Labor Day weekend, 1995. Pierre Omidyar posted AuctionWeb on a server he was already paying for anyway. The first item sold was a broken laser pointer — he asked $1, got $14.83. He emailed the winning bidder to confirm the device was indeed broken. The buyer replied that he collected broken laser pointers. Omidyar later said that was when he understood the internet could connect any buyer with any seller for anything. Within a year he'd built the Feedback Forum, a simple rating system that let strangers trust each other across distances they'd never bridge in person. That 1996 feature was architecturally more important than the auction format itself. Trust was the product. The auction was just the interface. By 1998, the platform had outgrown its founder's operational capacity. Meg Whitman arrived as CEO, the company went public, and transaction volume began doubling annually. The 2002 PayPal acquisition gave eBay control of its own payment rails — a vertical integration play that looked brilliant at the time and eventually became a constraint the company had to undo in 2015 when it spun PayPal out again. The Skype acquisition in 2005 for $2.6 billion was the exception that proved the rule — a costly detour into communications that added nothing to the marketplace and was eventually sold at a significant loss. The lesson landed hard. Every strategic move since has been evaluated against one question: does this make the core marketplace better?