What to do when your president quits unexpectedly? Play it like he wasn’t important.
That’s the general tact being taken by eBay after Scott Thompson suddenly quit last week as president of PayPal to head up Yahoo!.
Apparently, others agree that PayPal won’t sink at Thompson’s departure. In an under-the-radar research report from Wedbush Securities, Gil Luria, an analyst, handicapped PayPal’s situation:
We do not believe Scott Thompson was instrumental to the Mobile Payments vision. It is our impression that although “Paypal at the POS” was led by PayPal management, the holistic mobile payments vision was driven at the eBay Inc. level.
The truth, as illuminated by AllThingsD, is that PayPal seems to have a robust management team from which to draw. Thompson’s direct reports and “key leaders” included:
- Ed Eger, SVP and GM of North America, core payments and emerging markets;
- John McCabe, SVP of worldwide operations and customer service;
- Patrick Dupuis, CFO;
- Gary Marino, SVP of credit products and risk, who joined through the acquisition of Bill Me Later;
- Mark Lavelle, VP of strategy and business development, also from Bill Me Later;
- Rupert Keeley, SVP of Asia Pacific;
- Sam Shrauger, VP of global product and experience;
- James Barrese, VP of product development;
- David Marcus, VP of mobile, who joined through the acquisition of Zong; and
- Ranjana Clark, SVP and chief customer and marketing officer.
There’s got to be a PayPal president among them, no?