Departing PayPal executive Bill Ready confirmed via Twitter he’s heading to Google as its new President of Commerce. Indications of what this means for Google can be found on his LinkedIn bio, where he states in a nutshell, “Creating the easiest way to pay or get paid – online, mobile, in-store.”
PayPal had revealed Ready’s planned end-of-year departure in June, though it didn’t say what the executive’s plans were post-PayPal. It appeared to be an amicable parting of the ways, with PayPal CEO Dan Schulman having nothing but praise for his subordinate in the June announcement.
In Ready’s tweet on Wednesday morning, he linked to an article in TechCrunch about his new role. “Excited to build the future of commerce with @sundarpichai, Prabhakar and the team at @Google beginning in January!”
Ready joined PayPal when eBay acquired Braintree (and its Venmo app) in 2013. Then eBay CEO John Donahoe said in a statement that Braintree was a perfect fit with PayPal. “(Braintree CEO) Bill Ready and his team add complementary talent and technology that we believe will help accelerate PayPal’s global leadership in mobile payments. Together, we expect that PayPal and Braintree also will accelerate our leadership in supporting developers who are creating innovative solutions for next generation commerce startups.”
TechCrunch said today Ready will report to Prabhakar Raghavan, Senior Vice President at Google, who according to his bio on ai.google “oversees Google’s Advertising and Commerce products, including search, display and video advertising, analytics, shopping, payments, and travel.”
TechCrunch also went into detail about Google’s commerce plans, stating that Google sees Amazon as a threat.
It’s hard to keep track of which tech companies are friends and which are not, but it seems many companies in ecommerce are “fremenies” who share a common fear of Amazon.
