I’ve been pondering for a while why Google never tried to acquire PayPal, and/or perhaps most importantly Venmo (which is part of it). With Android & Chrome being the platforms that they are, the ultra tight integration of payment of PayPal/Venmo should be interesting to unlock more payment growth. Yes Google has the technical ability to build competitors to those, but the market of consumers/SMB’s don’t appear to understand the Google payment offering. Whereas with PayPal/Venmo as the frontend brand, it’d be hard to argue that the market would be confused given the already existing uses and brand appeal. Of course this sort of merger may raise all sorts of antitrust flags so maybe it’s just a thought experiment and nothing else for now.