797: Achieving a More Perfect Exit | Melinda Smith, CFO, ChaosSearch

Back in early 2014, the management of Paydiant, a 4-year-old mobile payments start-up, believed that it was still several years away from engaging with acquisition-minded bankers.

Nevertheless, when PayPal came calling, the Paydiant team decided that they were worth a listen.       

“Even though it was still an early stage for us to be in to be thinking about exiting the business, it was just a super interesting opportunity,” remembers Melinda Smith, whose CFO resume today lists the 2015 sale of Paydiant to PayPal as her third early-stage exit.

“If you had asked me when we first got acquired whether I was likely to stay inside a big, publicly traded firm like PayPal for long, I would have said ‘No,’” continues Smith, whose postmerger career with PayPal lasted more than 5 years and opened doors for Smith in surprising ways.

“What we determined was that our team, with all of its early-stage experience, could be really helpful in-house,” remarks Smith, who notes that at the time PayPal had only recently begun operating as a public company. It was felt that “noise from the Street” could become a distraction for PayPal’s smaller businesses like Paydiant, she adds, as well as for their mobile payment unit Venmo, which had joined the family in 2013 as part of PayPal’s acquisition of Braintree.

“We ended combining the teams, and I got the opportunity to be CFO of Venmo,” comments Smith, who would serve as Venmo’s finance chief for the next 3 years. –Jack Sweeney