eBay

“My epiphany eBay was at least for a marketplace, it's really a platform. And what that means is that when you build new functionality and capabilities, it's not enough to think about what the app can now do. And it's not the same as an application where, of co…”

“EBay, Yahoo, Amazon were some of the few companies that survived that forest fire. And so what it meant was from 2001 to 2005, they kind of had their pick of talent.”

“My friends and colleagues from eBay, I don't want to upset them too much, but it does look like Amazon got the better end of that. They absorbed that innovation in a better way or more profitable way.”

“EBay worked very much. They had an incredibly detailed financial spreadsheet that literally every feature we built went into a spreadsheet with a three year kind of NPV based that even built in eBay's cost of capital.”

“The flip side of that is it creates a dynamic where only power sellers remain that can do all the standards. So the more, you know, individuals a lot of times can't keep up with the demands of the marketplace. And you certainly eBay is a prominent example of t…”

“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.”