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 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
eBay employees knew never to buy from sellers below 4.8 stars
“Part of it was that every, every employee of eBay knew that you didn't want to buy from somebody that had a 4.8 star or less. Because in order to give someone a negative feedback as a seller, you basically had to buy your, burn your buyer account. You had to b…”
Carlson-Wee: P2P protocols will eventually compete with Web 2.0 giants like Uber and Twitter
“Many of the major Web two point O companies that have seen a substantial growth in the last 15 years, this is Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, eBay, Uber, every single one of these companies could someday see competition from a peer peer-to-peer protocol.”
Second-place players in data network markets drop to zero value
“And in fact, the value of the number two person goes to zero. Because they actually have a demonstrably poor product, which is why there aren't really any competitors to eBay.”
Dixon: PayPal blocks 20% of international transactions due to aggressive fraud tuning
“The way PayPal deals with many issues is they simply block about half the world from transacting, right? I mean, there's an eBay, 20% of all internet, international transactions are blocked because the way they deal with the fact that their system is not built…”
Jeff Jordan: Eastern European organized crime drove early eBay and PayPal fraud
“Most of the fraud on eBay and PayPal was organized crime, typically out of Eastern Europe. Where they had incredibly talented computer science professionals who lacked a lot of commercial opportunity.”
Deb Liu argues eBay failed to serve any individual vertical category effectively
“What eBay did really well was all of the categories, but what they did poorly was any individual category.”
Jordan: Beanie Babies drove 7% of eBay's GMV at its IPO
“Beanie Babies were something like seven percent of all gross merchandise sales when eBay went public. In fact, that was not highlighted in the S-One.”
Mougayar: OpenBazaar eliminates marketplace fees, saving sellers 8% to 10%
“In the, on, on OpenBazaar, and there are no listing fees. There are no fees that eBay or Etsy, whoever is in the middle, is going to be asking the sellers typically. So off the bat, there's like eight to nine to 10% that you can save initially.”
Jeff Jordan: Amazon and Yahoo's free auctions failed against eBay
“Amazon and Yahoo launch auction businesses early in eBay's life and they went for free. So every seller in the world said, I'll list, list my site there. It didn't work cause they hadn't, they couldn't get the buyers to show up there. So eBay, even though we w…”
Jeff Jordan: Raising prices damaged eBay in the long run against Google
“A lot of, it's easy to raise prices when you have a network effect, but you know, I think that hurt eBay in the long run versus Google.”
Jordan: Amazon and eBay each represent 20% of US online spending
“I've done some back of the envelope calculations that Amazon, if you take their first party business and their third party business and normalize it for consumer sales, they represent about one in five dollars spent on the internet. Interestingly, eBay also re…”
Mercando: Beacons will enable physical stores to collect e-commerce style data
“One of the things that I'm interested in in beacons is when you walk into a physical space, you can now get more data on people and more information. So if you think about e-commerce You know, there, there's so much data that we were collecting, you know, when…”
eBay could not launch services pre-smartphone due to connectivity limits
“And when I was at eBay, I, since eBay, I used to think one of my biggest failings there was I didn't build a services business. It seemed incredibly obvious to me that eBay with the community and PayPal with the payments should support a services business. I n…”
Amazon and Yahoo failed to compete with early eBay auctions
“Both launched auction businesses to compete with eBay early in the day. And both quickly got a lot of supply because they listed it, there were no listing fees. They required no economics. And no consumers went. Both businesses were DOA, and they abandoned it …”
Jordan: Tech's biggest winners initially look like non-obvious niche ideas
“Most of the huge winners are lightning strikes. Facebook was the second or third social network, but you know, no one was thinking social networks when they talk about a trillion dollar company. EBay was Collectibles online, weird Facebook, hot or not, you kno…”
Jordan: eBay required $11M minimum spend for TV advertising campaigns
“When I was Managing eBay, you know, we were doing TV, and it was a million dollars to produce an ad, and then, you know, ten million dollars to distribute it with a frequency that the brand people thought was efficient. So, eleven million dollars was the ante …”
McCullough: eBay proved self-organized online reputation systems could scale effectively
“They created, or they proved that a non-hierarchical, sort of self-organized reputation system could function online, maybe not perfectly, but well enough to achieve scale to be good enough most of the time.”
Jordan: eBay accelerated growth at scale by layering fixed prices and payments
“At eBay, the original business was an auction business in the U.S. And so, you know, some of the things we layered on earlier, we layered on fixed price in the U S not revolutionary, but it really did increment growth. Then we went international and then we la…”
Wroblewski: Top-aligned web form labels at eBay China increased conversions 20%
“We put the top aligned labels above the form fields and we had like a 20% increase in conversions or something like that.”
Jordan: Benchmark's Bob Kagle invested in eBay after finding duck decoys
“And it turns out the venture guy who made the investment at eBay was Bob Cagle at Benchmark Capital. Bob, who happened to come from Michigan, and there's a craftsman in Michigan who does really beautiful, and I'll remember the name, decoy ducks for hunting. It…”
Jordan: eBay transaction volume dropped 40-50% overnight following 9/11
“Our volume literally just dropped 40, 50% overnight. New users stopped completely. It was a big divot in the business for two or three or four weeks, and then everything popped back. We never regained the lost users we had during that month.”
Bahl: C2C e-commerce is winner-take-all globally, unlike B2C
“I think, at least as we've observed e-commerce around the world, we've seen that C to C tends to be a winner-take-all in most markets. Like, even in the U.S., you have one C to C player, eBay. In China, you have one C to C player, which is Taobao. Whereas B to…”
Jordan: Beanie Babies made up 8-9% of eBay trades at IPO
“Eight or nine percent of All the items on, trading on eBay when we went public were Beanie Babies, you know, Beanie Babies.”
eBay generated $83 billion in gross merchandise sales and $3 billion FCF
“Gross merchandise sales last year was about eighty-three billion. Revenue, just under nine billion. Free cash flow, three billion dollars a year. The market cap, we said 30 to 40, actually today it's right in the middle, thirty-five billion dollars. Total vent…”
eBay raised under $10 million and never cashed Benchmark's venture check
“They raised under ten million dollars of venture capital in aggregate, and according to the founder, they never cashed the check that Benchmark gave them.”
George: eBay's E-Commerce Market Share Fell From 15% to Under 1%
“EBay was actually, if you go back something like 10 years, it was like 15% of the overall market, and it's eighty billion of volume, still, by the way. It was like, 15% of the overall market. Now it's less than one percent of the market.”
Brian Chesky urges Airbnb staff to host and stay on the platform
“At eBay, we encourage our employees to trade, buy and sell on eBay. I'm on the board of Airbnb and Brian Chesky strongly encourages the employees to host or be a guest on the platform because it keeps you connected to the value and philosophy and, you know, th…”
Jordan: Early eBay users spent hours browsing passion-driven collectibles
“EBay had enormous levels of engagement early on. For a commerce app in particular, people would spend hours just browsing, because early on it was about collectibles, and it was about people's passions”
Rampell: eBay bought PayPal because its internal payment tool failed
“They had their own bill payment thing that they developed later, which didn't really work, and that's why they bought PayPal, but it was all COD.”
Jordan: eBay was once the largest digital ad spender globally
“EBay, I was the biggest advertiser in the world on digital advertising in the world for a number of years.”
Casado: Nicira launched with AT&T, eBay, and Fidelity as customers
“When we launched the company, actually went public with the company, not like public as in the stock market, but we actually came out of stealth. We had AT&T, NTT, eBay, Rackspace, and Fidelity.”
Andreessen: Meg Whitman used a five-highlights, five-lowlights format at eBay
“At eBay for many years, when she was running eBay, it was always, it was five highlights and five lowlights.”
Jordan: eBay achieved 40% to 50% operating margins
“I mean, eBay's, I think we got operating margins of 40 or 50%.”
Thiel: 30-35% of eBay sellers used PayPal by May 2000
“Yeah, we'd started targeting eBay January, 2000. I'd say it was 30, 35% of the sellers on eBay were using us by April or May, so it was fairly heavily embedded.”
Amazon required 10 to 50 times more employees than early eBay
“When, early on when I was managing eBay, Amazon had 10 times, 50 times more employees than we did, because they were building warehouses, they were picking out of their own warehouses, they were shipping, they were procuring merchandise, you know, the whole th…”