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.

I always kind of just went ahead and tried things.

I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.

Build a platform - prepare for the unexpected...you' ll know you're successful when the platform you've built serves you in unexpected ways.

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.

By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.

Give the individual the power to be a producer as well as a consumer.