Corner Office: Dan Schulman of PayPal on Guns, Cash and Getting Punched

Companies, and by extension their management teams and their C.E.O.s, have a moral obligation to try to be a force for good. I don’t think there’s any way that we can shirk that responsibility, and I don’t think there’s any way to fully stand away from the culture wars around us. You have to take a stand. That stand shouldn’t be a political one. But it should be one that is based on your values and your mission.

— Dan Schulman

You practice martial arts, right?

I practice Krav Maga. I spent some time in Israel when I was young, and they have what’s called Youth Military Training there, so I started then. That was when I was in my teens, and I’ve been doing Krav since then.

Have you ever gotten hurt?

Oh my gosh. I mean, look at my knuckles. These are all from punches. I’m always black or blue or I have some scar on my face. I’ve dislocated my shoulder. I’ve had stitches. If you look carefully on my face, stitches here, stitches here. Smacked into a mat here, here. That’s how you learn how to be cool, calm and collected in very stressful situations.

But the overrunning philosophy of Krav is that the best way to win a fight is to not get into a fight. It’s very Zen in that way. How do you de-escalate situations? We spend a lot of time thinking about that. It’s translated into the way that I think about business as well.

When we started partnering with Visa and Mastercard and JPMorgan Chase and Citi, nobody ever thought that PayPal would be allies with those companies. That would always be an uneasy friend relationship. But my view is, “How do you give customers the choice they want, and how do you avoid fights that you don’t necessarily need to be in?” And it was maybe one of the key things that catapulted PayPal’s success in recent years.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/business/dan-schulman-paypal-corner-office.html?partner=rss&emc=rss