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For me, the international expansion of eBay was the best idea. We are now in 35 countries, and have a huge global network. The second best one was the acquisition of PayPal - the wallet on eBay.

What makes eBay successful - the real value and the real power at eBay - is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.

I think if you look at the commonalities between eBay, PayPal and OpenTable, all three are businesses that built a network in a vertical. Network effect businesses are very attractive businesses.

Guess what? The world changes. eBay has defined e-commerce.

eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system.

Although eBay is a fantastic tool for collectors who want to buy or sell, you really have to have knowledge of items before you embark.

You look at the tremendous success of Facebook. To my mind there is not a lot of commerce going on in these social networking sites. eBay is a community anchored in commerce. It is a commerce site that built a community around it. What has not been proven is if the reverse can happen and people will go to community sites to do commerce.

EBay gave me the framework to discover I was an e-commerce entrepreneur. I touched everything, from shipping to logistics.

I've been lucky enough to be involved in a number of great startups, including eBay and Wikia as an entrepreneur and LinkedIn and Paypal as an investor.

Is Amazon truly the best online buying experience? Absolutely not. Is eBay the best platform for auction? Probably not. Are dating sites like match.com really a reflection of the way people date? Probably not.