The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 35 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Prince: The story of eBay starting with Beanie Babies is PR BS
“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.”
Grinda: AI disruption benefits startup marketplace incumbents over legacy giants
“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 …”
Hyatt: Long-term static moats do not exist for modern AI startups
“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…”
Taussig: High-margin eBay is losing market share yearly to Vinted
“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…”
Prince: The eBay Beanie Babies origin story is a PR myth
“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…”
eBay agreed to acquire all of MercadoLibre before walking away
“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…”
Eddy Lu: 30% of Yeezy sneaker listings on eBay are counterfeit
“You go to eBay today and type in Yeezy, and about 30% of the listings aren't real.”
Jordan: Best marketplace growth strategy is enabling organic user behavior
“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.”
In the early 2000s, eBay's media category surpassed Amazon's total GMV
“I think eBay's media category was bigger than Amazon's GMV. So eBay was really in those days like Amazon plus Google.”
First Round passed on Etsy due to Fralic's misplaced eBay confidence
“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…”
Silverman: eBay spent four months seeking Skype CEO before hiring him
“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…”
Webb: eBay required opposing white and black hat deal presentations for boards
“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 …”
Schultz Reveals the Primary User Retention Drivers for Meta and eBay
“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.”
eBay's original business plan and Benchmark investment focused solely on collectibles
“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…”
Jaswa: A $50B PayPal acquisition would have killed the PayPal Mafia
“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.”
Webb: Meg Whitman hired executive talent before eBay explicitly needed them
“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…”
Dan Lewis: Convoy used famous founder investors to win traditional customers
“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…”
Finkelstein: Early e-commerce forced a choice between million-dollar software and marketplaces
“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…”
SMBs cannot use consumer platforms like Amazon for custom procurement
“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…”
LiveBid amassed $100M in inventory before acquisition interest from Amazon and 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…”
Lemkin: Andreessen Horowitz tripled its money on Skype in 12-14 months
“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 …”
Alibaba Pitch Framed Company as eBay, Amazon, and PayPal of China
“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.”
Plantenga: Vinted originally charged sellers a 15% to 20% commission fee
“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,”
Schultz Says eBay Was Run by Consultants During His Tenure
“And how to put together a very good deck, because it was run by consultants.”
Jordan: eBay's Best Growth Strategy Was Making Organic User Listings Discoverable
“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…”
Jordan: Benchmark Originally Invested in eBay as a Collectibles Marketplace
“When Benchmark wrote the joint, Bob Cagle and Benchmark wrote the check, he was investing in a collectibles marketplace.”
Webb: eBay grew from 300 to 14,000 employees during his tenure
“When I joined eBay, I think we had 300 people. When I left, we had 14,000.”
Webb: eBay evaluated the Skype acquisition using a waterline risk framework
“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…”
Buchheit: Early Gmail launch invites sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars
“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.”
Justin Kan Sold Web Calendar Startup Kiko on eBay for $250,000
“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.”
Smith financed early pool table business via eBay customer pre-orders
“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…”
Schultz Recalls Difficulties Being Closeted Early in Career at eBay
“It wasn't, I wasn't out. So it was very hard.”
Darian Shirazi Was Facebook's First External Engineering Hire
“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.”