Stealthy Payments Startup Clinkle Adds PayPal Exec Mike Liberatore As CFO

Mobile payments startup Clinkle continues to add senior management types to its executive ranks. Mike Liberatore, who has 15 years of experience in financial positions at PayPal, Adobe, and others, will join the company as its new CFO.

Clinkle has yet to make its mobile payments platform available to consumers, but the company has already stirred up a lot of attention in Silicon Valley. That interest is due in part to a large round of funding that the company raised pre-launch, in addition to the way that the company has tried to keep the details of its mobile wallet technology under wraps.

When Clinkle confirmed that it had laid off a quarter of its staff in December, there was a certain amount of schadenfreude associated with the announcement. And yet, it might have been the right decision, considering Clinkle was pre-launch.

Over the last few months, the startup has made some key hires, adding a number of execs that have seen success in other organizations — most notably Netflix. That started with the hiring of former Netflix CFO Barry McCarthy as its COO, but continued with the addition of his old Netflix colleagues Andy Rendich and Allison Hopkins as VP of operations and VP of talent, respectively.

While he never worked at Netflix, Liberatore had been senior director of large enterprise finance and the North America financial planning and analysis (FP&A) group at PayPal. Prior to that he served as senior director of finance for Asia-Pacific, and also held several other roles at eBay, Adobe, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard.

In an email, Liberatore said he believed he was chosen for the role due to his “domain expertise, international experience, and reputation for helping scale finance teams at reputable tech companies.” With the new position, he hopes to help Clinkle “become a leader in the mobile payments space,” he wrote.

“My primary focus will be to help us manage our growth in the event that the product is successful. As the CFO, I’m on the hook for all necessary finance and accounting infrastructure to support the business as it scales. Some of this infrastructure must be completed prior to launch. I will also be responsible for our financial plan and for ensuring that we have a financial model that makes sense over the long term,” he wrote.

Clinkle’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Accel Partners, Intel Capital, and Intuit, as well as Peter Thiel, Diane Greene, Jim Breyer, Marc Benioff, Owen Van Natta, Andrew Viterbi, Bob Joss, Mendel Rosenblum, Dick Fredericks, Gordon Eubanks, Mehran Sahami, Peter Crisp, Regis McKenna, and Ross Perot, Jr.