Dan Shulman has become the new PayPal President and as soon as PayPal is spun off as a separate company will become PayPal CEO.
Dan joins PayPal from American Express, where he was president of the company’s Enterprise Growth Group. A seasoned leader in multiple industries, Schulman has held senior executive and CEO roles at AT&T, Priceline and Virgin Mobile, prior to joining American Express.
An avid sports fan and collegiate athlete, Dan says that he was attracted to PayPal’s competitive edge in a rapidly-evolving payments landscape, the unique growth opportunities ahead and the ability to give shareholders sustainable value with more targeted investment opportunities.
Dan has a wealth of experience in payments, in his time as Group President at American Express he led the company’s global strategy to expand alternative mobile and online payment services. Under his leadership, American Express successfully launched its next-generation digital payments platform, developed non-traditional sources of revenue and introduced a suite of payment products to expand the company’s demographic and geographic reach.
Prior to joining American Express, Dan was President of the Prepaid Group at Sprint Nextel Corporation following its acquisition of Virgin Mobile USA, where he led the company as its founding CEO. During his eight years at Virgin Mobile USA, he developed the company from its earliest stages as one of the first U.S. prepaid cell phone providers to a dynamic public company, when it was eventually acquired by Sprint Nextel in 2009 at a total value of $688 million. Earlier in his career, Dan was President and CEO of Priceline Group, where he led the company through a period of rapid growth and expansion. He also spent 18 years at AT&T, where he held a series of positions, including President of the Consumer Markets Division.
Apart from his professional resume, Dan is a bit of an unknown. Unlike previous PayPal president David Marcus he’s not an engineer and innovator, but then there are plenty of coders in the world so you don’t need to know how to code in order to set the direction of a company.
Whatever direction PayPal moves into as a standalone company it will be interesting to watch, most of all whether the companies who it’s claimed won’t use PayPal while it’s owned by eBay will now be willing to adopt PayPal as a defacto payment choice.
