Meg Whitman is to step down at Ebay after 10 years.
Anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley will have heard rumors of what an inefficient shambles Ebay is internally and how it is devoid of any creative inspiration.
But before dismissing Whitman, consider that she grew a company from 30 people and $4m revenue, to the behemoth it is now.
Like all things in life, the Ebay story is complicated, but here is a stab at a simplified version.
Ebay’s model was very clear when Whitman took over, they needed an executor not tempted by innovation or distraction, a John Sculley type not a Steve Jobs type.
As Ebay grew, it remained focused and held on to its monopoly by building a reputation system that created a switching cost for its users. Ebay performed financially.
Like all monopolistic companies there is a time when the growth starts to slow as it saturates its market and creative input is required to develop new products and explore new markets.
For Ebay, its weaknesses started showing with the PayPal acquisition and the tipping point was the Skype purchase.
Ebay had no option but to buy Paypal, because a fleet footed startup was potentially hijacking their business by inserting its payment system into their own transaction flow, as Ebay users were having to sign up with Paypal, in flagrante.
Paypal could have been a threat to the entire retail banking industry, rather than Ebay. With Ebay’s purchase Paypal’s ambitions were scorched and its efficacy demolished. It was a good deal, however, coming in the middle of the dotcom crash where the premium for Paypal’s potential banking play didn’t show too much.
Paypal’s founders had no place in a company run by management consultant types, they left and the product calcified while the team swelled, several people doing the job that one person had previously.
If Paypal was a way of acquiring innovation, where the company had been unable to innovate internally, the Skype purchase was a somewhat creative acquisition itself.
Sure there was a potentially hijacking threat with Skype, but it hadn’t yet manifested itself, and the asking price was more than the value of buying it just to kill it. Paypal was about banking and Skype about telecoms, big ideas that command big prices when you have lost of users.
Ebay doesn’t do creative, so this was a mistake. Skype wasn’t yet part of the Ebay transaction flow, and its price wasn’t cheap. To justify its price it needed to continue to innovate, something that Ebay is not setup to do.
This is where Ebay is now, a very successful business woman is leaving a company at the time where it needs a visionary.
The amazing thing, is that Ebay has some obvious and profound visionary potential:
1. Ebay is all about Green, the biggest angle any company can have, currently, and yet it has ignored this. As the largest marketplace for second hand goods, it is the worlds largest recycler.
2. Ebay contains a collective memory of the worlds stuff. How we interact with the world is largely through this stuff, yet Ebay throws away this memory by deleting its archives from the web. If you don’t think this is of profound importannce, William Gibson says it much better, here.
What is needed is a visionary to take what Whitman has built and let it flourish again, by building products and services based upon fundamental concepts, like those above. Ebay needs a Steve Jobs.
Ironically, and against all consensus, I suspect that Steve Jobs’s are actually less rare than Whitman’s, they just don’t often get a chance to run a company.
eBay’s Whitman To Retire; Donahoe As Leading Candidate | paidContent.org
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