The Oh, Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host Brian McCullough. Happy Memorial Day

everybody. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite startup stories of all time.

Early on in my career, I read about the eBay founding story, and it was very inspirational to me. I very much relate to the notion of

a side project, a hobby, accidentally becoming a business. In many ways I'm an accidental

entrepreneur myself. I went to film school not business school and my first

company started as a side project that morphed into a real company when I brought it online.

So I can identify with something taking off despite the fact that the founders really don't know what they're doing

or what they're getting into, and the idea sort of takes on a life of its own.

In subsequent startups I founded, I always had my teams read the book that a lot of this chapter is based on

It's called The Perfect Store inside eBay by Adam Cohen because that book so vividly captures the startup experience at

least the way I've experienced it. Every startup tries to show the world a face that is competent and confident and

professional but if you've ever worked on a startup then you know that you're

really spending a lot of time trying to hide the fact that everything you're

doing is really being held together with Scotch tape if you're lucky.

In previous episodes we've discussed at length that the very notion of e-commerce when it started,

of buying and selling goods online, was a dubious proposition to a lot of people for a long time.

But when you think it through with any degree of rigor,

then you can obviously come to the conclusion that this is obvious.

This is just another way of selling something you present a

good or service people give you their credit cards you ship it to them online

commerce is just like catalog commerce like a Sears catalog for a new era.

So as the notion of e-commerce caught on, people logically started thinking of all the various ways that transactions could take place online.

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