Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But I was like a freshman/sophomore in high school at this time and these were the days right before the bubble burst when I remember my classmates trading internet stocks during breaks between classes in high school in my freshman year. I remember one of my buddies buying a whole bunch of Western Digital stock which was a hard drive manufacturer. Best hard drives there are. Just not using a lot of hard drives right now in computers. I think you nailed it. I think ultimately it was a control play where there was risk that was going on by PayPal having a large part of their business dependent on something they didn’t control and they wanted to bring that in-house. They saw it as an accelerant to their business to make it more reliable that you were going to get paid by transacting on eBay. They were clearly billing it themselves and an opportunity to bring this in-house. It was probably the right one and they took it. Now, what it turned to, I think, was a behemoth that was not in the cards at the time and it would be super interesting to look at what was in Meg Whitman’s head and if they really though that this could be something that they grew independently because I think there’s been a lot of discussion since then, kind of like hindsight is 20/20 that that was the vision the whole time was to grow this new internet business where we can just transfer money anywhere all the time. I think it was the original vision for PayPal but they very quickly realized like wow, there’s this very specific need for when people need to transfer money and that very specific need is after auctions on eBay. Yup.…

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