PayPal picking Pinterest puts us in a parsing pickle

Equity

TechCrunch

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Look, we don't get it either. Taking some time as a group to sit around and chat through the possibly impending PayPal-Pinterest deal, Natasha and Alex didn't wind up cracking the story. Which makes some sense, as investors sent PayPal stock down 5% on the news, implying that they didn't really get it either. Recall that PayPal has made a few other deals in recent years, including buying Honey ($4 billion) and Paidy (less than $4 billion). Regardless, the transaction -- worth potentially dozens of billions -- could scoot the social giant into the welcoming arms of PayPal, an American consumer and business fintech giant. Here's what we tried to sort out: Does Pinterest have a big enough ecommerce story to make the deal line up with our first expectations? We talked about Pinterest's historical stock performance, as well as a number of culture controversies it has been embroiled in. Why doesn't PayPal just buy Etsy instead? Here we dug into why a shop-able, searchable mood-board may satisfy customer demands, thus Pinterest's lag on fintech infrastructure - in comparison to Etsy - has been somewhat surprising. And if technology is all bundling, and unbundling, does it make some sort of sense for PayPal to join forces with a more e-commerce content focused business, now more than a half-decade removed from its eBay divorce? We ended with jokes about fintech's expected (and unexpected) consolidation, and we want your best guesses for what's next on Twitter. Frankly we had a good time. Mary Ann was going to join up but was thwarted by Apple's iPhone headphone design, while Danny was slightly busy trying to figure out why his spouse beat him at Settlers of Catan, his favorite board game. We are back Friday with our regularly scheduled programming! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody welcome back to equity. We are live on a Twitter space talking about all things
0:14.3	PayPal and Pinterest.
0:15.6	We've titled this PayPal Picks Pinterest
0:17.8	because we wanted to make it as hard as possible
0:19.5	to say the title of this particular episode,
0:21.5	on air, live. With me I have my my dear friend and long-term
0:25.8	colleague Natasha Moscarinus. Natasha quickly and briefly you just walked around
0:29.8	SF is the city dead as we've been led to believe on Twitter?
0:33.0	The city is definitely very quiet. T.C. HQ is pretty empty which is whatever I'm not bitter about it or anything.
0:41.0	But I will say I saw a billboard of a startup deal which raised
0:45.7	money has a billboard up so I feel like that means something is happening that is
0:49.7	good in San Francisco. Yeah I think startup billboards are the green shoots if you will of
0:54.7	spring in startup world and it's just evidence that so much venture capital money
0:58.6	sloshing around they literally ran out of Facebook ads to put it into. But speaking of lots of dollars flowing around in the world of previously venture-backed companies, of course, talking today about PayPal and Pinterest.
1:10.0	PayPal, the American FinTech giant thingy that split off from eBay some time ago.
1:15.8	It's a public company worth, I think, north of $300 billion.
1:18.8	And Pinterest is a social application, a place where you could kind of collect things that you liked, and was working
1:25.2	more towards an e-commerce focus over time.
1:27.5	Natasha, before we jump into details about what's going on, just give me your first impressions
1:31.7	when you heard this. The deal is kind of like discussed as a late stage thing
1:35.8	What was your first thought? Sure so obviously at this point it's still reportedly we don't know if it's gonna go through always have to add that nuance on the top but I was
1:43.8	really excited to see two of what I would argue the best named companies in
	...

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