When eBay founder Pierre Omidyar was asked what the most significant lesson he had learned from his peer-to-peer auction site, he replied, “…that 135 million people have learned they can trust a complete stranger”.
The story goes that Pierre sat down over a long holiday weekend about 13 years ago to write the original computer code to help his fiancee trade PEZ candy dispensers. This turned out to be a fabricated PR story to get some media play in 1997.
Despite the faux pas, eBay managed to survive the dotcom burst of the late 90s and even amassed an estimated $7.7 billion net worth for Omidyar. I wonder if he’d have been so lucky under the watchful and critical eye of the blogsphere nowadays with a stunt like that.
Still, the trust goes on … along with those pesky spam emails I get everyday telling me I’ve won an auction I haven’t entered, or sold something I haven’t listed. Designed to look exactly like real messages you might
receive from eBay, the less savvy consumer might assume a mistake has been made and naively click the link only to find out later they’d been duped.
eBay has built such a robust trust network that even with totally baloney PR, massive market corrections and hundreds of millions of malicious phishing emails, the company still ticks. I’m amazed.
But, as Omidyar put it himself, the biggest lesson from eBay is that we trust each other and maybe that’s the secret.
Tweet This!
Print This Post
Leave a Reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
