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eBay, every mention

144 scenes (2022) · ← back to eBay

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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where eBay comes up

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Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired Dec 19, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:41:47 David Rosenthal I don't know what these 20 20 original M one MacBook Airs are going for on like eBay or Craigslist or whatnot right now.

Qualcomm · Acquired Nov 15, 2022 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 1:38:12 David Rosenthal In the year 2000, after this sale, the height of the tech bubble, you know, uh, this is like, on the benchmark episodes, we're talking about eBay, eboys, benchmarks making billions of dollars, Yahoo's going nuts, like it's the, it's the…

Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired Oct 17, 2022 · 1 mention

Benchmark Part I · Acquired Sep 28, 2022 · 59 mentions

  • ▶ 2:18 Ben Gilbert There were early e-commerce companies in the nineties like eBay, eShop, one 800 flowers, or Ariba.
  • ▶ 2:50 Ben Gilbert They clearly transitioned from the eBay generation to the Uber generation.
  • ▶ 1:09:27 David Rosenthal He embeds with eBay.
  • ▶ 1:12:20 David Rosenthal Right before he starts eBay?
  • ▶ 1:13:10 David Rosenthal Pierre starts tinkering around on the early internet and starts a collection of internet services that he calls eBay for electronic Bay Area, although there would be lots of retrospective justifications of that name.
  • ▶ 1:13:28 Ben Gilbert It's like a courier font website that has like a bunch of stuff on it all under this like umbrella of eBay, but it's just like a bunch of different content and like some programmatic stuff and
  • ▶ 1:13:42 David Rosenthal One of the five or so main things you could do on the site was do this thing called auction web, which surprise, surprise became the thing that became eBay.
  • ▶ 1:13:54 David Rosenthal So we're telling all this history because A, it's awesome to tell eBay history, especially having done Amazon earlier this season, but kind of painting the picture here of like, Pierre's this like engineer, this is a side project.
  • ▶ 1:14:11 Ben Gilbert He was still a full-time employee at General Magic when creating eBay.
  • ▶ 1:14:32 David Rosenthal Like, that's not what happened at eBay by any stretch of the imagination.
  • ▶ 1:15:45 Ben Gilbert But instead they became the it company for a generation.
  • ▶ 1:15:53 Ben Gilbert That's how people thought about eBay.
  • ▶ 1:17:44 David Rosenthal Jeff Skoll had worked very briefly after graduating from Stanford GSB for a few months before Pierre recruited him to come help open the mail at eBay.
  • ▶ 1:18:11 Ben Gilbert And an interesting thing to note is, at this point, eBay is growing 10% a month.
  • ▶ 1:19:15 David Rosenthal There is a version of the story where none of the money that Benchmark invested in eBay was actually used by the company.
  • ▶ 1:19:49 David Rosenthal What we do know is that Benchmark got 20% or more of the equity in eBay for their equity investment in eBay.
  • ▶ 1:20:01 David Rosenthal It was also reported by the Washington Post after the IPO of eBay that Benchmark had also structured
  • ▶ 1:22:18 Ben Gilbert And it's like, the benchmark eBay deal, that may have been 50% of the round, or at least 25%.
  • ▶ 1:22:36 David Rosenthal In September 1998, just a little over a year later, by which point in time the company, and with Benchmark and David Byrne, highly involved, has recruited Meg Whitman, the superstar Meg Whitman from Hasbro and
  • ▶ 1:24:47 Ben Gilbert And so in 2000 after that, a lot of the investments, actually not eBay, but a lot of the investments looked much worse very quickly.
  • ▶ 1:24:54 Ben Gilbert eBay had obviously a drop, but not like a drop to zero or anything.
  • ▶ 1:25:46 David Rosenthal That's one and a half billion dollars of carry dollars to be distributed amongst the equal partnership after the eBay investment.
  • ▶ 1:26:15 David Rosenthal But after eBay is clearly working and Meg Whitman is there, Benchmark had been doing for a while and would really embrace bringing in entrepreneurs in residence and doing the EIR strategy of company formation, bring somebody who wants to…
  • ▶ 1:26:47 David Rosenthal He notices eBay is becoming so big.
  • ▶ 1:26:59 David Rosenthal And so he says, you know, I think there's actually an opportunity to build a separate independent company to do payments on the internet and specifically to start with accepting payments for sellers on eBay.
  • ▶ 1:27:14 David Rosenthal They bring in eBay.
  • ▶ 1:27:19 David Rosenthal Maybe eBay will invest in the deal itself too.
  • ▶ 1:27:31 David Rosenthal eBay ends up not investing.
  • ▶ 1:27:36 David Rosenthal eBay gets cold feet.
  • ▶ 1:27:55 David Rosenthal The whole business plan was payments on eBay auctions listings.
  • ▶ 1:28:05 David Rosenthal And we talked about this on the amazon.com episode, but, uh, fortuitously for them and for Benchmark, Amazon was starting to think about competing directly with eBay and launching Amazon auctions.
  • ▶ 1:28:35 David Rosenthal You know, eBay then, they do buy another company, but one that does not have good technology.
  • ▶ 1:29:02 David Rosenthal Ah, so fun, such a fun sidebar and fun to tell it now from the eBay and benchmark side of things as we, you know, we told it from the Amazon side a little bit ago.
  • ▶ 1:29:19 Ben Gilbert Why did eBay appreciate so quickly?
  • ▶ 1:29:22 Ben Gilbert And to put a finer point on that, they invested at a twenty million dollar pre-money valuation, and by the next spring, the company was worth twenty-one billion dollars.
  • ▶ 1:30:09 David Rosenthal But there was another non-consensus from a Silicon Valley perspective aspect to the eBay deal that Benchmark was willing to see and exploit that nobody else did, which was that the external facing aspects of this company did not look…
  • ▶ 1:30:58 Ben Gilbert Sidebar, the first business enterprise that I ever did in my entire life was selling Beanie Babies on eBay.
  • ▶ 1:31:25 Ben Gilbert There was intrinsic value growth, certainly, of this company growing 10% per month, and then it had some fits and starts, and there were times where it was growing even faster than that.
  • ▶ 1:32:34 Ben Gilbert I looked up eBay's market cap today, and if you look at eBay's market cap, when they went public, it was a couple billion dollars.
  • ▶ 1:33:36 Ben Gilbert It's still astonishing to me that in the long run Amazon ended up beating eBay.
  • ▶ 1:39:03 David Rosenthal Not only did that not happen at Benchmark because there were no junior partners to hand the board seat off to, it was like in the case of eBay,
  • ▶ 1:41:11 David Rosenthal 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.
  • ▶ 1:54:11 David Rosenthal So, we're now post eBay.
  • ▶ 1:58:58 Ben Gilbert I mean, there's definitely a picture to be painted of, like, the eBay thing really worked out, and this set of principles we had was a really good way to get started, but it's, the world's gonna change and it's gonna pass us by, so we need…
  • ▶ 2:01:37 David Rosenthal So the one thing though, as you teed it up here, that they all pretty much right away are in agreement on after eBay.
  • ▶ 2:10:11 David Rosenthal And you, with the exception of eBay, with the exception of the one that was the one, you were backing companies at that era that hadn't yet put the products in market.
  • ▶ 2:12:00 David Rosenthal So one and the most obvious thing to me here that's so funny is eBay is like the exception that proves the rule, but is the rule here.
  • ▶ 2:12:08 David Rosenthal Like eBay had traction when they invested, and that's what made it non-consensus, but actually that was like the smart thing to do because it had traction, and that's where they made the lion's share of their returns.
  • ▶ 2:14:36 David Rosenthal They weren't eBay-sized wins.
  • ▶ 2:14:39 David Rosenthal They were far from eBay-sized wins.
  • ▶ 2:14:41 Ben Gilbert Well, Benchmark did not have an eBay-sized win until Bill's big marketplace.
  • ▶ 2:18:44 Ben Gilbert They looked and thought, eBay.
  • ▶ 2:19:02 Ben Gilbert We should be leveraging that for the next eBay that starts anywhere.
  • ▶ 2:23:56 David Rosenthal I mean, at this point, this was Bench where they had just done eBay.
  • ▶ 2:25:09 David Rosenthal eBay ends up buying Skype.
  • ▶ 2:27:12 David Rosenthal They did that with eBay, and then the international expansion happened, and then for a whole variety of conflicts and reasons, no Google, no Skype, you know, Skype's not generational defining, but
  • ▶ 3:16:36 Ben Gilbert But it is a great point, and it is the point that I wanted to make in regards to eBay.
  • ▶ 3:42:53 Ben Gilbert Uber, Snap, eBay, Riot, Twitter, Discord is still privately held, but, you know, will be a big win.
  • ▶ 3:43:01 Ben Gilbert And, you know, we've talked about people thought they were idiots for investing in eBay, because big consumer investments seem really weird.

Amazon Web Services · Acquired Sep 6, 2022 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 10:09 David Rosenthal Amazon's fighting for its life against both eBay and Wall Street.
  • ▶ 35:43 David Rosenthal That was how they competed with eBay.
  • ▶ 1:03:35 David Rosenthal And he says what they ended up doing was they got a tiger team together of the 10 best technical minds inside the company, and they deconstructed all the major web services, web applications of the day, amazon.com itself, Google, eBay, all…

Amazon.com · Acquired Aug 16, 2022 · 35 mentions

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