Whitman, Margaret

1957–

Entrepreneur

Margaret C. (Meg) Whitman is the business executive who has shaped the eBay online auction site into one of the World Wide Web's most successful businesses. She has overseen the site's transition from its roots as a hobby site selling Pez dispensers into a huge, multifaceted marketplace where it is possible to bid on and buy anything from classic baseball cards to real estate.

Whitman grew up in Cold Spring Harbor on New York's Long Island in a middle-class family. She has said that her early interests were in sports, and she didn't begin to think seriously about a career until she enrolled in Princeton University at age 18. Her first exposure to business was a stint selling advertising at a student-run business magazine; the experience inspired her to change majors from pre-med to economics.

Whitman graduated from Princeton with an economics degree in 1977, and two years later received her MBA from the Harvard Business School. She joined Procter & Gamble, then went to work for Bain & Co. consulting firm. Stints at Walt Disney Co., Stride Rite Shoes, and Florists' Transworld Delivery (FTD) followed. At FTD, Whitman served for the first time as a chief executive officer (CEO), and was present when the company devised http://FTD.com, one of the first successful business ventures on the Web. She later went to Hasbro, where she oversaw marketing for the Playskool and Mr. Potato Head brands. She joined eBay in 1998.

In a March 2001 interview with Business Week editor-in-chief Stephen B. Shepard, Whitman said [Page 480]that when a corporate headhunter first came to her with the offer to run eBay, she immediately refused the job, not wanting to uproot her neurosurgeon husband and three children. When the company persisted, she relented and agreed to an interview. The night before the interview, she said, she looked at the site, then known as Auction Web, for the first time, and was stunned to see that, in addition to a black-and-white design, the site gave equal space to a personal home page for the company founder's girlfriend, and to an attached hobby site about the Ebola virus, which was a pet concern of founder Pierre Omidyar. During the interview, Whitman said, she began changing her mind about the job, impressed by Omidyar's description of the auction community that was forming around the site. Some site users had met their best friends through the site. At that point, Whitman said, she began to understand the concept, and to see its potential.

When Whitman signed on in May 1998, eBay had some 750,000 users. By 2001, the site was being visited by some seven million people a day. It handled 79 million transactions in the fourth quarter of 2000 alone. Whitman has set plans for eBay to reach $3 billion in annual revenue by 2005. She led eBay's metamorphosis away from what Business Week called its “flea-market roots” into a company that sells cars, art, electronics, and many other products. In so doing, she has created one of the few profitable businesses on the Web.

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