Is anyone else worried about the long term stability of Braintree under such an aggressive board environment? I was always concerned about conflicts of interest with PayPal acquiring Braintree - two competing and incompatible ways to pay with a credit card. As much as I admire Braintree engineering, and I would normally trust a board to believe in the Braintree brand of reliability, it does no good if a single unpredictable actor, namely Icahn, could strongarm the parent company into underfunding or cannibalizing Braintree. Am I just being paranoid?
Speaking only for myself, I don't see a conflict of interest between us and PayPal. PayPal has embraced our APIs and approach to support as the future of how merchants will integrate with PayPal, and we've been able to leverage PayPal's consumer brand to build better products for our merchants.
I was initially very, very skeptical of our acquisition, but I have to admit it's turned out well. I don't think there is any risk of them underfunding or cannibalizing us.
For what it's worth, PayPal is embracing the shit out of BT acquisition - really see that as the north star for our merchant integration story. Everyone knows they know what they are doing and only want to help, they don't want to hinder/hobble/mess with it.
So what you're saying is that they learned their lessons from the VeriSign Payment Services acquisition, and learned not to actively try to break things that work?
(Yes, still very, very bitter about that. If you have a different perspective on that time/process, I would genuinely like to hear it.)
I see the opposite problem on the horizon. With the Braintree acquisition, Paypal is a lot less likely to integrate with Stripe. Braintree is going to be a worse version of Stripe, but we will use it because it will give us PayPal out of the box. It is a good time to work at Braintree.
As someone who has worked a ton with the Stripe API, whenever I use Braintree's (vZero) API it looks soo much like they are trying to copy Stripe, but fail so so hard. Want to get the subscriptions for a customer? Sure, first get all the cards the customer has, then iterate through that list of cards and combine all the subscriptions for each card. Oh, is that a paypal customer, well credit cards and paypal accounts are separate and each can contain subscriptions.
