Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…So I’ll go first with category. I’m going to say business line here, but it’s an accidental business line. Without knowing exactly what the eBay executives were thinking at the time, I could imagine that they thought about this as a feature acquisition almost. “Gosh, electronic payments are a critical part of our product and our marketplace. We’ve been trying to do this ourselves, these PayPal guys are doing it way better. We should just buy them and implement them as the feature on the site.” Then over time, it turned out that that was actually in and of itself a way bigger and better business than eBay itself. Yes, it’s interesting. I don’t think eBay tried to get into the peer to peer payment space. I mean, I think yeah, it was a very Apple thing to do as a very we want to create the best user experience by making sure that we control all the key components of our product. Which is crazy to back up for a minute. At the time of the acquisition, you said about 40 percent of settlements on eBay were being done electronically in total.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.