What we say here every day is that our success is really based on our members' success, our community's success. We've created an infrastructure and laid some basic ground rules to create this marketplace.
Be an enzyme - a catalyst for change. As a slogan, I don't know if that's ever going to be right up there with Ich Bin Ein Berliner, or “I Have A Dream,” but there's a lot of truth to it.
What makes eBay successful.. the real value and the real power at eBay is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.
We believe that business can be a tool for social good.
When I started eBay, it was a hobby, an experiment to see if people could use the Internet to be empowered through access to an efficient market. I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of a social impact. It was really about helping people connect around a sphere of interest so they could do business.
I just kind of had this naive approach to - well, gee, you know, why not. I’ll just go ahead and do it.
In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.
I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much do anything you want. I always kind of just went ahead and tried things.
I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.
Don't let people who you may respect and who you believe know what they're talking about, don't let them tell you it can't be done because often they will tell you it can't be done, and it's just because they don't have the courage to try.
I never had it in mind that I would start a company one day and it would really be successful. I have just been motivated by working on interesting technology
I started eBay as an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while I had my day job.
By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.
Microloans enable the poor to lift themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship.
If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things.
We ought to be looking at business as a force for good.
One of the things I tend to do is open myself up to a variety of voices. I try to expose myself to the kind of culture shock that occurs when you talk to people who speak a different language.
I always kind of just went ahead and tried things.
In the same way that you're driven in your business to keep innovating - Facebook is a wonderful example of constant innovation - think about doing that in philanthropy.
In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.
When you look at the accomplishments of accomplished people and you say, “Boy, that must have been really hard,” ... that was probably easy. And conversely, when you look at something that looks easy, that was probably hard. And so you’re never going to know which is which until you actually go and do it.
