eBay

“I would go to Target when Target would have launches with, like, Missoni or, like, any one of those big, huge launches. I would buy as much stuff as I could fit into my car, and I would resell it.”

“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.”

“Under the settlement, the couple will receive forty eight million in compensation from eBay and former employees. EBay will also pay six million to charitable, charitable organizations. And Wenig will pay one million to a free speech charity in Ina Steiner's n…”

“EBay is, in my opinion, just the most said it and forget it company that's just had the same service for 20 years basically.”

“And the third thing Player almost always tends to be someone who says, great, I will help you both find something, trust the counterparty, and underwrite the risk on both transactions. Amazon. And usually, in the marketplace of, like, on the internet, the thir…”

“I think that eBay and PayPal are probably the beginning of a wave of mega deals of call it flaccid, you know, digital businesses. That can be revived. With the blue chew of capital and the right operator. Again, I think that there's probably a big wave of this…”

“Marketplaces have great network effects. The trouble is, and you've seen this with eBay, you see this with some of the European online listings companies, once you get that market, now what? It's a great mode, but if you don't have anywhere to put the cash, Ma…”

“EBay could have been Amazon.”

“I mean, if you just look at how they've done in the past since COVID, Every important metric is down. GMV is down. Active users is down by thirty million.”

“Number one is on immediately improving earnings through cutting costs. And Pulling two billion dollars of costs out of the business and on the operating base of, you know, close to five and a half billion of expenses and 2.4 billion spent on sales and marketin…”

“But if you look at in-game digital items, there's no marketplace that is providing liquidity for them. And so I would use eBay to provide liquidity for in-game digital items. And I believe that addressable market is significantly larger than could be much larg…”

“I'm putting five hundred million of my own money into this transaction.”

“It's over a hundred million bucks.”

“We made an offer yesterday. 125 bucks a share. Half cash, half stock.”

“We've got 1600 access points that we can do live authentication.”

“EBay has a hundred and thirty million users and they're getting crushed by competitors in live commerce.”

“Yeah, it would be partnering with creators. I mean, they've got the platform, We would improve the platform so it looks better and more consistent with the kind of UI that you have at competitors, but there's the user base. And so it's not something you have t…”

“The strategics can't really do it because I don't think that they would be able to clear antitrust. So any of the large competitors wouldn't be able to acquire it.”

“They're spending five and a half billion dollars on operating expenses on eleven billion dollar business that Has no inventory in its asset lights. So, it just, there's 11 and a half thousand employees, and it doesn't make sense.”

“You know, I think that eBay is the kind of business where the future of the business model is more certain than most tech businesses, and that's why it's done so well. And, you know, there's been such a lack of innovation, yet it hasn't been able to be disrupt…”

“The goal here isn't to be an activist. The goal is I want to own eBay. I want to run eBay. Like, I want that to be my baby.”

“EBay is like Chewy on steroids. And so there's so much more runway, and it's global.”

“When I think about what eBay could be worth, if I'm running this business, I believe it's a heck of a lot more than a 125 dollars a share.”

“We have the cash accounted for today in terms of, ah, a highly confident letter from our bank for the twenty billion, plus we've got nine billion of cash, so.”

“You know, the directors board of directors make four million dollars. It's like 350 to 450,000 per director. There's been no insider buying at the company.”

“Well I haven't done the math, but if things go correctly, then it better be the majority. Otherwise I'm wasting my time.”

“In terms of the digital marketplace, and they are already doing it to a certain extent. I mean, like, all kinds of Roblox digital items are bought and sold, but and I've actually bought them for my kids, and there's so much fraud on the platform. Like, we're b…”

“Well, that would, so yes, and it would basically take zero dollars in capex in order to something like that, and it's a good idea.”

“I reached out to eBay, like, I don't know, maybe a year or two years ago to talk to them about partnering, and They didn't engage seriously.”

“But I mean, in terms of doing that well, accelerating revenue growth you know, I think that that is, that's big. And so going much deeper into collectibles and luxury trading cards, there's a lot of runway there.”

“If you pull up eBay's 10 K from February, fiscal 25, and I did not understand this until I read it, eBay spent 2.4 billion dollars on marketing. How many new users did they get for that? I mean, you guys are marketers, you understand. One million. That's crazy…”

“Amazon's used and collect, collectibles business has been flat for six years. They tried renewed, they tried collectibles, they tried trade-in, none of it's still.”

“You need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce.”

“We're offering half cash, half stock, and we have the ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done.”

“EBay is an incredible business. It's been remarkably durable. They've faced an onslaught of competition for every single category from sneakers to watches to art to name any cars, right? Any category there is like a vertical competitor to eBay. And yet the bus…”

“So when I joined eBay, they said, Christopher, go fix search. That was my thing. This was 2009. 92% of the sales went through search at that time.”

“EBay is buying Depop from Etsy for 1.2 billion dollars, and this is in the Wall Street Journal.”

“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 …”

“Some of those things, by the way, weirdly, you can resell them for more than the purchase price, because in some cases, the Kelly bag, for example, they won't sell it to you until you've been a fairly reliable customer of theirs for some time, and therefore th…”

“The other thing that was going on at the time was that, you know, I think it was Google PayPal and eBay. We're all talking about their vulnerability reward programs, which was what we called a bug bounty program back in like, 2012, right?”

“Network effects, like your supply-to-man ratios, like all of these different things, there is an element of land grab. That's just inherent to building a marketplace company. But I always saw that as being fairly fragile as the only thing to rely on because ul…”

“EBay told us that they had the same community mission, the same vibe that we did. We were convinced of it. So we authorized that guy to sell his equity to eBay.”

“In part, I don't perceive them being a competitor because they don't have the same vibe, the same mission that we do.”

“I remember sitting in a management meeting at eBay after we got acquired and right after we got acquired and they hired some consulting firms, Bain actually, to analyze the threat posed by Google to commerce. And their conclusion as a management team and with …”

“We merged with another private company. We renamed the entire thing shopping.com. And believe it or not, shopping.com ultimately went public. Had a bit of a mixed track record, but ultimately was bought by eBay for, I think, about 626 hundred thirty million.”

“EBay was a major, major driver of Beanie Baby's growth because people could buy them and then the secondary market was way more liquid than ever before.”

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

“I remember one year we were the number one selling product on eBay, and the 150 dollar product was going for a thousand on eBay.”

“So we tried to raise two 50, we only raised 60 and that was enough not to buy a new truck, because just the new truck before you turned it into an ice cream truck would have been 70,000. So we bought a used post office truck. Actually, we bought two. We starte…”

“And the third one was eBay. That was at the time a very light model in terms of just connecting with a software platform, buyers and sellers, and somehow we realized that the trading thing was something quite natural for Latin Americans, and that that would wo…”

“Because in a period of time, it was the only profitable internet company, even more profitable than the Amazons and the Yahoo's of the world.”

“Then probably they faced the typical innovator's dilemma, and because of the initial success that they had, They didn't kind of innovate in the business and Amazon did innovate a lot and ended up creating a much larger company.”

“We spent 65,000 cash on a candy wrapper machine off of eBay, and it's arriving on a truck.”

“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 …”

“In enterprises, you know, it's sort of hard to explore. It's hard to actually you know, have, like, Network effects like, you know, the kind that you have with eBay. Like, you know, enterprise software doesn't work that way.”

“The model for European VCs at the time was to invest in a copycat of a U.S. Internet company, and use the language barrier as a moat. So you kind of was really smart to invest in say a German copycat of eBay because eBay would probably buy them or a Nordic ver…”

“EBay coming up with, like, a really attractive offer. 2.6 billion and a 500 million earn out.”

“The largest Internet M&A before us was PayPal to eBay, right? One point by a billion. And So this was like two X. And then you had. This is amazing. YouTube. YouTube was also 1.6 billion or something like that. Yeah. Also the same year with Google. So this was…”

“It took him longer to write the founder's book than it took PayPal to be founded and then sold to eBay.”

“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…”