eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Bob Kagle, one of eBay's first venture capitalists to invest in the company, reminisced about the early days of eBay and also speculated about the promise of global trading on eBay in the future in this morning's "Coffee Talk" session on June 13, the last day of the eBay Developer's conference.
The chat was moderated by John Donahoe, president of the eBay Marketplaces.
Donahoe opened it up by asking Kagle when he first met Pierre. "I met Pierre through Bruce Dunlevie," he said, when Dunlevie and Pierre were at a "Web negative 1.0 company." Bruce said "Pierre's working on this online flea market company." Kagle said the things that struck him about Pierre were the qualities that stay with him to this day - "he's humble, gracious, unassuming."
Kagle had the audience laughing when he described Pierre's first demo of the service: "I have to say I was
a little uninspired at first," he said. "It's crashing about every three or four page loads...no graphics..it
calls itself auctionweb in one place and eBay in the other."
"Pierre said the first thing I sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer...and one man's trash is another man's
treasure."
Kagle said he thought about all this buying, packing and shipping, and asked "So who goes first?"
And then he said Pierre said something he'd remember forever. "You know, people are basically good." "That's a very inspiring comment," said Kagle.
Omidyar affirmed "I often say I founded the company on the notion that people are basically good. When you sit down with another person face to face, it's hard to come away thinking that's not a good person." He said in the past we've been bombarded with negative images. "I wanted to use the power of the marketplace in a way that they treat each item with respect, to see if this could create a functioning marketplace." He said that people are basically good has been proven in the marketplace - "it's been an incredibly gratifying and a wonderful experience."
Donahoe asked them when the notion of economic opportunity came to life, and Omidyar said "Not right away. A couple of years into eBay we had out first focus group." One woman's comments in particular struck a chord with him. "She was living on public assistance...she had found an item and paid 2 cents for something, borrowed a computer and listed it. It sold for $25. She kept borrowing the computer and eventually lifted herself out of welfare." He said It drove home the fundamentally empowering nature (of the efficient) marketplace.
Kagle recalled the woman vividly as well: As she told her story "you could feel the emotions - her voice was almost
quivering - it was an aha moment. We said "wow.""
Donahoe asked how the current personalizing features such as wigets and gadgets fit in with Pierre's original vision. Omidyar said when he was working at General Magic he was supporting third party developers, "so the notion was something I had in mind."
"Back in '95, I tried to make the UIs understandable - of course now you look at item urls and they're a little bit goofy, I think - so long. eBay content should be available where people are spending their time. People are spending their time in lots of different places, so we should enable people to take content they care about and put it wherever they spend their time," he said.
Kagle recalled "it took me a while to get on the external development bandwagon - it wasn't until PayPal came along." He said they decided they should look at buying the company, but at first $300 million, it was too expensive, then at $700 million, it was too expensive..."finally at a billion and a half dollars, we realized it was cheap." This got a laugh out of the crowd.
But as far as eBay has come, Omidyar and Kagle are looking 10-20 years into the future, to a more global eBay. "We still haven't empowered drumsmen in Nairobi to sell their goods to someone in Japan," said Kagle. "I'm very excited about what eBay can be 10-20 years from now if we deliver on that promise."
Touching on that global thread, one of the questioners in the audience, whose company does language translation, asked about the global potential for cell phones - there are 400 million in Africa, he said.
"I'm a huge fan of mobile," said Omidyar. "I think it's a highly capable computing platform...especially in the developing world is important.
Omidyar said "eBay has just begun to have a true impact - it's been 12 years; a long time in Internet time, but (we've) just begun to demonstrate if you put faith in people, people are basically good."
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Julia Wilkinson is the author of "The eBay Price Guide" (No Starch Press, 2006, powered by Hammertap); and "eBay Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks" (Wiley, 2004-6); and Publisher, Yard Salers, http://www.yardsalers.net. Her blog: "bidbits," is at http://juliawww.typepad.com/bidbits
