Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think PayPal had a whole lot of power over eBay other than if they went away, maybe people would have been kind of uncomfortable with the electronic platform that eBay was providing because it wasn’t as secure yet, but I bet eBay would have figured that out pretty quick. Yeah, I think this is a slim scenario but you can imagine a scenario where PayPal finds a different market besides eBay. The money transfer, what they have grown into today which people eventually did become very comfortable with but were uncomfortable at the time. So they probably would have had to ride out some tough times for a while if they had moved away from eBay, and eBay maybe doesn’t figure it out and figure out the fraud detection, and then people are uncomfortable transacting on eBay and they never get everyone onboarded to their own payment platform, and people don’t like using eBay because they still have to use an analog system. Then someone comes along and builds… It all feels farfetched actually. The more I talk about it, it’s like they would have figured it out. Actually, before that, PayPal just never would have moved away. That was the cash cow. Finally, they had found product market fit in this, in being effectively like a vendor or supplier for, yes, probably a vendor for eBay. So what would have happened to eBay? I can’t imagine a scenario where eBay doesn’t win here. I think the only, well, not the only but one potentially negative picture you could paint for eBay here is if you think about over the subsequent 13 years between the acquisition and the spinoff, PayPal grows so much that it has colored 60-65 percent of the entire value of the company, maybe even 70 percent. Certainly all of the growth engine of the company, eBay have been able to recruit and attract and retain top quality talent if it didn’t have this really sexy growth business attached to it. Would eBay have stagnated a lot earlier?…

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