In a long post on X, Marcus spoke about several flaws in PayPal, a San Jose-based fintech giant, across its history. Marcus left PayPal in 2014 and has since worked at Coinbase and Meta. He has also founded a payments company, Lightspark, where he is now CEO. He said he had woken up to messages from former PayPal colleagues, which pushed him to "finally speak up."
These places have incredibly sophisticated performance frameworks, coaching programs, design systems, review processes. They've invested years into building cultures where the average quality bar is high and talent is supposedly evenly distributed across their teams. And yet. When something orbit-shifting comes up, a decision that could reshape their trajectory, a gnarly opportunity they need to nail, leadership doesn't just route it through the normal channels. They call the same handful of people. Every single time.
When Sam, the founder of a fast-growing tech company, came to see me, he was exhausted. For over a dozen years, he had poured everything into his startup, building it up to hundreds of employees and revenues nearing a hundred million. But as market shifts and new technologies gave rise to fierce competitors, growth had stalled... and so had Sam. In our sessions, Sam vacillated between two poles. At times, he would slump in his chair, shoulders collapsed, voice flat: "I'm thinking of just quitting."