API Economist: Your article, APIs are Dead, Long Live APIs, created a little bit of a stir. What point were you trying to drive?

John Sheehan: I think it created a stir because people don't want to think that something so new could be “dead.” I was hoping to make the point that they're far from it; that the amount of attention that the consumer APIs out there get is disproportionate to the amount of total API traffic they handle.

I spend a lot of time talking with people, finding out where they actually use APIs, where they apply it most. The two things I hear most common are, "Yeah, we might use a social API here and there," or "Yeah, we might use an infrastructure API like Stripe, SendGrid, Twilio, or Parse" but the vast majority of our traffic is powering our mobile apps or internal to our company and never exposed externally. That's where most of the uptake has really happened in the last year.

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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James Barrese on how PayPal learned to listen to its developers

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