Meg Whitman was the President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay, the world's largest and most well known online auction site. She left the company in 2008 to pursue her interest in politics.
Meg Whitman was born on August 4, 1956 in Cold Spring Harbor, New York where she grew up as the youngest of three children. Her father, a businessman, was often away from home, leaving Meg and her siblings to her mother's care.
After graduating from Cold Spring Harbor High School, Whitman attended Princeton University with the intention of studying medicine to become a doctor. After taking many of the biology and chemistry courses necessary as a premed student, Whitman decided to change her career goals and she settled on economics. Whitman became passionate about studying business and even had the Wall Street Journal delivered to her dorm room.
She graduated from Princeton in 1977 and attended Harvard Business School in order to earn her MBA. She received her master's degree in 1979 and immediately went to work for Proctor & Gamble as a brand assistant. Within two years the company promoted her to brand manager, a position through which Whitman learned a lot about marketing and branding of company and products, something that would come into play later when she helped build eBay.
During her time at Proctor & Gamble, Whitman met and married Griffith R. Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon and moved to San Francisco with him in 1981 when he took a residency position at the University of California at San Francisco. As a result of this move, Whitman needed to change jobs. Soon after settling in California, Whitman became vice president of the consulting firm Bain & Company, where she ended up working for eight years.
In 1989 Whitman changed jobs again, this time moving to the Walt Disney Corporation to become senior vice president of marketing for the consumer-products division. She would later credit her experience at Disney with teaching her a lot about running a large business.
In 1992, only a few years after she started working with Disney, Whitman once again moved with her husband when he took a job in Boston, Massachusetts. Whitman worked for StrideRite, a children's shoe company, for four years before accepting the position of Chief Executive Officer at Florists' Transworld Delivery (FTD), a job that ultimately dissuaded her from working in the corporate world. She resigned from her position in 1997 and took a job with Hasbro, a toy manufacturer, as a general manager marketing products.
In 1998 a corporate headhunter approached Whitman with an opportunity to work for a small internet start-up company in California's Silicon Valley. The company was named Auction Web, an online auction site started by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar. Originally intended to sell and trade pez dispensers, Auction Web had quickly become a leader in online auctions and had grown too big for Omidyar to handle. He was looking for someone to help direct the company's growth and hired, along with investors from Benchmark Capitol, a headhunter to find a qualified candidate.
Whitman was originally reluctant to accept, but, after spending a day with the Auction Web/eBay company, she agreed to take the job. She joined eBay in March 1998 and immediately began restructuring the marketing, graphics, and online approach of eBay. Eager to appeal to both individual sellers as well as larger companies and stores, Whitman helped guide the changes to create equality in the marketplace. Once all the necessary changes were in place, Whitman took eBay public in September of 1998. Within hours of their first public offering, eBay was listed as one of the fastest growing internet companies in the world. Whitman quickly became a miliionaire.
Within a few short years, Whitman helped eBay grow their customer base from 750,000 to over seven million. Although other internet auction sites tried to follow the eBay formula, the company had already established itself as a leader in the industry and remained almost untouchable. Whitman continued to restructure eBay services, making sure that the customer (the buyer) was always protected and that the site maintained a degree of quality control over the merchandise listed. Satisfied customers continued to spread the word, bringing more business to both eBay and the sellers on site. It was a win-win formula for everyone.
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