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

The personal wealth that's coming is absolutely secondary to the stories that I hear about our users who have given themselves some financial independence as well by starting businesses, and all the lives we've touched positively.

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.

I never had it in mind that I would start a company one day and it would really be successful. I have just been motivated by working on interesting technology

To truly prepare for the unexpected, you've got to position yourself to keep a couple of options open so when the door of opportunity opens, you're close enough to squeeze through.

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.

In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.