Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.
If you give people the opportunity to do the right thing, you'll rarely be disappointed.
Long-term sustainable change happens if people discover their own power.
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.
In terms of my belief that one individual can make a difference - that belief comes from my parents.
My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories.
Advertisers don't want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it's extremely difficult to do that. And very few people today actually read those serious news stories on the Web now.
News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.
In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.
In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.
If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things.
A well-functioning microfinance bank can actually be a profitable business as well. So it became a perfect proof point that, through business, you can provide an experience that leads to individual self-empowerment.
As a philanthropist, I try to help people take ownership. Everything I've done is rooted in the notion that every human being is born equally capable. What people lack is equal opportunity.
In the early days of eBay, I articulated for the very first time this belief that people are basically good.
I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.
I'm a technologist by origin and by training, but I'm focused on philanthropy.