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 15 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
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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 achieved 40% to 50% operating margins
“I mean, eBay's, I think we got operating margins of 40 or 50%.”
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…”