Word: ebay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Within a few months, Omidyar was ready to take eBay up a notch. He brought in a partner with the business background he lacked: Jeff Skoll, a friend and Stanford M.B.A., then working in e-commerce for Knight Ridder. Together they began to bring in more employees--techies, customer-support staff, finance people. In those early days, eBay--operating then as now out of a bland San Jose, Calif., office park--was a goofily informal place to work. Decor ran to Star Wars figures and giant papier-mache Pez dispensers, a wedding gift when Pierre and Pam tied the knot...
...Omidyar had lined up a venture-capital firm (Benchmark Capital, whose initial $6.5 million investment is now worth some $4 billion). eBay hired a marketing consultant to come up with the company's catchy, multicolored logo and confronted (and later defeated) threats from two new auction sites backed by well-funded big companies: Onsale and Auction Universe...
...eBay had a first choice for its new CEO: Meg Whitman, who had honed her consumer-marketing and managerial skills at Hasbro (Mr. Potato Head was one of her toy lines) and worked as a marketing executive at Disney. At first it didn't look as if she was going to come. She had strong ties to the East Coast--kids in school and a husband who was a top brain surgeon at Massachusetts General--and eBay seemed like a lark. But looking at the numbers and getting a sense of the passion people felt for eBay, she was hooked...
Whitman started imposing discipline fast. She whipped the finances and infrastructure into shape and got the company ready to go public. Within months of her arrival in early 1998, she was leading an eBay team on a road show to win over investors. On Sept. 24, 1998, the initial public offering took place, with shares offered at $18; by the end of the day the price had bounded up more than 160%, to $47. Omidyar, Skoll, Whitman and the rest of the eBay staff were suddenly rich. Back at the office, conga lines snaked through the hallways...
...year since the IPO, eBay has hit a few speed bumps. The site has been plagued with headline-grabbing crashes, among them a 21-hr. outage in June, four more in July, and a 10-hr. shutdown in August that sent eBay stock plunging 10%. The stakes were higher than ever because the eBay staff was well aware that thousands of individuals outside the company--single mothers, disabled people, seniors--were supporting themselves by selling on eBay. "It was probably the single most stressful time we've had at eBay," says Skoll of the August crash. "Poor Meg would catch...