Jeff Jordan Quotes

By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.

Great businesses can be built on scale. I think Amazon has built a phenomenal commerce business largely on scale. Their network effect isn't obvious to me, but boy, have they used scale effectively.

There's no single company in the whole world that has a big-scale production base and at the same time has screening and distribution channels. Wanda Group is the first one in the world.

When I started eBay, it was a hobby, an experiment to see if people could use the Internet to be empowered through access to an efficient market. I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of a social impact.

EBay is a great company. There are a lot of good assets and good customers, and the U.S. people love it.

In the early days of eBay, I articulated for the very first time this belief that people are basically good.

The United States is a huge market, and once you get rolling, you can replicate that model over and over pretty easily. Your supply lines are taken care of. You don't have technicians to deal with. You've got your customer base.

The difference between Amazon and us is Amazon is more like an empire - everything they control themselves, buy and sell.

The whole idea behind virtual integration is that it lets you meet customers' needs faster and more efficiently than any other model. With vertical integration, you can be an efficient producer - as long as the world isn't changing very much.

You may think of Google as a single organic entity, but in 2011 it bought a different company every week.

The easier question might be, 'What isn't Alibaba?' The company is only 15 years old, but it has gotten so big over that timeframe that it basically touches every single part of the Chinese economy. I think the simplest comparison to draw is that it is like eBay and Amazon combined.

The music industry really has to learn a lesson from the tech industry about what scale means at the end of the day and learning how to monetize.

The platforms that are big, global, diversified, and both financial and physically enabled are competitively much better positioned than those which are not.

Without competition, Silicon Valley will stop taking risks and will stop innovating.

You can't replicate Seamless or OpenTable for another industry.

With Facebook's IPO, the world learned a new way of organizing businesses around one overriding imperative: to ship new products quickly.

We now understand the distinction between startups - who search for a business model - versus existing companies - that execute a business plan.

Startups are companies that are still in the process of searching for a business model. Ventures that are further along and executing their business models are no longer startups; they are early-stage companies.

In an increasingly competitive technology world, VCs must work more and more closely with portfolio companies to develop superior technology, talent, and operations.

To the extent that anyone anywhere does anything interesting, the question is: 'Why isn't Apple doing that; why is Apple behind in that?' We aren't the Everything Company. We take on a very small number of things that we do very well, and we find that pretty rewarding.

There's nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year.

A platform is essentially a business model that thrives because of the participation and value added from third parties with only incremental effort from the owner of the platform.

I'm in favour of entrepreneurial, risk-taking businesses that create great products and services.

Technology companies tend to operate in winner-take-all spaces and thus adopt a very high-commitment culture.

In a market where funding is hard to come by, if you're scaled already, then you are in a brilliant position because nobody is going to catch up with you.