eBay CEO John Donahoe Speaks about $2.4B GSI acquisition

Trasnscipt: "ebay snaps up e-commerce for $2.4 billion in cash and debt. joined by the ceo of ebay, john donah donahoe. what is your version it seems you're moving towards being an online or mobile payment company. it almost seems like you should just change your name to paypal at this point. what we've always been about is connecting buyers and sellers. that's what ebay does, connecting small businesses to buyers around the world. that's what paypal does, connecting buyers and sellers to websites around the world. what gsi does is it brings to u.s. 180 of the largest retailers that won't to and need to come online and need help as they try to expand their businesses and g multi-channel and explore things like mobile commerce. we think the combination of gsi and ebay makes a lot of sense. how soon would you see this company stores it seems like it would sort of cut them out of the equation. well, paypal is a wallet. the thing that people need to understand is you can fund your paypal account with any financial instrument. if you want to use your credit card, your visa card or your bank account or a balance or a debit card. so we're agnostic to how a consumer chooses how to fund their paypal account. what paypal does is it allows you to pay in the safest most convenient way where you never share any of that financial information. be it your credit card or bank statement. will you never share that whether you're shopping online or on a mobile device or overtime in stores. so in terms of the effort to bring pay balance to the bricks and mortar, what's the time line on that? you spoke about that hat a conference just a month or so ago. we're finding merchants are looking for paypal to come into the point of sale environment. we're working with the small number of merchants to develop a pilot program where paypal will be live in a few merchant experiences, few merchant locations by the end of the year but we think it is an enormous potential. we'll see. it is still early days. what's emore munormous? you think of all the online payments happening in the world. you would a thought a year ago about e-commerce as being somewhere between 5% and 6% of total offline retail and offline retail being an enormous market. the smart phone or mobile device is absolutely blurring that boundary. so today you can walk into any offline retailer with your iphone and use ebay applications like red laser where you can scan any item in the store, see what's available online across the web, as well as seeing what's available in local stores around you using mylow, which is another company we bought last year. the line between online and offline is blurring and that's what's causing retailers in the offline world to embrace paypal and look for help about how they can grow their businesses. that's why we buy tsi today to further that aim. john, great to see you. thanks so much. john donahoe, ceo of ebay."

John became President and CEO of eBay Inc. on March 31, 2008. In this role, he has global responsibility for growing the company's core e-commerce and payments businesses, which include eBay and PayPal. As CEO, John has aimed to redefine the company as a global e-commerce and payments leader through a strong focus on innovation and customers. Under his watch, the company has aggressively grown payments worldwide, made major strides in reinvigorating its core marketplace business, and established an early lead in mobile commerce. In addition, John has brought strategic clarity to the overall business – selling off a majority of Skype in 2009 – and centered acquisitions on important e-commerce markets (e.g., Gmarket in Korea), as well in burgeoning growth areas like transactional credit (e.g., Bill Me Later) and mobile commerce (Red Laser).

John joined eBay in February 2005 as President of eBay Marketplaces, responsible for all elements of eBay's global e-commerce businesses. In this role, he focused on expanding eBay's core business, which accounts for a large percentage of the company's revenues. John also oversaw a number of strategic acquisitions, including Shopping.com, StubHub and classifieds site Gumtree. During his three-year tenure as President of Marketplaces, revenues and profits for the division doubled.

Prior to eBay, John spent more than 20 years at Bain & Company, a worldwide consulting firm based in Boston. Starting as an Associate Consultant, John rose to become the firm's CEO, where he oversaw Bain's 30 offices and 3,000 employees.

In addition to serving on the Board of Directors for eBay Inc. and Intel Corp., John is also on the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College. In 2010, he was appointed to serve on President Barack Obama's White House Council for Community Solutions. John received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Blodget: 5 Reasons Google Should Buy Twitter for $1 Billion

From Henry Blodget - If Google were to acquire Twitter, Google should buy the company for $1 Billion
1. Google needs a huge new growth engine and Twitter might just fit the bill.
2. Twitter is a hell of a lot more relevant to Google's business than other big Google ideas, such as YouTube...
3. $1 billion is couch change for Google.
4. Twitter could conceivably threaten Google's cash cow--search.
5. Like Google, Twitter is already a verb.
We hope Google has a better strategic rationale for acquiring Twitter beyond buying into the hype.

Twitter has raised ~$55 million in funding from venture capitalists including Institutional Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and angels Ron Conway, Mike Maples Jr., Chris Sacca and Betaworks.

Dealbook: For would-be Twitter Acquirers - Beware of Buyers' Remorse

What were they thinking? AOL’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape, and eBay’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Skype.

From Dealbook:
Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”


All That Twitters May Not Be Gold, Analysts Say
Twitter seems to have gone from obscure to mainstream in about the same time it takes to send a “tweet” over the network.

Despite the fact that the three-year-old microblogging service doesn’t generate revenue — never mind profits — there is already chatter about who might want to buy it.

However, analysts at Sanford Bernstein believe that potential acquirers for Twitter should think twice.

In a research note published late last week, the analysts argued that the Web 2.0 model of building a product and then figuring out how to monetize it has been largely debunked.

The Web is littered with examples of promising but ultimately value-destroying acquisitions, they wrote, citing deals such as AOL’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape, and eBay’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Skype.

The analysts said that monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

Speculation about Twitter has been echoing in the yellow hills surrounding Silicon Valley lately. The chief executive of Google has been peppered with questions about whether the Web search giant might have its eye on Twitter.

But the Sanford Bernstein analysts think Google would do best to steer clear, as it is still struggling to make money from YouTube, a previous takeover target, and the social networking site Orkut, which it created in-house.

Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

Last fall, reports surfaced that Facebook offered Twitter 3.33 percent of its privately held stock, which it had determined was worth $500 million, based on a $15 billion valuation for Facebook that was set when Microsoft invested in the company a year ago.

Twitter balked, and raised funds on its own instead.

How will Twitter make a profit? The company freely acknowledges that it’s not quite sure:

“Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don’t want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world,” Twitter says on its “about” page. “While our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”