crypto work? How shall we be leading into stablecoins? What is the future of what we want from an e-commerce perspective, which can include agentic as well? And then lastly, we were being slowed down. We had a lot of incredible acquisitions. We've started a lot of projects, but you've got to have a common platform. And in a world where the advantage that we have in Fintech is the scale of our business. We've got a quarter of e-commerce running through PayPal. When that's fragmented, and you don't have one common customer data set or one common risk platform or one common ability to authenticate someone in one area of the product and step them up on a risk provision somewhere and have that flow through all of your different products, then you're just shooting yourself in the flow. And so we really focused on how do we create one PayPal platform. And those are the original. We've evolved them over time as things like agentic weren't even on the radar 18 months ago to be transparent. But here we are now just continuing to keep that laser focus. That's awesome. I just saw someone earlier today as a agentic was not a word 18 months ago. Before I say I was not a concept 18 months ago. And so it's quite a nimble time. Not even 18 months ago. February, we did this month's investor day, and I had all the slide agent to commerce zero questions. Not a single follow-up question. April, we did conference with investors 45 of every 60 minute conversation was not agent to commerce. It's just it's absolutely turned on and done. Yeah. Well, I'm sorry about to add to that count because I do want to jump into agentic commerce to your point probably no bigger buzzword across fintech, e-com, consumer, payments marketplace right now in the valley. We've seen launches from you. We've seen launches from the card networks, other PSPs, e-com platforms and more. How is PayPal positioning itself sleet is one of the few platforms that has both consumer and then check out? Yeah. Well, you're hearing a lot from us because I think we are incredibly excited about this next move. If you think about what e-commerce did, just enabling consumers and merchants to now actually discover and they purchased his online in a frictionless area. I mean, that's really where PayPal started to accelerate and really was more. This feels like that kind of if not even bigger evolution. And so this is our opportunity to really lean in and paint the future. What we're excited about is consumers and merchants have unique needs. We have them at scale and it's one of the things that made it paid out was one of the things that drew me to the company was two-sided network and massive scale. So serving close to half a billion consumers around the world, serving 30, 40 million merchants around the world and being able to now enable them to find each other, find in a personalized way by the right product at the right time at the right price and enabling AI to do all of that for you, I think it is absolutely an exceptional opportunity. And when I look at how consumers are starting to adopt AI, they really are just having these conversational conversations where it could be about finding the next travel or finding the next product and just being able to describe exactly what they want and then not have to go spend time searching through the web to find exactly what they need. But being able to just have the AI about deep network. Now that's the goodness, right? That's what sounds amazing. That's what gets as excited. That's the sort of like closer eyes you can imagine it wonderful. Now let's talk about all the problems with that. And when I say problems, I mean opportunity because what PayPal is really good at is making it frictionless and reducing those challenges. So the problems with that is, okay, so how does a merchant expose their catalog to an AI without losing the direct connection with their customer? That doesn't work today. And so there is a very clear model that's been established over the last 15 years. If you're a merchant, you put an inventory in, you create a website, you go buy some keywords, you kind of know if I spend a little bit more on keywords, I get the right customers, hopefully they're targeted customers. And then I can optimize my conversion and there's a little bit of an ROI calculation that's very tried and true. In AI, how does that work? So I expose my catalog. How do I know who I'm competing against? How do I know what customers are coming? If the AI is making a purchase, do I need to get to know who that customer is? Do I get to have a follow-up in a relationship again, or are I just selling a widget to somebody that I don't know? Right. And we need to solve that problem. And again, if you really think about what we've established over 25 years, we have the world's largest commerce LLM. We have over 80% of e-commerce in a catalog that we can start to really enable the AI genes to be able to get access to, but be what we put out with our being the first with a remote MCP server is really enabling the merchants to still have agency over the customers and a relationship with their customers. So that's on the merchant side and the agent side. Let's talk about the consumers. Sounds magical to just speak into your phone and have your agent go off and make a purchase for you. But how do you trust the agent? I just had this problem on Sunday. I was trying to buy tuxedo shoes for a wedding, and I didn't trust the agent. I had to go manually verify myself, want to make sure we got the right size, right shipping address, right form, everything. Everything you just talked about, we've grown accustomed to, but oh my gosh, usually you've got multiple instruments. How does the agent know whether you wanted to use a certain credit card, a reward credit card, a debit card, buy now pay later? Is it optimized for the rewards that you're getting, right? There's, we get there, and I think PayPal was building a smart wall that will enable that, but that's a problem that needs to get solved. Then there's all the things that, as you just described, are in the back of consumers minds like, how would I do a return? How would I do shipping tracking? How would I do, you know, what happens if there's fraud? What happens if I bought this thing, and it turns out that the tuxedo you just bought was made out of valedent, you didn't want valedent tuxedo, and all of a sudden you want to return it. How is that all going to work? And to be honest, the agents that we've talked to, and we're working with all of them, we saw, we did an announcement with perplexity, which we're really excited about, and we're working with all the agents, but they're focused on AGI, they're focused on how do we build, you know, the future? That's what they should be focused on. They're coming to, to players like us, and specifically PayPal, because we've got both sides of the ecosystem, we know how to connect the dots, and we can enable them. So I'm just, I'm really excited because I do think this is going to create new opportunities for merchants and for consumers, but there's a lot of the details to actually work out to make it as magical as we all hope it'll be. Right. And then can we go a level deeper into, you know, some product announcements that have happened PayPal MCP, the agent toolkit, even quantum leap. What are some of these announcements now going to enable in the future for merchants and customers? Yeah, so let me hit on a couple of those different things. So quantum leap is one that you talked about. This is one that we came out with a little over a year ago. That's not an external name. We call that internal, because really, what it is is a reinvention of our branded checkout. And so it's streamlining what we put out over a decade ago, which is that that iconic PayPal button that everyone knows it loves. But now, how do we use more modern tools like biometrics and an API that then it's able to identify if you're a PayPal user and be able to then say, Hey, you by the way, you know, this merchant wants to be able to give you a reward because they know that you're a new customer to them. So all of the data, all that personalization that's now built into our APIs and services is really what we think about when we think about that quantum leap experience. That all gets now exposed with these remote mcp servers and our agent will get. So how do we now take really the APIs and the secret sauce that usually PayPal is having a one-to-one relationship with the merchant and enable an agent to be able to grab that and have that conversation with between the merchant and then ultimately the consumer. And so the best part about an mcp server is it allows agents to get access to this work without having to go build all those integrations, right? If any agent decided, okay, well, I want all the commerce out there, I'm going to go connect all to all merchants. When you think about the head, the torso, and the tail of millions of merchants, it would take them over a decade. I mean, that's what we've been doing. And so instead of having to go one by one through merchants, they can access to PayPal's network of merchants instantly. And then they're able to allow the agents as they're thinking through and processing what the consumer request is to actually call in real time our APIs and the data that we have. And now we'll continue to build on it. We'll continue to make it more robust, but it's enabling that conversation in real time between consumers and merchants, all facilitated by the agents. And it's really exciting. Again, we just talked about it in February. We launched it, I think, end of April beginning of May. We've got partners now that are on coding against it and launching to customer and I think as we get through the summer and fall, at least from an agent capability perspective, it's gonna be there. From a consumer adoption perspective. - Right, your guess is as good as mine. - I think people are gonna dabble with it. I think they're gonna have the same reaction you did, which is how much trust do I have? - Right. - Our perspective is PayPal and Venmo or trusted brands that have built decades of legacy of trust and safety and security. And so when we put something out with our guarantees on the connection with the merchant, it matters. And again, all these merchants that are available through our ecosystem are ones that we've onboarded are the ones that we validated. And so from a flawed perspective, we stand behind the services that we put out. - Yeah, I do have to say any time I'm on fringe frontier websites and I see the PayPal check out button. I will use it with 100% certainty or is it a regular shopping. - I do have one last question here. I mean, we could talk to the progress of the episode on this, but how is your team dropped that build by partner decisioning so far, right? There's so many opportunities out there, early stage companies that have been formed, partnerships you've already decided and then given all the new product glossy of PayPal, how did you rally your team to think about this? - I think having a very robust, inorganic, roadmap is always something that we have running. The reality of AI right now is it's moving so fast that there isn't proven technology that's out there that's three, four years advanced that from a tech perspective makes a lot of sense to acquire in agent to commerce 'cause it's just also new. We also can't wait at the velocity in which we're talking internally. I wish I could tell our teams like hey, it's just a moment in time and then it's gonna slow down. It's just not. - It's probably not. - It's just not. Now the good news is we're bringing it or own tools and technology. We're leveraging AI internally or efficiency is going up. But we talk about velocity and we talk about just the pace of innovation and the pace of what we need to put out. We talk about that and my leadership team every time we get together. And for someone that loves product and loves innovating and loves delivering for customers, like there's nothing we're exciting. But it's real and it's probably never gonna slow down. We're just gonna get used to it at this pace. It's like we were running an eight minute mile and now we're gonna run a six minute mile and then we're gonna run a four minute mile and pretty soon you're running a four minute mile for a marathon and that's just how it works. - So true, we're all feeling it. It doesn't matter what industry you're in right now. I think we're all trying to sprint the marathon as you said. I'd love to actually double click on some of the threads that you left on AI. This is probably the biggest buzz of all, more than agent to commerce, more than stable coins. I'd love to understand where specifically PayPal is deploying AI to create value across your two-sided network and data footprint especially. - I mean, we got AI across the entire ecosystem. So right now, significant investment internally. As you can imagine, we have data sets that are massive. This is not only for risk and fraud and making sure that our customers are protected and our merchants are protected. But it's also customer service. We've rolled out customer service agents that can answer customer's questions, right? Instead of, yeah, I mean, people wanna know where's my money, how it'll refund. I mean, just the basics that you want. - And is that chat voice or both, or email? - It's chat, it's moving to voice 'cause customers are getting more optimal with voice. And that's been a big change. You know, a year ago voice. - Yeah, it was even a thing. - It wasn't a thing. And it sort of, you know, customers weren't loving it. They wanted to talk to her here. We still have, we still have a lot of incredible employees that answer questions. But now as AI is ramping up, we're getting more and more customers that love chat and then are saying, well, wait a second, I'm used to talking to an agent on my phone. I wanna talk to an agent, like give me an AI agent. And so we're evolving very quickly to deliver for customers. We're deploying AI for our own employees. And this is not just engineering. This is across the entire employee base. - Right. - I've heard that you said Eva, right? That's what I've heard. - Eva is what we've named our, you know, think of it as our orchestration layer internally, which has access to every single model you can think of. Because every model has its own unique characteristics. And we wanted to give all the models to our employees, but we needed to have an orchestration layer in one interface for employees to get access. And this orchestration layer also then has access to all of our internal data. So you actually get to have a protected conversation where you can really get work done. But we're seeing efficiency gains obviously for engineering, but across every function of our designers or marketers, our product leaders, our support leaders, like everybody right now, sales, you know, tremendous efficiency gains as we're starting to leverage AI. And I'm really just noticing a bit of a shift from a mindset, you know, before it was a little bit of, you know, employees holding back saying, yeah, I get AI. I think it's going to be helpful. You know, if I have a question that I'm stumped on or maybe a task that's, you know, seems to be inefficient and maybe I'll leverage AI for it, we're really starting to flip into that AI need of mindset where we're saying, look, let's just start. Like, let's go to the tools first, let's leverage AI to be solving the problems that we need. I wouldn't say we're bright green on that yet, but we're definitely heading in that direction. And then for customers and merchants, you know, that's where I get really excited because, you know, we talked about the smart wall and like the ability to leverage AI, you know, we talked to customers and said, hey, how do you make a decision on which instrument to choose when you make a purchase? And the feedback we got time at time again as we would have conversations with consumers is, they have no idea. And they're actually overwhelmed, right? They all have reward cards, they've got debit cards, they've got buy and out pay later options, they've got a million different options at every checkout. And we said, well, look, if we could tell you and give you more information, make you smarter when you make that decision. So they'd, hey, if you're making that airline ticket, you actually get these reward points with at this instrument, but if you're buying these concert tickets, you get a different level if you bought it, you used a different way. - The Holy Grail. - Like if we could give you that kind of intelligence in real time, you know, how much more empowered would you be? And we put that to a test and ran a quick experiment where we actually leverage AI to inform the consumer. We saved hundreds and millions of dollars in consumer spend by them being able to just route the decisions by being able and they're torsive. We're just scratching the surface of what that can look like. And then on the merchant side, same thing. Like how do they know who to go after, right? We launched the ad platform, which allows our, we have over 80 million consumers that have opted in based on the trust that they have with PayPal to be able to share some of their profile data. Getting that to merchants to then be able to say, hey, tell me the cohort of customers you want. Would you be willing to pay more to acquire that customer? And if so, what's the reward that you'd be willing to give them? And leveraging AI to be able to automate that customer acquisition, it's lowering their ROI, it's lowering their CAQ, it's raising their ROI, lowering their CAQ and giving them real access to their limited marketing spend to drive the results that they want. So again, we're super excited about, about how to leverage AI across the whole ecosystem. Got it, and with AI adoption comes so much change that organizations, leadership teams and, you know, operators, ICs might not be ready for. What are some of the hurdles that you faced or are facing in enterprise adoption for AI? I'm thinking a lot about the traditional design. I think it's gonna have to get disrupted. We have a very clear, just like most organizations, kind of a pyramid structure, you've got managers, you've got people on teams, those teams continue. I think that org design shifts when you now have agents that are enabling employees to be so much more effective and efficient. And I think we're gonna find flatter org structure, we're gonna find more employees that have larger breadth and scope in their jobs because they actually now have access to expertise and tools that they probably didn't even have before and they had to work in a certain type of team or to get things done. But now they actually have a team of agents available for them. And so they could own more. And I think that's actually gonna be really empowered for employees to be able to say, hey, you get to work maybe from a large team to now a smaller team of employees, but with a large team of specialized agents around you. But now you have full ability to solve an end-to-end problem as an employee. I think that's gonna be really, really exciting. So I think that's gonna be a big unlock and it's gonna change the way people adopt the tools. But I don't think we can just take traditional org models, add tools and expect that we're gonna get the right outcome. I think we're gonna have to really rethink the design of organizations. - Makes sense. And now let's jump to the third big theme of the moment, which is crypto and stable coins. PayPal is, in my opinion, one of the first large tech companies to lean in to crypto, free COVID hype. We'll start with on the consumer side. Where are PayPal and Venmo trying to integrate? crypto into their day-to-day products. So first, you're right. We launched our own stablecoin PYUSD. I think we were one of the first to really get out there in a highly regulated environment. We worked through our state pathway with the New York FDS and just wanted to make this thing representative of what a PayPal product would look like where everything is backed one-to-one and we felt really, really good about it. Here's my belief on the reality of stablecoins. This is not a cure-all for all of financial services, but it is a really, really important product for some really big problems that exist today. So when I think about domestic payments, domestic peer-to-peer, it kind of works pretty well, right? I mean, yes, we could use stablecoin, but there's an education element. There's a replacement element, you know, five years or now, 10 years from now, will we get there? Maybe, but that's not the first thing that we're gonna both solve. The US consumer buying from a US merchant, yeah, we'll make it available, but I don't see there's gonna be a ton of action in the short term. Now, when you start to talk about cross-border transactions, when you start to talk about merchants that are in high inflationary geographies and we started to go to them and say, hey, if you could get paid, we could do a currency conversion for you, or would you want to get paid in PYUSD? And you'll have all the liquidity you need to be able to make conversion to a local fiat if you want, but would you want to hold PYUSD and then would you want to be able to make other B2D payments if you need to pay vendors, cross-border, or anything else with PYUSD as well? That starts to unlock huge savings for these merchants. And for the consumer standpoint, huge potential savings in cross-border peer to peer transactions and purchases as well. So we're really excited about it 'cause there's just a lot of friction, speed, trust, safety, and fees in cross-border transactions right now that I think we're gonna be in a really advantageous part with both sides of the ecosystem to be able to really make an impact over the coming months. Do you feel yourself facing a bit of that innovator's dilemma because there is big fee pools, traditional rails of PayPal has strengthened, and now you're going to be almost leapfrogging existing global financial infrastructure. I invoke innovator's dilemma, probably like twice a week inside of the organization. First, it's a mindset. Second of all, it's the thing that gets us the most excited because yes, will we disrupt potential revenue pools that we have today? Absolutely. But the size of the prize is much larger than where we're playing today. And so when I think about what pie can we play after? I'd rather go after a good slice of a much, much larger pie than hold on to the slice of a small pie that we have today. And so it's something we have to talk about in something that we have to reconcile. I'll give you an example. We rolled out the ability for our consumers and merchants to be able to convert some of their balance in Venmo and PayPal into PYUSD if they want in her and rewards off of that balance. We make money on their balance right now, right? So that's giving up revenue that we have from that we're holding now and giving it back to consumers that they want to convert. That was, it was a conversation we had. It was a clear eye decision that we made. And for us, it started to seed a better ecosystem with a future because we believe, hey, this will actually drive, especially for merchants, more balance actually being held inside of the ecosystem. You add that to some of the product launches we've got now, we build pay and more ability for B2B transactions to happen. And all of a sudden we start to create this ecosystem of stablecoin transactions at high volume and high velocity. That's a bigger pie for us. As a company, it's the blessing in the curse of being 25 years old and 30 plus billion dollars in revenue is you're doing something right. And so there's always that challenge of what are you going to disrupt? I'm looking for how are we going to 10X in the position that we're in right now. And in order to do that, let's play bigger games and let's be willing to disrupt ourselves. Absolutely, and this is funny. We keep saying 25 years as if it's such an ancient company. It's really not that long ago. It's really not, but, but, you know, I think it's just quickly. I go to business councils. I sit on these objects. I look at all the companies around me. I mean, we are my far the youngest company in that cohort. And then you look at the Fintech world and we're like the granddad of Fintech. And so it's this funny balance that we go back and forth on. I think the thing that gets me the most excited is this first wave of evolution of Fintech to get to where we are, I think was the infancy. And so it's exciting to be a 30 plus billion dollar company in revenue in the infancy of Fintech. What's going to happen over the next 10 to 15 years is going to be his move to adulthood, which is going to just transform as everything moves into online or agentic. And we want to be the leaders to be able to transform there. Yeah, I agree. I think we're at a unique moment in history where, quote unquote, incumbents may be positioned to win through these tech sea changes. They have much faster tech adoption cycles and more tech-forward leadership than decades past. And of course, the distribution advantages. And in today's area, technology modes are falling by the day, but distribution modes matter more than ever. And so it's a great opportunity for folks like PayPal. Now, one more question on Staples here. We've had a pretty dynamic regulatory landscape over the last few years. What has this new regulatory regime unlocked for PayPal's crypto efforts now? What we were moving forward, we're not a tiny startup, we're not someone that's going to go with an offshore account just to be able to get this done. So we were moving through the regulatory hurdles and we were very successful as you mentioned before. We launched a stablecoin that was regulated and well perceived. The challenge is when you had regulatory headwinds, just the overall industry adoption is limited. And so with the new stands, with the momentum that we're seeing right now, I think we're just kind of seeing acceleration. And I like the position that we're in. When consumer, merchant, bank, overall, even government adoption is going to go up because then we can really start to accelerate. So we were involved in working with government on the construction of the Genius Act. So we were really excited about this momentum. And let's be honest, it's mostly traders that are taking advantage right now. What I'm getting excited about is when the consumer's and merchants really start to get into this game, that's going to take some time. And it's going to have to be focused on where is the biggest friction? And again, go back to that working customer back. The product that we're going to fall along with first is high fee, high friction, and cost-effective transactions. That's a big thing that we can solve. And now I want to switch gears as we head to the last section of the episode. I want to turn it more to you as an individual and leader, starting with the place where you really grew up as an executive at Intuit. Intuit has built from the outside, at least a pretty incredible leadership factory. Many execs had long tenures into it and then land at phenomenal roles at other companies like you did yourself. What made it a long term home for you in such an effective training ground as a leader? Yeah, incredible company. And had two big elements that came together that just worked really well to train me and many other leaders. One was this real product customer obsession. And I get a lot of credit to Scott Kirk, who was the founder, who still is involved on a day-to-day basis and just obsesses about customers and obsesses about how to build great frictionless products for customers. The other thing that the company really invested in was leadership development. And I was an entrepreneur before I joined. I joined at a relatively young age and wasn't even right. I joined to help Rhonda start up there and figured I'd be there two or three years and then go start something else and ended up staying for almost 20 years. And the reason it was, every time I fought it out of leaving, I realized how much I was learning and how much the company was investing in me to both give me new, bigger, challenging opportunities, but also just learning how to be a leader, learning how to operate, learning how to just do things that I could have learned maybe on my own, but I knew that eventually the investment they were making in me would just make me a better leader. And so that deep customer obsession and that learning ecosystem were two things that I think makes the company special. And then we've seen a lot of great executives come out of into it and be leaders across the industry right now. And I think it is a factory that I hope to replicate here at PayPal as well and build the next great leaders. And then you did eventually leave and take this great role as CEO of PayPal. Was there a specific moment or conversation that convinced you to take this leap? - You know, I was not planning on leaving. I think the thing that got me most excited about PayPal was, I love network effects and I love two-sided ecosystems. And I have a passion for small businesses, which is what I've focused on for a while. The scale that PayPal operates on on a global basis, is really out to ignore it. After a while being in a company, you get a little bit comfortable. And I do how to operate in the old role. I wanted to see if, hey, of all this stuff that I just learned, all these things that I'm passionate about, could I help transform a company that I think has the potential to be one of the greatest technology organizations for the next two decades? And that's what brought me on. I mean, what a privilege it is to be at PayPal and be able to not only an iconic company from the past, but one that I think is going to transform the future. And so Alex, you've made it to the final part of the interview, which is the rapid fire question around here. Have you about 10 or so questions replies no longer than 10, 30 seconds? Are you ready? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So a couple of dovetailing off that last answer, high stakes, high volume job, probably limited free time. How do you stay grounded? Spend a lot of time with family when I can. When I'm not traveling. Try to keep my workouts going. What are you doing? I've got a gin in the garage, so I have no excuses. I do some inversion of a crossfit type of situation that I've been doing for the last 10, 15 years and just-- And then if I get any chance to cook, cook a meal for friends or family, I'll do that. But that's about it. Got to go to a dish. I'll cook anything. But if it's warm out and I can grill and get stakes on the barbecue, I'll do that. Ultimate dad mode, I love it. And then going back to the family ties, do you ever lean on family for product inspiration? Or testing? I've got three boys, a teenage age. Harsh critics. Yeah. Well, they're the best, because anytime I think, oh, yeah, I'm really advanced in AI or things like that. I just watch what they're doing. And I'm watching them have deep emotional conversations with an agent, just having conversations. And so all the things that just makes you feel old and you realize the products that we're going to build for the future, if you don't believe that people are going to be doing agentic conversations by just having a conversation and having an agent do something on their behalf, go watch an 18-year-old, have a conversation with their agent. You've lost the plot, like it's going to have some crazy. Next question, maybe throwing back to your teenage years, where's the first job that you ever had? I grew up playing tennis. And my first paid job was stricken tennis rackets in a tiny little sweat box of a tension. That's gritty. All right, next one, you founded a business. As you mentioned, what is the biggest lesson you learned as a founder that still sticks with you? You've heard what's funny is I founded a business right in college. I went to Kinkos and put a CEO on the business card. So great. Anybody can be CEO. All you have to do is make a business card and put you in title on it. It is not the title that makes the CEO. It is what your people look at you as. And so you want to be a real leader. You got to learn to lead people. And at 18, 19 years old, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. Hopefully I learned how to do it a little bit better at this point, but it is not the title that makes the CEO. Next one, it's been such an earworm. This will feral commercial that you all put out. I want to pay with you everywhere. It's like killing me. What is the genesis of that story? And did you get to meet Will? Yeah, I mean, our consumer team, our marketing team, Diego Scotty, Jesse, these guys are just unbelievable. And when I came in, one of the big things I wanted to do was reinvent and reinvigorate the PayPal brand. And we wanted to go out and find someone iconic that spoke to a global audience at all generations and all generations and will ferals about is, I mean, everybody wants what's universal. So they did an incredible job. I did get to spend time with him. We actually took it brought into one of our all-hands at PayPal Park in San Jose, he came up and did a whole bit where you know, he told the audience of employees that I invited him there because I was making him the new CEO. He was just fantastic. And he's exactly how you would expect the nicest, most down-to-earth, obviously invests heavily in his craft and just an exceptional guy. Love that. All right, you interviewed a lot of folks. I'm sure to bring them on to PayPal as you alluded to the beginning of the episode. What is your go-to or must-ask interview question? You know, I usually want to know what gives people energy. Like I really want to know, these are hard jobs, especially at the senior levels. Like these are hard jobs, these are crimes. And when you can really tap into the motivations for people, it's important. And it's important because it aligns culturally. And so even to use the simplicity of trying to root out, are they a mercenary or a missionary? And the answer, it doesn't matter from like who they are. Like I have no judgment of what their answer is. But if what makes them tick is not aligned with what we're trying to drive from a mission perspective, then it's just a matter of time until we end up with some sort of conflict. When we can align our values and we can align culturally on what's going to get them a work above and beyond to get them to jump out of bed in the morning and do an incredible job. When that's aligned with what I want for the organization, things work out really well. So those are the kind of things that I'm probing. - Is there any question you ask that susses it out of that then what motivates you? The kind of thing you grab it? - You know, usually it's sort of like, hey, where do you get your engine from? Like why do you do what you do? And you'll be surprised. I mean, you have an answer in your head. - Right. - I mean, it's not the universal answer. I mean, I'll tell you that. Again, I have people that when they answer that question, they go, you know, I want a yacht. I want a yacht in the Mediterranean and then I'm working for the next 15 years to be able to afford that yacht. And it's like, hey, more power to you. That's a fantastic answer. That's not aligned with what I'm trying to drive. But it's great, I know that that's what motivates you. That is what it is. And so I think you could just ask, usually it's a pretty simple question to understand what makes the person tick. - And then last question for you, Alex, who is your dream guest that you would love to hear on a future episode of this month in Fintech podcast? - I mean, there's so much fun stuff going on right now. You know, the person that I've gone to know a little bit that I think three, six, nine months from now is doing some really fun things is you start to arubin from perplexity. - Yes. - I think perplexity, you know, we've obviously done a great partnership with them. We've got commerce coming in into oxidie. I also think they've done an incredible job on the financial services side in terms of being able to, you know, I mean, I use perplexity now to do finance research on them. - Yes, they just launched a different stock. - Yes, it's really good. - It's really good. And getting his perspective as to why did he go down that path? Where does he think the differentiation is, you know, what could commerce look like? I think it could be a fun guest to have, you know, six months. - Yeah, that's a great one. 'Cause we've also, you know, anthropic just announced their financial services offering, we're trying to see how they're thinking about things as well. Well, great recommendation. We might take you up on that one. Well, Alex, I know we're at time here. I want to thank you for coming on this episode of this month in Fintech Podcast. Fantastic. Having you on and sharing your story with our global audience. - Oh, so good to be here. Thanks again, Ryan. And hopefully you talk next time. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - Thank you for listening to today's episode of the this month in Fintech Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like, follow, subscribe, or rate us across your preferred podcast and social media platforms. Lastly, I'd like to thank our editor, Evangelo Marco, for his great work on our episodes. Signing off, I'm your host, Brian Zauk. (upbeat music)