In this presentation Sam Bright, eBay’s Merch & Seller Partnership Lead, outlines how companies decide between building, buying, or partnering to acquire capabilities and how eBay applies this framework to its own go‑to‑market strategy. He explains the trade‑offs of each option—control versus speed, cost, cultural integration, and dependency risks—and shows how strategic objectives, capability gaps, and market dynamics drive the choice. The talk walks through eBay’s systematic process: defining strategy, assessing internal versus needed capabilities, conducting competitive landscape analyses, ranking and selecting partners, and engaging in structured negotiations. Bright highlights the importance of understanding the partner’s value to eBay and its customers, prioritizing deal terms (duration, financials, exclusivity, IP), and managing internal approvals. He stresses that partnership deals typically take 3–6 months, require ongoing execution, and must be tracked for performance through regular business reviews. For entrepreneurs, he advises crafting pitches that focus on the benefit to the corporate partner and its users, rather than self‑promotion, and stresses measuring and communicating partnership impact to sustain and grow the relationship.
Chapters
So let's talk about go-to-market strategy, the role of partnerships. So when we think about go-to-market strategy, there's really 3 options, right? There's build, buy, partner. Who knows what build, buy, partner is? Partner's obvious, but anyone? Okay, so build is actually building it internally in-house. That's using your engineering resources, your product resources to actually develop the capabilities that you need within the organization. Buying is actually acquiring, acquiring an asset, right? That's going out, finding another startup, maybe you merge with them, maybe you acquire them to bring the capabilities that you need in-house. And then partnering is building a commercial relationship with a third party. Right? For mutually beneficial reasons. Now, there are trade-offs. Most of the trade-offs here are around time and control when you're thinking about go-to-market strategy, right? So, with building, you have full control over the capabilities that you, that you are trying to bring to bear, but it takes longer, right? Because you don't live in a world of infinite resources. There are, uh, your engineers or your product managers have multiple things on their plate. And so you may not be able to build everything that you want to build as quickly as you want to build it because they have limited bandwidth. With buying, it's usually a significant upfront cost. There are cultural implications that you have to think about as you bring new talent into the organization. And have to be comfortable with whether or not they're going to gel and are going to stay, and whether or not the technology that they bring into the organization is actually going to work with the technology that you've built. But you do get to get those capabilities in-house quickly. Assuming you can integrate them quickly, you get the benefit of them right away. And then you also are able to control it going forward. Partnering is really interesting because partnering is somewhere in the middle in terms of speed, right? It's not as quick as acquiring an entity, but it is quicker than actually building something in-house. And you can exert some degree of control through the partnership agreements that you put into place, but you remain at risk of if you have built a partnership with a third party and that partner is acquired and you're only dependent on that partner, then what happens to the capability that they were bringing, bringing to bear, right? So there are trade-offs for each of these depending on what capability you're trying to build. If it's something that's completely core to your business, you probably want to build it in-house. If it's something that you're wanting to pilot or extend, You probably want to look at partnership. If it's maybe a new area that you've determined that, hey, I'm not going to be able to build this as quickly in-house, or another party has a significant competitive advantage or lead in that market, then it may be something that you explore through M&A. And in all these, a lot of times this isn't like a pure linear progression, right? You'll start with building something and then realize, hey, another partner actually has a lead in this particular area. So maybe I want to partner or pilot a piece with them. Or maybe you start with a partnership, build the relationship, and it eventually turns into M&A. Or maybe you start down the M&A path and you suddenly realize, hey, I don't think either the valuation doesn't make sense or I'm only interested in 30% of what this company brings to bear. I can accomplish what I need. just from a partnership. So here's how we think about it. We think about partnership. We think about what is our strategy as eBay, right? And strategy isn't static because your customers aren't static, right? So as your customers evolve, as your competitors evolve, as the market landscape evolves, your strategy also evolves. And as you determine what the strategy is, then you begin to think about, okay, what are the resources that are needed in order to enact that strategy, in order for us to meet our strategic objectives? And what are the capabilities that we currently have versus the capabilities that we need? And if there are capability gaps that aren't in our organization, is that something that we want to bring to bear via reallocating product or engineering resources in order to build that? Or is that something that we want to do a competitive landscape and see if there are partners out there who can actually help us get those capabilities in-house through some sort of partnership agreement, or is that something that we want to look at from an M&A perspective? And so, I've done both the M&A side and now the BD side, but this is really how eBay thinks about it and how you'll see a lot of corporate BD teams or corp dev teams look at the world. So, as you are building your businesses and thinking about, hey, how can I add value to a potential partner or a potential— build a potential long-term relationship with a more established company, this is how you want to be thinking about it. Because one of the things that I see so frequently when people come and pitch us on partnership ideas is that they spend the first 20— They spend the first 5 minutes telling me all about their company. They spend the next 20 minutes telling me why a partnership would be a great idea for them. And the last 5 minutes, they leave for questions. And I'm like, okay, that's great, but how does this benefit eBay? And not just eBay, but how does this benefit our customers? So you're gonna be much more successful in pitching various companies to partner with you if you do your research and understand what are the ways that the idea that I have, what are the ways that the assets that I bring to the table, whether it be team, technology, patents, product, market fit, whatnot, can actually help meet what their customers need or want. In a marketplace world where there are multiple customers. It may be buyers, it may be sellers, it may be different parties. But you're much more likely to have a better partnership pitch if you come in with that mindset. So then just going through very— our team tries to engage in the strategy formulation process because these things take time. An average deal is going to take anywhere from 3 to 6 months to do. In some cases, it takes even longer. So there isn't an easy partnership button you hit or M&A button you hit. It takes a lot of work to bring all the various resources to bear. So for us, we set the strategy. We hear there are certain ways that the business or the product organizations want us to either accelerate their strategic plans, or they need certain things because they're entering a new business or building a new experience that isn't currently available. And they wanna say, they wanna see, okay, what is out there that can actually help us? So then that's where we get into partner criteria and selection. That's where we go, we do a competitive landscape, We look at what partners can actually provide what we're looking for. And often we'll assess them based on, okay, we're looking for these 3 things. This partner has 10% of what we want, but has 50% of number 2. And then we'll take a very structured tactical approach to determining which partner is probably the best fit. And usually we'll rank order them. So that we know who to engage with when, given the limited resources we have. Then we'll reach out to those partners, or sometimes those partners will reach out to us. Sometimes it's something as simple as, hey, I was at Draper University and I bumped into so-and-so, and they're looking at something that's really interesting because I know what another business leader who I support is focused on and kind of skip certain things and get right to the partner pitching. Other times, it's we go out and talk to partners specifically. Or in other cases, there are partners that are so large and so significant that we spend a lot of time managing the relationship holistically with them. And so we're constantly innovating together to think about, hey, is there more that we can do together? So you mentioned that you're Then there's sort of the deal structuring and scoping. And so, for us, this is about understanding what terms are important to the business, to our business, and also what's the value of this deal. So, from your perspective as an entrepreneur, it's thinking about what terms are important to you, right? And being able to prioritize those so that when you enter into negotiation with a larger company, you're able to know which items you should focus on. Maybe it's the length of the partnership. Maybe it's the financials. Maybe it's the exclusivity. Maybe it's the IP rights. But you need to go into it knowing which terms are going to have the biggest— Impact. Business impacts. Business impacts. And a lot of times people underestimate how important these terms are, right? Because they can end up in situations where they have gotten themselves locked into partnerships or locked into deals without thinking about the ramifications. And putting myself in your shoes, doing a partnership with the wrong player As an entrepreneur, can be terminal. It can drain all your resources. It can drain a lot of your emotional bandwidth. If you haven't— and it can also destroy the value for your shareholders if you haven't thought through, spent significant time thinking through what terms are important and why. And then there's, then there's the execution. Right? I can't just go do a deal and say, hey, this is great. Like, I think this is wonderful. eBay, sign. Right? It's a continual— it's a continual process of keeping the execs abreast of what I'm working on and what my team's working on, making sure that they are constantly bought in on how the deal's evolving. And then finally, after we've converted a term sheet into a contract, getting the necessary approvals from finance, from legal, from marketing if there's brand implications, from product if there are product implications, and from the execs who will actually sign the deal. And then after the deal's done, that's not it. That's when the real work occurs, right? That's when you actually have to go build something. If you said you're going to build an experience, That's when you have to deliver on that. And if you don't deliver on that, you're going to find out what termination— what the termination term is about, which is really, really unfortunate after all the work that you put into it, right? And then for us, it's tracking how that deal is performing, right? Is that worth all the time and effort that we put into it? And for you as a partner, this is even— or for you as an entrepreneur, this is even more important. Given the fact that you will likely have much more limited resources than the corporate partner that you're working with. And so know what value is being generated for you and your business. And know how to measure that. And know how important you are to the partner that you're working with. Are you hitting it out of the park? If you are, you probably have— you probably have more ability to expand that relationship. If you're not hitting it out of the park, it's better for you to figure that out sooner rather than later through getting— maybe it's quarterly business reviews or fairly frequent interactions with your corporate partner so that you're not surprised if the relationship if the relationship doesn't continue. One of the worst things that can happen if you're an entrepreneur is you've gone, you've built a partner, you've got a very brand-name marquee partnership, but you aren't tracking how the partnership is doing. And then you're at a stage where you're about to raise money, and the VCs don't necessarily know you as well as the partners that you're working with. And they find out that the partner that you're working with, it isn't working out. Because they will call. They will call that partner and say, how's it going? Because for them, it's validation of traction and market fit and everything else. If that corporate partner is actually investing their time and resources in building something with you, then that means that they actually think there's a there there. Because they know that they have to go through this process, and there's a lot of time. Time and visibility into how partners are managed.
