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Comment by bready | Hacker News Reader

I'm CEO at Braintree. I'm not going to comment on any of the rumors that are being circulated. I will tell you that we won't do anything that would compromise our product or our service. We are all fully committed to that. More on that here --> https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/more-committed-than-e...

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> I will tell you that we won't do anything that would compromise our product or our service.

Wouldn't be the first time someone said that prior to being acquired, only to realize later that they do not have the influence over upstream decisions that they imagined they would.

I'm no babe in the woods. I've been through multiple acquisitions in the past as well as multiple funding rounds. With either you run risk of meaningful changes for employees and customers if you don't choose well and structure properly. Lots of founders and CEOs take the cop-out of "I didn't know." You won't find any of that here.

When I give my commitment and my word that we won't do anything that would compromise our product or our service, I do so with eyes wide open. Again, I'm not making any statement about the rumors that others are fueling. However, I do want to be very clear about our principles and the fact that everything we do will be driven by our commitment to deliver great products and fantastic service to our customers. That means I’d have to be very confident in our ability to do that for any path we choose – with no cop-out of “I didn’t know”. There will be no deviation from that – you have my full commitment on that.

I am an extremely loyal Venmo user (I generally make people sign up if they want fast payment from me, and don't feel bad since everyone I have onboarded has become a loyal user). Thanks for coming in here and talking about this, since I'm not a huge PayPal fan and definitely worried that this type of move could break what I love about Venmo (if it happens). Keep up the good work on Venmo, it's really been a huge improvement in my life, from buying movie tickets, to splitting checks, to letting me use my rewards card to make big purchases for a group and instantly get paid back since the mobile implementation is so good.

While you are here, one interesting positive I could see from joining up with PayPal is letting people use Braintree without a merchant ID (the main drawback of Braintree, I run a Shopify store for someone and can't get Chargify set up on Braintree because of this).

Why so defensive? You clearly are commenting on the rumors... just sayin'. Cool company by the way! Sounds like you've had a lot of success. Paypal isn't very cool, though...

>> Paypal isn't very cool, though...

That's where the defensiveness comes from. I love Venmo and do not like PayPal. Coming in here helped make me feel a bit better about this potential merge.

Hi Bill. I've only been a customer for a few years, but I've been super impressed with the level of customer service. If I have an API question or a problem, I always get a real, human, thoughtful answer - not a copy/paste from the documentation that I've already read.

So while I understand the necessity of the linked blog post, it doesn't really address my concern - which is that PayPal has notoriously awful customer service, and the thing I value most about your company is your customer service. And despite all of your best intentions, the culture of very large companies inevitably affects (or replaces) the culture of the companies they acquire. I've been acquired before. I know how it goes.

At the end of the day, all I care about is that I continue to get the same level of customer service from your company. The moment that changes, I'll go somewhere else (probably Stripe).

Customer service is absolutely part of the commitment. It's a huge part of why we've had such phenomenal growth and have so many fantastic clients. We are absolutely intent on delivering that for years to come and wouldn't consider anything that would degrade our service. More on that in my response above.

Bill, I have the utmost respect for Braintree. But if this rumor is true, all I can say is "famous last words." PayPal have demonstrated an inability to operate competently.

And we just notified our entire customer base that they can kiss their Paypal problems goodbye because we've switched to Braintree. How does that look now?

I have my fingers crossed that this sale does not go through.

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