James Barrese on how PayPal learned to listen to its developers

James Barrese on how PayPal learned to listen to its developers

API Economist: What challenges was PayPal facing with its developers?

James Barrese: I'll be frank. As an organization, we had not been listening like we should have. We were growing so quickly and dealing with some parts of the business that we didn't pay as much attention as we should have. That's changed. So, in the last year, David Marcus has been named as president. He came through our acquisition of Zong. He's a great technologist and a great entrepreneur. I was named as CTO in the last year as well. What we're doing is we're driving a renaissance at PayPal and essentially going back to our innovative roots. And right away we saw we really needed to listen to our developers.

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John Musser on how to start an API developer community

John Musser on how to start an API developer community

API Economist:  You founded ProgrammableWeb back in 2005, is that correct?

John Musser: That’s correct. It’s coming up on its eighth anniversary this summer. It was really the birth of the open API and web mash movement. The phrase “web mashup” was really coined four or five months before we started ProgrammableWeb. That was the same spring when Housingmaps.com was built, which was essentially the first quintessential mashup (a mashup of Craigslist and Google Maps).

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