Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.