| From: John Gault (2/14/2002) I used to work for PayPal.
Understand that I was happy to work with most of the reps and middle management. The vast majority of them are good people and were very concerned with providing high quality service to PayPal customers. But they never had the leadership they needed to get the job done right.
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As a former member of middle management I saw first had how poorly organized their inner-workings were. Often, competent customer service reps would be suffocated by huge influxes of emails and calls.
"Dig-Outs" were performed in an attempt to shovel through the cases. Usually service levels suffered and the reps were required to work overtime.
Heavy and light days are to be expected, and some of middle management understood what had to be done. Usually, the Omaha office was blindly ordered to do what Palo Alto dictated. You see, the customer and financial services divisions are in Omaha; but Executive management and the developers are in Palo Alto.
PayPal put absolutely no forethought into its reporting methodologies. As an afterthought, they discovered that they could not effect positive changes without intelligent metrics. Oops! Too late...
But the juggernaught that was the 300+ member customer and financial service divisions never received educated orders from above. This is because the leaders were more concerned with political wrangling and IPO dreaming than number watching or metrics development.
Their contention was that the volume and quality issues would just go away if they could only reorganize the workforce.
Hence the term "reorg" was born. And what a bastard child she was!!! With certain uncertainty and maddening frequency workers were promoted, demoted, reassigned, and fired ("Other Opportunitied" or "OO'd" as we used to say). At times the circus-like antics of Executive management were quite
entertaining...
Everyone expects a certain amount of change, but at PayPal it was ridiculous! As a result, not much good was done; time, training, and air-fair was wasted.
I'm sure you've seen the movie Office Space.
I recall the VP of Human Resources making trips from Palo Alto to Omaha to torment the little people. This VP's arrival signified certain OO'ing for someone...every time, guaranteed.
It is important to understand that Executives and their support personnel from Palo Alto carried with them a distinct attitude problem. They oozed with implied superiority that created not so subtle under-currents of distaste for Palo Alto based personnel. This created a negative or apathetic attitude base in the Omaha office with respect to Palo Alto. Again, evidence of insufficient leadership.
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We heard more about how many millions of customers we had signed up than how well these customers were being served.
That's because the Executives and others believed that the number of customers was the important issue. This number is what would determine the companies value at IPO. This number is what would determine the size of the Executive's Golden Parachutes and other options. This number is the sole determinate of the value of PayPal.
This number is not an ethically strong basis for value-judgements.
PayPal is a financial mechanism.
When dealing with money, if you don't have high quality of service, you have NO ETHICAL RIGHT to high volume.
In other words:
The Executives of PayPal knew that the quality of their service was insufficient. This means that the acted unethically by soliciting millions customers in spite of their inability.
When you take on a customer you imply that you have the ability to service their needs. PayPal knew that it did not have this ability and went to great lengths to avoid looking at that fact.
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I quit for many reasons, but the main one was that I knew things would not get better.
Keep your money as far away from PayPal as possible.
A note to the investors...
When the dust settles you may never know just how much of your money was thrown away.
Or given away, or stolen, or lost, or forgotten, or just plain pissed on.
I saw PayPal misuse your trust. I saw them acting wastefully at your expense.
$270 million in funding is ridiculous! And without razor sharp oversight it's lunacy. Somehow, you were made to believe that a band of morons execs could work magic. If you believe that a cute name and a web page are worth that much, then you deserve to loose your money.
You should have taken more control of the operation!!! You should have had a task force separate from PayPal audit its
inner-workings. If you can get any of your money back then DO IT NOW.
...because things will not get better.
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