Warwick's Books Presents Meg Whitman Part One of Four

But people were a little skeptical at the beginning when we went on our IPO road show. Our initial public offering road show, the number one reason that investors did not invest was they didn't actually trust that you would send your money to someone 3,000 miles across the country and you would get the good. They were sorry they did not invest. But if you think about it, we built a company of massive proportion on that very simple notion. The other thing that I think we saw every single day at eBay was the power of connecting over a shared area of interest. Collectors were the first to come to eBay, whether you collected teapots or used car fenders or advertising memorabilia. In fact, when I joined eBay, 80% of all the items on the site were actually Beanie Babies. Do you remember those soft toys? This was not a fact we widely shared. But what happened was people were enabled to trade without regard to time and distance. They were able, if you were a collector of teapots, prior to eBay your trading area was right here around San Diego. All of a sudden you could look for teapots in California, in the United States, and around the world. And you often met your very best friends on eBay. You met people who liked the same stuff you did. And I'll never forget in the earliest days, people would say my husband or my wife is a collector of XYZ, and he found people who like the same weird stuff he did. But I think that notion of people being basically good was essential to what we saw at eBay. And I'll give you another way that that manifested itself. We had the idea around September 11th that there was a way to actually use this trading platform to raise money for causes. And we were inspired like so many Americans around 9/11. What could we do to help? Being out here in California, didn't you feel a little powerless? I felt powerless. And so we decided, could we create a trading platform that was actually for charitable giving? So we launched a subset of eBay which is called Giving Works. And what you can do on eBay is you can list an item for sale for the benefit of charity. So let's say you want to list your son's used bicycle that he has outgrown, you can say in your listing that you want 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100% of the proceeds that you get from the sale of the item to go to a charity of your choice. Eight years later, seven years later, eBay users, not eBay, eBay users have generated $170 million for the benefit of 177,000 different charities. That is the power of many. And just for perspective, if we were a charity, we would actually be the ninth largest charity in the world based on that $170 million of donations every year. And yet it's not centrally controlled, it's all bottoms up, and we give people a lot of choice about how to list. And so that's the kind of thing we saw every single day. Believe that people are basically good, create a trading platform, and let the users pioneer how they want to use it. I think the other thing that I would say in terms of eBay and believing that people are basically good, one of the unintended consequences of eBay is one of our biggest categories of sellers were sellers who were disabled. Because think about this, on eBay no one knows when you're disabled. They can't see you. And if you list your item well, you take a good photograph, you answer your own customer support, you can be very successful on eBay. And sometimes if you are disabled, maybe you need help pick packing and shipping or selecting the items. But I'll never forget one story. We had an annual gathering at eBay called eBay Live, which was a land-based, real live gathering of eBay users. In fact, the first one was in Anaheim, California, where 7,000 eBay users showed up live and in person. We went to Orlando, Florida, we went to New Orleans, Louisiana. And at one, then I got an email from a woman who said, listen, I'm going to be there with my son who's an eBay user, and he'd like very much to meet you. I said, great, come to the green room after my big opening speech for eBay Live, I'd love to meet you and your son. So she comes in and her son is in a wheelchair, obviously has pretty severe cerebral palsy, about 17 years old. So we start chatting and she said, my son is an eBay seller, he has 10,000 positive feedback points on eBay, meaning he's done 10,000 positive transactions. And he said, it's changed our life. I've quit my job to help my son sell on eBay, my husband has quit his job to help sell on eBay, and we are doing better than we ever did before. I said, that's just remarkable, what a great story. And she said, yes, but you know, the real difference on eBay, Kyle is not disabled. And that's the kind of story that we heard every single day. So that's the first value I'd like to talk about. I think the second one is about results. You know, results actually matter in life. You have to deliver the results. I'll tell you a story about my first job, which was at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, after I graduated from Harvard Business School. I showed up as a brand new, young, what we call brand assistant in the marketing department. And I showed up my first day at work feeling quite proud of myself, newly minted MBA. And the brand manager who I was assigned to, we were running a product called T4, test market 4 brand, which actually turned out to be Ivory shampoo. You will notice there is no Ivory shampoo today. Didn't work out that well, actually. But in any case, he said to me, your first assignment, Meg, is I need you to figure out how big the hole in the shampoo cap is going to be. I said in my brain, I did not say this out loud, you must have people who know how to do this. I mean, haven't they marketed shampoo for years? Isn't there someone else who could do this? But in fact, it was of course an important lesson for a new marketer to learn. And that night I went home and I said to myself, I'm going to do the very best job that has ever been done in figuring out how big the hole in the shampoo cap should be. We're going to do focus groups, we're going to do quantitative research, this is going to be the best piece of work Procter & Gamble has ever done. And it has been a touchstone for me as I have been in my career. No matter what you are asked to do, if you do it to the very best of your ability, I ultimately think you do get the credit. Results really do matter. And my very good friend Mitt Romney, many of you may not know, but at Bain & Company where I went after Procter & Gamble, my first boss and my boss for most of the 10 years I worked there was Mitt Romney. And of course that's how I ended up working on his presidential campaign. But he used to say to me, Meg, if you don't care who gets the credit, if you are constantly in the neighborhood of good things happening and you deliver the results, ultimately you will get the credit. And that was another touchstone for me. And so I always thought, just control what I can control, put one's head down, deliver the results, and that will make all the difference. I think the third value that I'd like to talk about is about relationships. You know, in life, relationships really matter. Relationships with your spouse or significant other, relationship with your children, relationships with your co-workers. You never know when it's going to come around. There will be turnaround, and you will do something great, someone will do something great for you. And I've always tried to remember that those relationships matter. And I was struck last night, we were doing a fundraising event in Northern California for my campaign, and our top fundraisers were around the table. The top 11 fundraisers in the entire state of California, how many of them were eBay executives? Actually, four. And they, you know, these are people who have not raised money for political candidates before. I mean, they don't know anything about this, they're not particularly political. But they were there because we'd got to know each other, we'd had a bond, we'd had a shared mission and a shared sense of values for the 10 years that we worked together. So I think a lot about that. And particularly as a working mother, you know, gosh, balance in life is really hard. People ask me all the time, how have you balanced being a working mother, being married to a neurosurgeon with two teenage boys? And I always say, with great difficulty. I mean, this has been really challenging on many different occasions. But what we did is we tried to be a team, we tried to play as a team, we tried to reserve the weekends for our family. And finally, it really helped me when I gave up the notion of being the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect hostess, the perfect CEO, the perfect fashion plate. Things in life, focus matters. And when I gave up that notion, it actually gave me a certain amount of peace. And we live in a very nice house, I will say it does not look like Martha Stewart just left. In one of the great quotes, when I was being interviewed by Fortune Magazine a number of years ago, I said, I'm frumpy, but I deliver. And you know, I have some friends who are absolutely beautifully dressed at all times. Don't you have friends like that? They just look great every moment. It does not happen by itself. That, like everything else, takes work and takes focus. And I just chose to focus on being the CEO of eBay, running businesses over time, and trying to hold the family together.