EBay's Founder on Innovating the Business Model of Social Change

摘要

My journey as a philanthropist began in September 1998, on the day eBay went public. I'd spent two weeks helping with the pre-IPO road show, and we'd arrived at the New York office of Goldman Sachs. I was exhausted. The actual moment was pretty anticlimactic. We'd always assumed that when you go public, your stock starts trading the moment the market opens, but it doesn't work that way. You have to wait for the bankers to do their initial trades. So when the market opened, we just stood around on the trading floor with nothing to do. Nobody was really paying attention to us. There was an electronic ticker on the wall, and after about 45 minutes somebody gave us a heads-up that we should start looking for eBay. Sure enough, a few minutes later we saw our ticker symbol coming across from right to left. We cheered; we hugged; we high-fived.