In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.

A lot of people don’t just go ahead and try things. They’ll have an idea and they’ll say — they’ll convince themselves or other people will convince them that it can’t be done. You know, one or the other. Actually I think that the first is even more dangerous and more serious. It’s convincing yourself that it can’t be done.

I started eBay as an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while I had my day job.

Long-term sustainable change happens if people discover their own power.

If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things.

In the same way that you're driven in your business to keep innovating - Facebook is a wonderful example of constant innovation - think about doing that in philanthropy.

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.