John Donahoe at the LMCM Thought Leader Forum

It was announced today that Mr. Donahoe will be replacing Meg Whitman as CEO of eBay when she steps down at the end of March. He gave this talk at the Legg Mason Capital Management Thought Leader Forum last year.

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John Donahoe

President, eBay Marketplaces

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Thank you for inviting me here today. I'm delighted to be here and have thoroughly enjoyed the program thus far. Let me apologize up front that not only did I not bring a video, but I don't have any sound either. I'm certainly not as smart as Clay Christensen, but when he comes up here I'm almost as tall! [laughter] So, one out of four isn't so bad.

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The topic of disruptive innovation and the history of eBay have a lot in common. In many ways, eBay itself was a disruptive innovation. All three of the major businesses that are a part of eBay are disruptive innovations. I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about how eBay got to where it is and then talk about how we approach innovation going forward. Today we're dealing with phase two or phase three of disruptive innovation. We've had the disruption, now we must disrupt our own disruption. That's part of the challenge.