Prince: The eBay Beanie Babies origin story is a PR myth
Matthew Prince · Matthew Prince: The Two Biggest Mistakes Every Founder Makes | E1072 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 16, 2023 · at 41:17
Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. In a discussion on startup strategy with Harry Stebbings, Prince disputes the narrative that eBay succeeded by starting exclusively with a narrow niche like Beanie Babies.
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“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 started that you that you don't like, nobody wants to tell the story of hugely ambitious entrepreneur sets out on hugely ambitious tasks and succeeds. What they like is the story of cute thing started small and then turned really big. So the beanie baby story is a complete and total made up PR.”
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