CHAPTER FOUR
Operating Strategies
Why eBay Isn’t Enron
Enron and eBay approached similarly daunting challenges in the late 1990s. Each attempted to be the hub of a massive business network of trading partners, and each attempted to use the potential of Internet technology to build hundreds of individual markets. The first started by leveraging its established, unique position in the energy sector, its extensive existing assets, and its aggressive blue-chip managerial talent and focused on improving vast, high-value, traditionally fragmented, and inefficient markets. The second started with very little and focused initially on the narrow collectors market.
In the years that followed, both Enron and eBay moved to start and scale hundreds ...
