You are listening to the Draper Fisher-Jervinson Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar,

brought to you weekly by a Stanford Technology Ventures program at Stanford University School of Engineering.

Gill started out just like many of you.

Only a few years ago, he was an industrial engineer major in college, and after school,

he ended up going to, I want to make sure he's got everything right, to General Electric,

and then went off to eBay.

So we're going to sit down and hear a lot about his story and the insights that he will share with you. So, Gil,

come join me.

So the way this is going to work is I'm going to interview Gil, but I certainly am going to

leave at least 20 minutes at the end for questions for you. So please make sure to save up your

questions and we will definitely have time to answer them. So let me ask you a question to start

out. When you were studying industrial engineering in school, did you have any idea that you

would be doing now, doing what you're doing now, this many years later? I don't think I do what

the internet was.

When I was starting school, we had email, but the internet was probably DARPA net back then.

So I knew I did want to eventually try to run a small business.

And industrial engineering was sort of a good combination of engineering and business,

very much like some of the Stanford programs here.

So it felt like a good way to get both a technical background and some business skills,

but certainly didn't know I'd be working in an ad auction company

or doing startups out in Silicon Valley.

Now, it's interesting, we were talking beforehand, that when you went to eBay, people

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