Paypal buys IronPearl

Paypal buys Iron Pearl, a 'growth hacking' company

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Jon Xavier

Web Producer- Silicon Valley Business Journal

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In a blog post today, Paypal President Dan Marcus announced the company's second acquisition of the year, a customer acquisition and retention startup founded by veteran "growth hackers" called Iron Pearl.
Under the terms of the deal, which were not disclosed, co-founder Stan Chudovsky will join the company as Vice President of Growth, and his partner James Currier will stay on as "growth advisor." Paypal is also creating a new division to manage it's growth, which will be built from the team at Iron Peal and headed by Chudovsky and Currier.
All of which begs the question, what the heck is a growth hacker, anyway?
In the parlance of Silicon Valley, growth hackers are usually veteran entrepreneurs brought in by fast moving startups to help them take their user growth to the next level without the company imploding. You might not think of an exploding userbase as a bad problem to have, but in fact it can wreak all kinds of havoc for a company as their organization struggles to onboard new customers and its IT infrastructure buckles under the new traffic. Growth hackers strategize ways to acquire new customers and keep the ones the company already has, and make sure the whole thing goes smoothly
So, basically, it's a euphemism for "business consultant." Using the word hacker is just a way to render the concept palatable in a Valley where anyone in a business suit is instantly distrusted.
In Iron Pearl's case, there actually was a fair amount of technology involved, as well. The company was looking to produce a software platform to track and manage customer growth, but it was still in beta at the time of the acquisition. Whether that technology will continue as a part of Paypal, or whether this was really just an acquihire as it appears, isn't clear from the announcement.
Click here to read Paypal's official blog about the deal.

Jon Xavier is Web Producer at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1826.

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