eBay

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• bullish assessment Alexis Maybank

  eBay pre-ipo I was there pre-ipo I saw the process and then I watch the base scale from 40 to about 6,000 people and one thing that Meg was a tremendously successful doing is keeping that focus and allowing allowing that business to scale very very quickly at Pierre and Jeff's Jeff school who is another founder of a bee Bay they kept the kind of culture consistent and that focus on how we treat the customer and consistent

• bearish criticism Alexis Maybank

  you're going up against Amazon which their pages are a mess and eBay which is even more of a mess and Craigslist which is a disaster I mean in terms of design I mean the bar is set pretty low on e-commerce

• neutral fact_claim Alexis Maybank

  eBay was entirely driven by word of mouth so out of the two and a half million people that we have shopping today 75% have come to Gallup from a referral from a friend so looking and and kind of being a part of that really initial viral marketing that happened that word-of-mouth marketing that drove eBay people pursuing their passion

• neutral fact_claim Roelof Botha

  yeah eBay was completely closed and sort of PayPal was one of the first companies to have the sort of embed strategy where PayPal buttons were on eBay but they they were essentially closed you know they they tried to not have us be on eBay and yet we managed to get in there and delivered an interesting service did they ever ban pay did eBay ever ban PayPal or or threaten to was that threatened to they threatened to basically and and I mean they probably could have uh I mean it would have been il

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  eBay did get to convoluted on iPhone I don't really use it if I have to leave quick feedback or something I might use it in a pinch

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  out of everything that we looked at today I definitely will have to say e is the best and then again but again Amazon and mobile definitely definitely worth checking actually eBay did get to convoluted on iPhone I don't really use it if I have to leave quick feedback or something I might use it in a pinch but um eBay on iPad winner

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  if you've ever been uh daunted by eBay because oh what if I forget about the auction it has post new notifications so I think if you've been daunted but have kind of want to try it it's will solve that problem for you

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it's free uh sign in your account and use it

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  overall it's a really wonderful experience there's uh all your organizations there

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the organization behind her I think is much much easier

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the eBay um website can get a really convoluted it can there's so many ways you can organize your shopping and the things you're looking for before that gets a little confusing whereas it's really really easy here

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  look at all the things that have worked with a lack of polish ebay craigslist twitter

• neutral fact_claim Dave Linthicum

  we got to understand how ebay builds their cloud and how they leverage cloud computing technology to automate automate their world and they have a unique problem because they can't use amazon because amazon's a competitor of theirs so they have to use other cloud products

• neutral fact_claim William Quigley

  we sold PayPal to eBay at a price that was way way too low 1.8 billion 1.8 billion and now a really it's worth 25 billion 25 billion and is the real value I think of the eBay franchise now

• neutral fact_claim Liz Gannes

  they're focused elsewhere they think PayPal is their big business

• neutral fact_claim Liz Gannes

  maybe they weren't willing to put their resources into it

• neutral fact_claim Liz Gannes

  maybe it wasn't the right fit for them

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  it does make you wonder is eBay stupid

• bullish assessment Scott Heiferman

  if you're charging yes people's expectations are high which will force you to make a freaking good product that people are willing to pay for a level of focus is obtained because people are paying yeah a focus a just just a you know I mean if you're getting paid here but you're trying to serve these guys like yeah it's it's it's your customers will bust your balls yes uh to make a good product

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I think there's an opportunity and and and I think with the with the right Vision with the Right leader and with there with somebody with

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  look at PayPal eBay is just not focused on it for a decade and it's just growing like a juggernaut and to the point at which it's obviously a better asset than eBay itself I mean who the hell wants this garbage Auction Company in 2011 obviously PayPal is the asset there

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  eBay made a study they lose $14 million a year for every 1%

• bearish assessment David Sacks

  i think if paypal was a standalone company with its metrics it'd probably be worth over 20 billion dollars i mean it's it's probably more valuable than ebay at this point

• bullish assessment David Sacks

  we're a social switzerland we wanna we have a platform approach we wanna work with every everyone we wanna take these basic horizontal components uh the the apps that we're gonna focus on are the horizontal ones the ones that everyone in the company needs um so it's stuff like profiles and identity it's stuff like uh you know uh some degree of file sharing conversations right and so on uh but we're not gonna get into like departmental apps like crm you know that's what our integration or platfor

• bearish criticism David Sacks

  i think the thing to realize about chatter is it's basically an activity feed for what's happening in salesforce right so it's it's useful for getting a record of you know when people change an opportunity from open to closed or change a dollar you see those record changes but that's pretty much all it is like those those um sort of system generated messages are coming at such a fast velocity that it actually drowns out when humans want to just talk into the feed right so yammer is more about co

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  salesforce is coming into your backyard they have like sort of the crosshairs on you guys do they not well they have the other competing product called chatter i mean i see it on the cover of the wall street journal for a year i did maybe i haven't seen in a long time but they were buying the ads yeah they're pretty heavy they're pushing it pretty hard

• mixed assessment Steve Chen

  yeah I think once once you reach a certain scale it's Grant it's more difficult for people to get off of it like people moving from eBay to sell their goods that that'd be challenging you know Craigslist head was dominant in the market for local goods and services but you know you've seen other people come up you know and and basically take at least a portion of what Craigslist used to have from there yeah and yeah it could be death by a thousand different cuts for that matter if they don't chan

• mixed assessment Andy Rachleff

  eBay very poorly run really I mean they they screwed up a lot of things PayPal disaster right fraud everything but but if people want the service it's going to succeed

• neutral fact_claim Andy Rachleff

  one of the the company's Benchmark is well known for is uh eBay yeah and I can tell you that until it went public all of our peers in the Venture industry thought we were Silly they would say beanie babies come on this isn't a real business

• neutral assessment Ben

  the other scenario is probably more likely that with like there's also the possibility with this update they just didn't know how badly it would punish yeah um eBay but I bet you they've been talking

• neutral assessment Ben

  the first scenario is I think Google and eBay have probably been talking and we just don't know it

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  eBay now is a fantastic service.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  eBay now is big in New York, huh? And it's going away.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And we had eBay, eBay now, eBay now, but supposedly that was a failure or mismanaged and is closing down, I read.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  People don't know how profitable it is, though. So one of the big questions is that the businesses have been very intertwined. Right. So not a lot of transparency.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  So eBay right now is worth $70, and at least two-thirds of that worth is PayPal and PayPal subsidiaries, you know, Venmo and all that sort of thing.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  I think it was sort of inevitable when this was going to happen. Inevitable that it was going to happen.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think it's definitely a savvy move because if you just look at the overlap between the businesses, it's getting smaller and smaller, the percent of revenue on eBay that was being driven by PayPal and vice versa.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  so eBay and those players they they provide all the customer support and then that's what kind of what their fee is subsidizing is all that that support

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  in eBay and this PayPal a lot of that is is subsidized through the fees right so everybody has to pay for it I mean I could have a thousand great transactions no problems and I still have to pay 10 to 12% take rate to those companies for what right so that's a lot of money for huge vendors

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I think generally I think generally the um the merchants kind of get screwed over because you know a buyer will just say hey uh I I didn't get the the item it was crap or it was broken and then they just they refund the money back and then they take it from the merchant and that costs you know those chargebacks kind of cost but then they have to get the product back from the person if they're lucky

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  Alibaba did with uh in terms of crushing eBay in China what did they do I mean they brought out they have tbal which uh they basically said there's no fees it's all ad based it basic just destroyed eBay there they haven't been able to get a real big foothold there and tbell is massive

• neutral fact_claim Brian Hoffman

  eBay is going to have some issues and the eBay operates on a global scale and they as the central server are responsible and they decide what can and cannot be sold on their services

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  eBay a couple years ago ran into trouble with this. I I think they were creating on the order of tens of millions of new types of pages targeting very very specific queries. Um and they were so effective at it that they were ranking like number one 2 3 four and five for a lot of the same terms. Uh and obviously Google isn't happy with that. Um and they they got penalized for this and they missed their quarter in the public markets. A lot of people get fired. It was it was messy.

• neutral fact_claim Craig Newmark

  we had some little dance with eBay for a while where they owned a piece and now they don't anymore so that's all been worked out

• bullish assessment Jeff Housenbold

  eBay's one of the best business models enterprise software is a good one but eBay was profitable from day one and yet we were investing in international we're investing in fixed price we were investing in Bill Point which was the competitor of PayPal and and then you know before that split off PayPal is now a you know one hundred and forty billion dollar business and so we had adjacent markets

• bullish assessment David Cowan

  like eBay you're it's winner-take-all

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the average gaming store purchase is about 40 and ebay does about 312 million transactions a year so our tam is about 12 billion dollars

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  and then we'll touch on ebay buying a trading card marketplace in our m a segment and what you can learn as a founder or capital allocator from a niche marketplace forcing ebay to buy them because they kicked ebay's ass yep it's just that simple

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  paypal it was a startup that launched effectively as an involuntary app on top of the ebay market at that time ebay had a monopoly on the auction market and that was the key sort of beachhead market for online payments so we launched on top of ebay they were constantly trying to dislodge us and remove us from their platform and really the only thing keeping them from just switching us off was a was an antitrust thread we actually spun up you could call it a lobbying operation where we would send

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Somebody who's going to use us is going to be an eBay seller, an Etsy seller, somebody that's, that's selling their items around the world.