Before Meg Whitman joined eBay it had a mere 100 employees and was the sole preserve of the US market.
Now it’s huge. With over 9,000 staff eBay dominates the global online auction market – and it’s all thanks to the leadership of one woman and her relentless pursuit of success.
Whitman was born 4 August 1956 and grew up in Long Island. She attended Princeton in 1977, getting a degree in economics, before honing her business brain with an MBA at Harvard Business School.
Her first job came with Procter & Gamble, but she moved on in 1981. Whitman subsequently represented consultants Bain and Company, and then Walt Disney until 1992.
Her business pedigree is second to none. She resuscitated failing brands like Florists Transworld Delivery and Keds shoes, and also had a managerial stint at Hasbro.
When eBay came knocking in 1998 Whitman was initially dubious about moving her family 3,000 miles from their home in Boston to San Jose to work for some “no-name internet company” has she dismissively called it. Yet she was won round by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, who had the Big Idea, but just needed someone with a Big Plan.
Under Whitman’s stewardship, eBay has fought off rivals Yahoo, Lycos and Amazon.com to become the world’s number one internet-only company. Meanwhile, Whitman became the first female internet billionaire.
Whitman reacts quickly to the market’s demands. If a new eBay feature is unpopular, she’ll remove it. When customers complained they couldn’t use PayPal for eBay transactions, she promptly bought the electronic payment service for $1.5bn. And she broadened the site’s offerings beyond unwanted gifts, kitsch memorabilia and second-hand bric-a-brac by courting conventional retailers.
Whitman claims to still reply to buyers’ and sellers’ emails directly. Is she superhuman, like Santa Claus, who apparently visits billions of households in the space of one night? One can only assume that she doesn’t answer every single email from this marketplace of over 100 million users.
One of Time’s hundred most influential people in 2004-2005 and one of Business Week’s 25 most powerful business managers since 2000, Meg Whitman fully merits her place among our Business Pioneers.
