eBay Millennials Go Rogue, Save Company

Nicholas Carlson’s retelling of how a couple of millennials working for eBay went rogue and flew to Australia for two weeks to redesign the homepage, thus breathing new life and profit into a flagging company, well, it kind of makes me want to fly to Australia to two weeks and redesign someone’s homepage:

Donahoe [eBay’s CEO] came to a decision: “Alright,” he said, addressing Abraham and Palmer, “you guys have carte blanche to do this. Any resources you need, any money, any human capital, you’ve got it. The only thing that I ask is that you don’t tell anyone about what you’re doing.”

Donahoe directed them to work together for a few weeks developing a plan. Then the three of them would meet again to discuss the idea further.

As excited as he was, Abraham had a bad feeling about where “planning” and “road mapping” would lead in a company of eBay’s size — to the slow death of his idea at the hands of the company’s entrenched careerists, who would naturally rally to protect their turf.

But here was a chance to really do something. If he could just move quickly.

Jack Abraham is 25 years old and came to work for eBay when they acquired Abraham’s own search engine company (for $75M!) that he started with a $10,000 business grant out of college. Pretty cool!

Photo: cytech

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