eBay

“It would be a long journey, but Amazon's stock price tripled in 2007, while eBay's fell by over 50%. And during that year, for the first time since, like, eBay's IPO, Amazon finally passes eBay in market cap.”

“In the fall of 2000, Meg Whitman and Jeff Jordan fly up to Seattle and they pitch Bezos on the opposite idea. EBay takes over the failed Amazon auctions and all of third party sellings.”

“If that had gone otherwise, I don't know about PayPal. Like, there's probably no PayPal. There might not be a PayPal mafia.”

“Amazon steals the deal and acquires accept.com mostly so that eBay doesn't get it.”

“When you have the network effect of more buyers attracting more sellers and more sellers attracting more buyers like eBay had, and they were a couple years ahead, it was just already in full swing. And even if you have a more technically superior interface.”

“Honestly, I mean, I think this is drawing too broad of a brush, but I think Google killed eBay, right? You know, the best way to search eBay is Google. It's not eBay.”

“And an interesting thing to note is, at this point, eBay is growing 10% a month. So check, fast growth company. It's profitable. All these checks that are getting mailed in, like, it is generating cash and growing.”

“That's one and a half billion dollars of carry dollars to be distributed amongst the equal partnership after the eBay investment.”

“They give Pierre and Jeff a term sheet to invest 6.7 million dollars total in the company in a series A financing at a twenty million dollar pre-money Evaluation.”

“It was also reported by the Washington Post after the IPO of eBay that Benchmark had also structured Equity-backed loans to Pierre and Jeff in the amount of 750,000 dollars each as a way to, like, prevent them essentially, give them an incentive not to take th…”

“There were so many points in time where like the window should have closed for PayPal to be started. There's no reason that that company should have been successful or existed yet.”

“He was still a full-time employee at General Magic when creating eBay.”

“The reason you would get acquired is they offer Pierre and Jeff Fifty million dollars. Five zero million dollars.”

“Benchmark did not have an eBay-sized win until Bill's big marketplace.”

“David Byrne made as much money on eBay as Bob Cagle made on eBay, as Bruce Dunleavy, as Kevin Harvey, as, you know, Andy Ratcliffe made on eBay. They all made the same.”

“By the time the lockup expires the next spring in 1989, that stake is worth over four billion dollars on an eighty-five million dollar fund.”

“It is funny that like if Pierre hadn't Needed to pay for the server costs. There's a really good chance this could have gone the way of the Linux foundation or Craigslist. And I know Craigslist is a real business now, but like it could have been Wikipedia coul…”

“There wasn't Founders Fund yet. There wasn't A-sixteen Z yet. There wasn't like the notion of founder friendliness. What venture capitalists did is they invested in founders companies and then brought in management to take them to the next level. It's what hap…”

“They were trading on eBay for average price of a 150 bucks in the early days.”