eBay

“And in about a year we're able to amass close to a hundred million dollars in inventory that was, you know, being offered through auction through our website, which at the time was quite a bit, and we then had, had interest from eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon for acq…”

“Spent eight years at eBay running various different functions and groups as the company grew from about a hundred people when I joined to about 15,000 when I left.”

“Ended up selling on eBay. Decided startups weren't quite as bad as we'd thought because from the eBay sale, which was about a quarter of a million dollars, we made a little bit of money.”

“I remember being one of the first sellers on eBay during the beanie baby craze in the late nineties. So I was 11 years old. I'd set up this like little business flipping beanie babies on eBay.”

“Small businesses are kind of stuck in this awkward no man's land where they can't really go to Amazon or eBay or use consumer sites like that. Like say me and you could, because they're usually buying pretty custom things. They're buying custom equipment, they…”

“And at the time in 2004, 2005, there really were two ways to sell a product online. One way was you would pay some agency a million bucks to do some sort of IBM Webster integration or some sort of Magento or, you know, some sort of Hybris integration. These bi…”

“People were selling the invites on eBay for hundreds of dollars. It became a real currency because people were so excited about getting an invite to the service.”

“And so when we were able to get investors that had built significant companies to come be a part of Convoy, that lent a lot of credibility and trust to our customers where they could say, okay, the founder of Amazon or the person who, you know, created and dev…”

“And prior to Radius, Darian has enjoyed roles such as first external engineering hire at Facebook and working on the sell your item team at eBay.”

“You go to eBay today and type in Yeezy, and about 30% of the listings aren't real.”

“When I joined eBay, I think we had 300 people. When I left, we had 14,000.”

“When we were looking to buy Skype at eBay, we used that analogy to say, okay, if it doesn't work, is it going to hit us above the waterline where it's going to be ugly and we're going to have to fix it, but it's fixable? Or is it going to hit us below the wate…”

“Meg used to go hire people before we needed him, because she knew we were going to scale into needing them. By the way, I used to think that was crazy, and then I fell in love with it, because they all got gobbled up within three to six months, end of Meaningf…”

“One of the things we did at eBay is we would have, you know, one of the things you worry about is deals get momentum and get excitement, and everybody gets aligned around that. And sometimes you're not willing to actually do the parade of horribles about what …”

“When they asked me to run Skype, I was at eBay. Honestly, they spent four months looking to find anyone else, and no one would take that job because, you know, it's in the telecommunications industry, which is highly regulated, and international phone calls we…”

“We had the opportunity to look at Etsy, and I was almost dismissive, or I just thought of it as this little niche of handmade goods or something, and I think I was jaded. I mean, I thought I knew so much from eBay that it kind of turned me off to the whole cat…”

“Later on, at a much higher valuation, we did agree To sell. This was with eBay. At the time, eBay was a 20% owner of Mercado Libre, and they wanted to acquire the remaining 80%. And then, after we had agreed, they decided to walk away, which was pretty traumat…”

“I think eBay's media category was bigger than Amazon's GMV. So eBay was really in those days like Amazon plus Google.”

“If PayPal sold to eBay for fifty billion, I doubt the intensity and commitment to pursuing startups would have stayed that, would have been as high for as many of them. Certainly some, but not most.”

“Jeff Skoll wrote the business plan for eBay with Pierre. And I got a copy of it when I joined the business and they were focused entirely on the collectibles market. Now their argument was collectibles market in in the U S I think was a hundred, you know, it w…”

“The most successful growth strategy we had back in the day was just look what people were listing. And then try to enable it to be found on a much more systemic basis.”

“So eBay became a mechanism for that, for computers, for sporting goods, for, you know, and so the most successful growth strategy we had back in the day was just look what people were listing. And then try to enable it to be found on a much more systemic basis…”

“When Benchmark wrote the joint, Bob Cagle and Benchmark wrote the check, he was investing in a collectibles marketplace.”

“And how to put together a very good deck, because it was run by consultants.”

“So for Facebook, it's friending. The whole thing's about friends. For WhatsApp, it's about sending a message to somebody. You know, for Instagram, it's still following. And for eBay, it was placing a bid or buying an item.”

“It wasn't, I wasn't out. So it was very hard.”

“So I've talked to the founders of eBay about that. That's complete and utter PR retrospective BS. And the reason that a lot of stories look like that is because almost nobody Once, if you're in the, you're the journalist that, that, that you said before we sta…”

“So, so the eBay example, you're like eBay started with Beanie Babies. So I've talked to the founders of eBay about that. That's complete and utter PR retrospective BS.”

“What we decided to do is when we listed them on eBay, we said, 10 week lead time, custom made, hardwood pool table, 10 weeks. You know, a lot of people probably are like, there's no way I'm waiting 10 weeks, but other people are like, hey, I'm building my hous…”

“So they were asking something in the tune of 15 to 20% seller fee, which is like the standard thing that eBay and Poshmark were doing for years,”

“Usually the highest EBITDA margin businesses have the lowest growth, right? And so it's this kind of funny thing where You know, the business like eBay has a great EBITDA margin. It hasn't really, it's not really growing and it's kind of losing market share ev…”

“The story was positioned very simply that, hey, it's the China consumer play, and they are the eBay plus Amazon plus PayPal of China.”

“But some kind of compounding effect where we think no matter what happens after this year, it's eBay, they just launch a product and 40 years later, the product looked basically exactly the same and it's just fine. Like that, that, those ages are not right now…”

“The AI disruption is actually benefiting startup incumbents, because they have the data modes, and so it doesn't benefit eBay, you know, because they're slow and big, but it benefits, you know, an incumbent startup that has already liquidity, that is the most …”

“And the reason it was a structurally weird deal where they got a good deal. Now they took risks. Skype was a aging platform, but they bought it from eBay, right? Is that eBay needed to divest it? They had enough of it. There was no synergy and Andreessen went …”