Word: working
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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...
...four years old, the dollar amounts are staggering: $4.5 billion in sales this year, and an estimated $15.5 billion by 2001. eBay is the dominant player in the online-auction world, with 7.7 million registered users bidding on some 3 million items. But other Internet heavyweights are hard at work trying to break off some of the market for themselves. Amazon.com added an auction site last spring. (It appears to be starting slowly; as of October, eBay had more than five times as many visitors as Amazon.com's auction site). Yahoo, the most visited site on the Web, introduced...
...piles. eBay took in $1,000 the first month, more than it cost to run. Omidyar really knew he was onto something when he put up a listing for a broken $30 laser pointer that he was about to throw out. He fully disclosed that it didn't work--even with new batteries--and started it at $1. Inexplicably, a bidding war ensued, and someone ended up taking it off his hands for $14. Meanwhile, the site's revenues kept doubling: they were $2,500 the second month, then $5,000, then $10,000. Omidyar eventually had another insight...
...eBay's only full-time employee, Omidyar soon found himself thrust into a new and unwanted role: grievance officer. Buyers and sellers with complaints about each other were e-mailing him personally and asking him to step in. Omidyar urged them to work things out amicably between themselves. But if eBayers really had to gripe, he decided, they should do it publicly on the site. "I wanted to reinforce the notion that if you're going to bring a complaint about someone, do it out in the open," says Omidyar. "You can't come running to Daddy...
...community angle is one that eBay executives work hard to promote. Users find electronic newsletters catering to their obsessive interests, visit chat rooms where buyers and sellers can get acquainted and swap tips, drop in at a cafe where they can catch up on the latest community news. Everywhere you turn--or click--you find the chipper, boosterish tone of a small-town newspaper--that is, a small-town paper with almost 8 million writers and readers...