eBay

“EBay had bought a company called Billpoint, which it owned a hundred percent of, and it launched on its platform, and it wanted everything to go through Billpoint, nothing to go through PayPal.”

“So the basic issue with PayPal was that it's designed for consumers, not for businesses. And so if you're building an app, if you're building, you know, a website, if you're building a new marketplace, something like this, PayPal works okay for sending, you kn…”

“And then these tickets started to sell on eBay. So people would get the free ticket, and then they would start to list it or sell it, and tickets were starting to sell for like, 9000 dollars, 120 dollars on eBay. And we were like, huh, maybe people will pay fo…”

“Well, after 16 interviews and four rounds where they called him to eBay, he finally got the offer.”

“Alon was really, he built the API from scratch, you know.”

“I just started selling the stuff that I already had in my collection, kind of like whittling it down and what can I get rid of and what's worth a lot. And through doing that, I made, I don't know, Probably five grand, but I moved to Chicago with that much mone…”

“And so it was kind of a race, which they should have absolutely won because they had a Product that was supposed to do what we did that they owned, that could be built in, that, you know, could be promoted much, much, much better than we could.”

“Back in 99, there really isn't a way to take a credit card payment online if you were trying to sell things. For a business, there were a couple of companies that kind of provided that service. But if you were a, like, a normal person just trying to sell somet…”

“Right as we filed to go public, they came in and said, Hey we'll we'll buy you. Don't go public. And we said no.”

“The reason ultimately eBay was able to acquire us is because the team was so overloaded over the four years of previous life.”

“Every Monday when eBay auctions would settle, the system would just go down for multiple hours.”

“They came at payments a little bit after we did, but they had some really good ideas that we didn't have. So very quickly, we start just looking at each other and going, oh, that's a good idea. We'll copy that, and vice versa. And we were in the market just be…”

“It was on eBay. I believe 265,000 dollars was the winning bid. 13 bidders.”

“Overcoming inertia in the early stages of a marketplace is incredibly difficult. It's almost impossible, which is why, you know, there were so many eBay clones that never went anywhere. And, you know, you need to be able to tell a compelling story, and you nee…”

“And you look at a marketplace, like, I would say Etsy now, or eBay, And the primary customer is clearly the buyer, where the whole experience is optimized on the buying side, to the point where, you know, I pay a listing fee, and here's my item, but the websit…”

“Yeah, it was about a two billion dollar business and I was the general manager for the fashion business.”

“It's probably between 30 to 50 grand a year at the time.”

“So we decided to run the business using our savings from the eBay days and to self-fund the business until we see significant traction, then we can try to raise money.”

“You can still do that today, and you can do, like, even more, right? So now there are, like, cross-border companies. You can actually scrape those companies and list down on eBay.”

“We bought back Fanatics, including the licensed business that GSI had for three hundred thirty million bucks.”

“The business has grown from two hundred fifty million dollars when I bought it back from eBay, to this year that division is like a 6.7 billion dollar business, ok?”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“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 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 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.”