eBay
Stephanie Tilenius is vice president and general manager for merchant services at PayPal, an eBay company. PayPal enables any individual or business with an email address to securely, easily and quickly send and receive payments online.
An eBay employee since early 2001, she is responsible for the strategy, growth, and financial performance of PayPal's merchant services group, the business unit providing payment solutions to small and large e-commerce merchants.
Before eBay, Tilenius was senior vice president of sales and marketing for PlanetRx.com, a company she co-founded and took public on the NASDAQ in 1999. Previously, she was vice president of business and product development for Firefly, a software start-up that was sold to Microsoft Corp. in 1997. Early in her career, Tilenius spent several years as an investment banker at Deutche Bank Alex Brown, primarily focusing on software and telecom. In this capacity, she worked on the Initial Public Offering for America Online in 1992, and she subsequently decided to join its corporate development group where she managed mergers, venture investments and strategic partnerships.
Tilenius graduated with high honors from Brandeis University where she earned both her bachelor's degree in economics and her master's degree in international finance. She also received her master's in business administration from Harvard Business School. Tilenius also spent time as a presidential management intern through a two-year fellowship with the U.S. government where she worked for Treasury Secretary Brady and Carla Hills on Japan-U.S. trade negotiations.
Related Links: www.paypal.com
Last Updated: Thu, May 25, 2006
Stephanie Tilenius, vice president and general manager for merchant services at PayPal, an eBay company, shares in detail the story of the acquisition of Auction Co, a successful company in Korea. This brings to life management characteristics and values and execution, she says. Tilenius defines the situation, the process within eBay, and eBay's response to a different market place.
Reedy talks about how the eBay team came to the rescue in September 2001. The team was given only three days to launch The Auction for America, which required 20 hours alone for coding and additional time for testing. One hundred people worked on this over the weekend and they had the product one hour before the deadline. No one said we can't do this, she says. The teams had to collaborate and work together to get this done.
Reedy talks about the importance of being flexible. In a high growth company, like eBay, opportunities arise everyday and if a company is not flexible it will miss these opportunities, she says. Similarly, as issues arise, eBay is flexible and willing to tackle these issues, she adds.
Reedy tells the story of the brand name eBay. The founder,Pierre Omidyar, wanted to call the website "echobay" but it was taken, so he went with eBay.
Reedy talks about how eBay continuously improves. She gives examples from within eBay to illustrate how they execute improvement.
Reedy explains that another principle instilled in the people at eBay is to develop and execute the right strategy at the right time. If you execute the wrong strategy at the wrong time, you will not have success, she adds.
An important area for improvement is cross-border trade, which includes shipping, customs and language translation, says Tilenius. Creating businesses around eBay to continue to grow the trading community (e.g. Auction Drop) is also important. Some of the key questions the company attempts to answer are: How do we convince people of the safety of the site, and how do we make it easier to use?
eBay has about 5000 pages that must be localized, says Tilenius. Hence, eBay plans to reduce pages, keeping the important functionality and making it easier to go from country to country. However, the countries where eBay is present have more similarities than differences. Thus, eBay only has to be customized in a few areas, including language and message boards, she adds.
Reedy shares a commercial that is going to air later in the week. She talks about eBay's vision - providing a global online trading platform - and the value proposition - making inefficient markets efficient by bring back the fun and the passion.
Tilenius talks about the long term plan of eBay, which is to have a language translator so that there is one platform and one user ID to trade across borders. eBay has not found the technology to do this yet, she says.
eBay is in 28 countries and the company is looking into cost effective ways to enter new markets, says Reedy. PayPal will attack Europe next year. Typically, eBay, being global, can enter new countries easily; in the case of PayPal it will take more effort. When making an acquisition eBay lets the business strategy define the process or platform. Over time they look for ways to move the country onto the platform as long as it does not put the country or the business model at risk.
Tilenius talks about how eBay has the technology for wireless integration but the demand for wireless notices is not high enough. In Germany they have a wireless provider who sends users messages if they have been outbid, she says. Besides Korea and Germany, other countries do not have high penetration for wireless trading, she adds.
Reedy talks about eBay's site statistics - on an average day a vehicle is sold every 2 minutes, a car part or accessory sold every 3 seconds, diamond jewelry sold every 83 seconds, and timberland shoes sold every 10 minutes. eBay brings buyers and sellers together, she says. The company has 83 million registered users with net revenue pf $531M in Q3 2003.
Reedy explains that eBay has 670 million page views a day, 120 million searches, and 4 billion database calls. She talks about how eBay uses a special platform to handle this large volume.
Tilenius talks about eBay's late launch into Japan when Yahoo! was already Number One in Japan with 500,000 listings. This made it difficult for eBay and they made the decision to exit. We believe that you have to be number one in the market or it isn't worth investing in, she says.
Reedy talks about what the success in the engineering organization of a high growth company is. The business has two levers: the website, which is the product, and the product enhancements that eBay does as well as the marketing. The engineering group is pragmatic and focuses on value. Time to market is very important. The technology is made for the business and for the future, she says,and is flexible and continuously improves.
Reedy talks about the importance of rapid execution with integrity and confidence: executing with a vengeance. Another important principle, she says, is to keep the community front and center in the decision making. The founder understood the power of the community and till this day the community is at the center of everything that eBay does, she adds.
Tilenius talks about the lessons learned as eBay has grown. These include: 
Reedy talks about eBay's global presence in over 27 countries. eBay has partial ownership in some companies, she says. Eighteen countries were running an eBay platform in 1998, for example, when eBay was only operating in the US.
Lynn Reedy, senior vice president of product, development and architecture at eBay, sets the stage for the talk about eBay, its history, leadership and how to be successful at a high growth company.