When you don't know what to expect, prepare for the unexpected.

I just kind of had this naive approach to - well, gee, you know, why not. I’ll just go ahead and do it.

We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.

When you look at the accomplishments of accomplished people and you say, “Boy, that must have been really hard,” ... that was probably easy. And conversely, when you look at something that looks easy, that was probably hard. And so you’re never going to know which is which until you actually go and do it.

What we say here every day is that our success is really based on our members' success, our community's success. We've created an infrastructure and laid some basic ground rules to create this marketplace.

eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system.

When I started eBay, it was a hobby, an experiment to see if people could use the Internet to be empowered through access to an efficient market. I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of a social impact. It was really about helping people connect around a sphere of interest so they could do business.