eBay

“We were buying Dell instead of Apple, eBay instead of Amazon, Yahoo instead of Google. I mean, those three trades alone would have had, had they been done differently, would have had dramatically different results for that domestic product.”

“I remember the first SEC filing that mentioned Bitcoin and kind of feeling a level of validation, a level of Excitement around this coming into the, just the first fold of mainstream. And it was the S one where PayPal spun out of eBay.”

“In that role, I also became Google's first customer in the world. Having ran AltaVista and competed with them, they were starting to monetize their search, and I became the first customer, and that really changed the trajectory for both Google and for eBay”

“That's exactly the way that Alibaba did the business, and I actually, I think it's potentially an original sin. It's the way that eBay thought, and it didn't really work out that well for them versus, let's say, an Amazon.”

“By the end of high school, my brother had bought a car right when he turned 16. He had a car delivered in our driveway. We both paid for college with it.”

“The problem is if you want to build Amazon, you need billions of dollars of capital. You need supply chain management skills. If you want to build E-Trade, you need a banking license. When you build a marketplace like eBay, you have a unique set of problems of…”

“I remember when eBay first came out, I had like a spelling arbitrage model going where I'd buy misspelled tickets and resell them with the proper spelling.”

“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…”