PayPal Eyes Social Push With Iron Pearl Acquisition

PayPal has acquired Palo Alto start-up Iron Pearl, which should help it drill further into social data to expand faster.

Founders of Iron Pearl, Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier, have been made growth advisor and vice president of growth respectively. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

PayPal wants growth avenues

“The new Growth team at PayPal will focus on growing our customer base and engaging existing customers more actively by leveraging data to develop innovative marketing approaches and product initiatives,” wrote president of PayPal David Marcus, in a blog post.

“There are only a handful of world-renowned ‘Growth Hackers’ with amazing track records and Stan is one of them. He managed to create genuine and sustained viral growth and retention for his own startups, and has advised others to grow at a tremendous pace, leading to hundreds of millions of unique new users.

“We’re confident that applying this unique, and highly effective skill set to PayPal will lead to making our groundbreaking payments experiences even more ubiquitous for our merchants and consumers.”

Chudnovsky and Currier have a good track record in the social media space, having run Tickle, which created online tests designed to be both viral and gain insight on users. Tickle was criticised by some for being too aggressive in pushing pop-ups at users, but was nevertheless acquired by job search site Monster in 2004.

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