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Management Career & Success
WrittenMeg Whitman: How We Grew eBay from 30 to 13,000 Employees
The eBay CEO discusses smart acquisitions and what it takes to keep 193 million passionate users happy.
May 1, 2006|by Margaret Steen
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Meg Whitman's first look at eBay's website did not inspire visions of a multinational company that sells $1,608 of merchandise per second. The site had an online auction section where people sold collectibles, such as Beanie Babies, but it also prominently featured information on the Ebola virus, a passion of founder Pierre Omidyar.
Whitman met with Omidyar anyway about the CEO position — and concluded he was a visionary. She took the job as president and CEO of eBay, a company with just 30 employees, in 1998. Today, eBay has 13,000 employees and 193 million users all over the world. And it has a passionate community of users who send Whitman thousands of angry e-mail messages whenever the company does something they don't like.
The company's dramatic growth was one theme of Whitman's May 23 talk at Stanford GSB, part of the student-sponsored "View From The Top" speaker series. She also discussed lessons she has learned during her career, which has included executive positions at Hasbro and the Walt Disney Co. And she described two major acquisitions for eBay, PayPal and Skype.