I am a former employee of eBay, and I really enjoyed my time there from mid 2005-mid 2008. At a high level, I'd say many of the criticisms of being MBA and powerpoint heavy are true, and for a period of time, things swung out of balance between technology and business.
I worked on the Marketplaces Strategy team, which is in fact an internal consulting team that helps different businesses within Marketplaces (Core Auction Marketplace, Advertising, Classifieds, Shopping Comparison, Tickets, Verticals, etc). Because I was in on a team of ex Mckinsey/Bain/BCG/Investment Banker types with top b-school pedigree, our experiences may have been skewed, but I don't think it's entirely fair to blame everything on people who have some arbitrary degree. I did not have an MBA at that point and had started at Ebay as a SQL writing heavy quant analyst.
As professional strategists, we kind of needed people like that. I think the problem arose when people of similar backgrounds were thrust into meaty operational roles prematurely or for which they were not really qualified/competent enough to be making important decisions. (say marketing, technology, whatever) With all these caveats in mind, here are the things that I remember fondly or not about my time there:
- Ebay's Marketplace is a living entity, and people working in that business functioned more like central bankers balancing an economy, than they did as product ninjas making and breaking stuff faster. The core business (other than the additional of paypal) is still largely the same as it was fifteen years ago, and you can't blame them for that. When it works, which it does most of the time, it's a thing of beauty. You can count on one or two hands the number of companies whose core markets are as profitable as Ebay's (Google, Apple, Oil Companies, etC) Marketplace.
- Everyone at the time was Ex Mckinsey/Bain/BCG + Harvard/Stanford/Wharton MBA. Like not just in strategy, but across every leadership role across most functions. Pros of this are that people generally had their shit together when it came to being prepared and analytical about decision making. The Cons are that you tend to find local maximums, rather than make game changing decisions, since for drastic generational leaps in technology, you can't logic your way to it. This is why consulting firms' biggest customers are behemoth stagnating industrials, not high tech firms who go too fast and with incomplete information. For a wacky stat, rumor has it that at one point no less than forty or fifty people from the same HBS class of 1996 were all employed as category managers at one point. By the way, this is not unique, on the business side Google/Facebook/etc are largely similarly composed, people just flock to whatever the hotness of the day is.
- Technology was subservient to Business. Obviously in the people pecking order, but also just in who got the final say. Everything was done to optimize revenue, and to avoid massive whole hog investment to change the underlying tech platform. One of the biggest changes that I saw towards the end of my time there was that John Donahoe (CEO, ex CEO of Bain) had started to clear out people who were to wedded to the legacy and started the process of putting technologists into positions of power, which has been a huge positive for the company's ability to execute on innovation.
- Exceedingly pleasant culture. This stems all the way back from the founders, but we operated under the assumption that people were generally good, both our users as well as employees. I rarely witnessed outright Game of Thrones style evil behavior, though I'm sure it still happened. It was just a place where you could not get ahead by being an abrasive jerk, unlike, say, most other Tech Giants led by eng/product folks. Compared to Google or Yahoo, Ebay was always the company that had the oldest average age, and as a result, the maturity of the average person was higher at the tradeoff of innovation capacity.
- People genuinely cared. While you can be as critical as you want about the over MBAness of the whole place, everyone I worked with worked pretty hard and actually cared a lot about users and our products. There were many superstars who not only saw the future as well as people in other companies, but spoke up about it too. The problem was more that the leadership wasn't listening and wanted to keep milking the golden goose. We understood social and mobile, etc back even before Facebook and the Iphone and the broad impacts they would have on our business, we just as a organization could not get inertia at senior levels to support these more disruptive and less short term profitable activities.
- Problems we worked on were really interesting.I can only speak a little about the technical side, but definitely on the business side, the stuff we worked on was then and still now some of the most interesting work I will ever have a chance to work on. As mentioned earlier, our team funcioned like central bankers, as we were overseeing an entire value chain from supply through demand. We spent a lot of time thinking about macro product management issues (in zynga like ways, but with less malice, and more desire to make lasting value) such as whether single horizontal site vs vertical category sites, minute pricing detail of different types of formats, cross border trade policies and their effect on the marketplaces. My job involved writing a lot of SQL queries, digging into unknown unknowns, and then formulating interesting hypothesis and stories to help steer executives in the right direction. On the technology side, I'm not as good a judge of what's interesting or not, but definitely my friend's on that side of the organization said they were working on one of the world's largest webscale databases, so that was interesting. Compared to Google, Ebayhas a lot of challenges around real time synch across the entire transactional platform, plus billing/money transfer, security, etc are all at the cutting edge.
This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on eBay:
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