EXCITED: David Marcus looking forward to building something new and meaningful at scale

PayPal CEO David Marcus is leaving the online payments provider at the end of June to take up a new role at Facebook, as vice president of messaging products — prompting speculation that he will oversee building ecommerce and payments capabilities into the social network.

“An entrepreneur at heart, David has made a career decision to focus on what he loves most – leading smaller teams to create great product experiences,” says PayPal parent eBay’s CEO John Donahoe.

“Messaging is a core part of Facebook’s service and key to achieving our mission of making the world more open and connected,” Facebook says in its announcement of the new hire.

“Every day around 12 billion messages are sent on Facebook, and in April we announced that Messenger, our standalone messaging app, is now used by more than 200 million people every month. We are excited by the potential to continue developing great new messaging experiences that better serve the Facebook community and reach even more people, and David will be leading these efforts.”

“While I was in the middle of my thought process about what was next for me, Mark Zuckerberg and I got together,” Marcus explains in a Facebook post. “Mark shared a compelling vision about mobile messaging. At first, I didn’t know whether another big company gig was a good thing for me, but Mark’s enthusiasm, and the unparalleled reach and consumer engagement of the Facebook platform ultimately won me over.

“So… yes. I’m excited to go to Facebook to lead messaging products. And I’m looking forward to getting my hands dirty again attempting to build something new and meaningful at scale.”