Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher
Author:Adam Fisher [Fisher, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-07-09T23:00:00+00:00
BOOK THREE
NETWORK EFFECTS
We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
—MARSHALL MCLUHAN
The Check Is in the Mail
eBay’s trillion-dollar garage sale
The web, suddenly accessible by ordinary people thanks to Netscape, sparked a gold rush. Almost everyone had the same big idea: to sell things on the internet. Up in Washington State, Amazon sold books. But down in Silicon Valley, something stranger and more surprising was being sold. What we now know as eBay started out as a philosophical experiment, utopianism in the form of a website. Back in 1995 General Magic employee Pierre Omidyar was a young, ponytailed idealist: He believed in the power of markets to improve people’s lives. So over Labor Day weekend he hacked together an online marketplace. It was powered by free (and flaky) open-source software—and the honor system. Strangers mailed each other money and stuff with no guarantee that they would get what they were expecting. The founding conceit was that people were basically good, and if you gave them the opportunity to be good, they would prove to be so. Remarkably, people on the internet were good. The checks were in the mail. Even more astonishing is how thoroughly the often barely functional site trounced the auction-site competition. Something about eBay made people loyal, too.
Jeff Skoll: In 1995 when I graduated from Stanford Business School, I was living in a house with five guys that were sort of internet focused, even though ’95 was still a little bit early on the internet trail. I knew Pierre from just hanging around, and when Pierre talked about the idea of eBay—or AuctionWeb, as Pierre called it back then—I wasn’t quite so sure. Pierre said, “We’re going to build this thing, and it’s going to get people selling things to each other.” And there were other players coming along. Amazon was around, there was a CD site called Music Boulevard…
Brad Handler: There were fifty other sites that were in the actual space that eBay was in.
Mary Lou Song: One site comes to mind which actually took physical possession of the goods: So basically the seller has an item, they send it to the company, the company puts the item up for bid, and then turns around and delivers it to the buyer. That was OnSale.
Jerry Kaplan: OnSale was very much what Overstock.com is today, but with an auction component. That was the concept. We ran a test and somehow got some publicity and basically said, “Get on your computer, dial into America Online, connect to this thing, and you can put in bids.” We didn’t know if it was going to work, and people loved it. They went nuts over it—of course it was a total nerd-ball crowd. That was early 1995. But when I first took this idea around to the venture capital community, nobody thought that it was a good idea at all! You have to understand that the computer community at that time was kind of countercultural, that’s where most of those people came from.
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