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Former PayPal president David Marcus, who was hired by Facebook last month to run its Messenger business, will be working on getting Payments and Messenger to “overlap, ” according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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“On Messenger and David … he is just a real talented product generalist and he’s done a number of different things, including in his past, he ran and built a messaging company, ” Zuckerberg said during a July 23 earnings call. “Messenger will have, over time, there will be some overlap between that and payments … the payments piece will be a part of what will help drive the overall success and help people share with each other and interact with businesses.”
When Facebook announced Marcus’s hiring, it was a hint they were looking to monetizing the messaging app. That’s what Marcus did when eBay, which owned PayPal, bought his mobile-payments startup Zong in 2011, and hired him to leading PayPal’s mobile operation, before making him president.
But monetizing is a long-term goal, according to Zuckerberg, who said, “I really can’t underscore this enough that we have a lot of work to do and we could take the cheap and easy approach and just try to put ads in or do payments and make some money in the short term, but we’re not going to do that.”
