Whatever future you're building, don't try to program everything.

It is not really work if you are having fun.

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.

Be an enzyme - a catalyst for change. As a slogan, I don't know if that's ever going to be right up there with Ich Bin Ein Berliner, or “I Have A Dream,” but there's a lot of truth to it.

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

I've been asked before, "Who are your heroes?" and these types of questions. I always find it hard to identify a single person or a single book or this sort of thing. I've always been forward looking. I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much anything you want. You're able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish. I was given a sense of confidence and I never really felt the need to - or I've never had the benefit, I should probably say - of being inspired by outside heroes.

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.