About a decade ago, when I was the CEO of Virgin Mobile, a colleague and I accepted an unusual challenge: Spend 24 hours living on the street in New York City as a homeless person would, with no money or credit cards, no cell phones, and just the clothes on our backs. Virgin had been supporting a charity for homeless youth, and during an employee event someone from the charity told us that the only way we could learn about the importance of its work was to experience the lives of the people it was serving. I agreed to do it. It was one of those experiences you never forget. We panhandled, and I wasn’t very good at it—it took me six hours to solicit enough money to buy a little food. Most people looked right past me, as if I were invisible. We spent a lot of time trying to find a safe place to sleep—we kept getting kicked out of places, and eventually we ended up in a skateboard park. I lived like that for only 24 hours, which of course is nothing—and it was during the summer, so the weather wasn’t terrible—but it was enough to give me a large dose of empathy for people who have to live on the street.
PayPal’s CEO on Creating Products for Underserved Markets
Back when the author was the CEO of Virgin Mobile, he accepted a challenge to live like a homeless person for 24 hours in New York City—with no money or credit card, no cell phone, just the clothes on his back. A few years later, when he was head of a division at American Express, he joined his leadership team in a variation on that experiment: They would spend an entire day trying to pay bills and transfer money the way people without bank accounts or credit cards have to. Those experiences increased his empathy for less-affluent people and his awareness of how difficult it is for them to manage and move money—and energized PayPal’s new strategy after Schulman joined the company as CEO, in 2014.
That strategy was to be a “customer champion” company and reorganize into just two groups: merchants and consumers. For merchants, PayPal would evolve its technology platform to enable more-intimate relationships with customers using mobile and software. For consumers, it would empower underserved citizens throughout the world to make more-secure, faster, easier, and less-expensive financial transactions. Within those two segments, the company has created or acquired a suite of products that target different markets, including Venmo for Millennials, Xoom for international digital payments, and PayPal Working Capital, which lends money to small businesses.