Greg and I just came back from an event held at USD San Diego where Meg Whitman was talking about eBay, I have been to a lot of events like this in the past and she is really one of the best presenters I have ever met, no wonder that eBay is doing so well…I would like to take the chance and share the key points that have been most valuable for me:

1. focus, focus, focus
2. perfection is the enemy of good enough
3. listen to your customers
4. doing nothing might end up being more expensive than doing the wrong thing
5. what happened in the last ten years was only a warm-up for what is coming in the next ten years

Number one means that I shouldn’t try to do too many things at the same time, and as an entrepreneur who just loves technology and who sees another great business opportunity coming around the corner every other day, this is probably one of the tougher lessons for me, nothing I didn’t know before, but it is good when somebody like Meg Whitman reinforces this idea…

Number two means that trying to make everything perfect sometimes just takes too long and leaves you behind your competitor, this applies mainly to our internal processes…

Number three doesn’t need any further explanation i guess, Meg explained that they introduced the eBay motor section once they realized that people are selling cars on eBay, if eBay would be a reseller, than it would be the biggest car dealership on earth, that’s what I would call a pretty successful concept…

Number four applies mainly to our internal business strategy, how fast do we want to grow and how fast do we expand our operations, Kai was talking about this in his last post…

Number five is another good reason to keep number four in mind…

Besides that Meg was asked why eBay didn’t tap into the shipping industry yet, they have the e-commerce platform, they have the payment system, but so far eBay left out the shipping part, she replied we can expect some announcements regarding this in January, this will be interesting…

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