Maybe it's just me but when I look at eBay I see a combination of luck and turning a blind eye to counterfeiting. You're right they make a lot of money but it doesn't mean she is a genius leader.
She was lucky to be hired at EBay, but growing a small company into $8B in revenues is a highly credible act that validates a certain set of qualifications that are essentially rare.
Nobody really knows what the next big thing is going to be, but some people are strong in some areas. They theoretically make a good team on paper. But it's hard to know what the reality is.
He is content oriented, she is operations oriented, I'm not sure if anyone was behind the end-to-end experience.
Yes, but the eBay flywheel was already in place when she arrived. In a marketplace business it's hard to get started but hard to be disrupted, so while growing the company to $8B revenue demonstrates great managerial skill, it doesn't have anything to do with the skill of being the CEO of a startup without product-market fit. She hasn't ever demonstrated the skill of breathing life into a company.
It looks like she was running it while Yahoo Auctions was competing; in that time frame, Yahoo was a force to be reckoned with, and they had some scaling issues to manage (which is mostly a tech thing, but management can screw up tech things). So, while ebay did have market fit, it wasn't a sure thing.
