The Paypal vendetta

Silicon Valley's players are way too focused on the future to hold a good grudge. Except when they do. Paypal veteran, Keith Rabois, was spotted this week at the Googleplex; word is that he's consulting with the search engine on its competing payment service for small businesses, Google Checkout. I'm sure it's a wonderful opportunity, blah, blah, but there's additional psychological compensation: the Paypal clan, one of Silicon Valley's most influential new networks, still nurses its resentment against eBay, the online auction giant, which acquired the pay-by-email innovator in 2002.

You'd have thought that a $1.5bn payday for Paypal shareholders, during the internet downturn, would have won their goodwill. But Paypal's top execs — a management team of all the talents, with the self-importance to match — dispersed within two months of the acquisition. Peter Thiel, Paypal's co-founder, left the very day after the deal was concluded.

Another exec, David Sacks, who now divides his time between Hollywood movie-making and social networks for old people, even tells former colleagues he detected a whiff of anti-semitism among the white-bread Boston establishment types whom stolid Meg Whitman brought in to run eBay. A more common complaint: that eBay's culture was not so much homogenous, as merely deadening. Even monkeys could run a business as profitable as that; and they do.

But that's all ancient history, right? Maybe not for Rabois, who's deciding whether to take on his former tormentors, full-time. His only comment: "Google is a great company." eBay, presumably, less so.

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