This content was created by Tim Draper. This content was uploaded by Tim Draper. This is a YouTube video titled "Strategic Themes | eBay Merch & Seller Partnership Lead, Sam Bright" (posted 2015-09-18). The excerpt is a single-speaker presentation—likely Sam Bright—explaining how eBay sources and evaluates potential corporate partners. The speaker outlines the roles of strategy teams, corporate development, investment banks, VC firms, tech/product teams, and operating business leaders in identifying, referring, and nurturing partner relationships that can evolve into partnerships, investments, or M&A over time.
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So let's talk briefly about how we source potential partners, because I think this is important for you too in terms of building relationships with various corporate partners. So part of it is strategic— is knowing what strategic themes are important. We have our strategy teams who are constantly following competitive intelligence, industry trends. They're meeting with startups. They're doing startup assessments. They're meeting with people like you to see, hey, is there— do you guys have an interesting idea? Do you have the right team? Do you have the right technology? Do you have the right product that can actually make a real difference in the lives of our buyers and sellers? It's our corp dev team. It's not really— a corp dev team actually may not be quite at the stage to encourage an M&A transaction or investment, but may refer a company to our partnership team to keep an eye on and to start building a partnership relationship. And if there is traction, if there is the ability to scale, then it could evolve into something more over time. And our corp dev team is informed by investment banks who come in and say, hey, look at the greatest company in the world that I have for you to look at, by VC firms who build relationships with eBay and say, look at these companies within my portfolio that we think would make sense for you to do a partnership with or a potential exit. And then our tech and product teams who are informed by all the above. A lot of our tech leaders are angel investors or have relationships with key technical talent or well-known engineers. And so know, hey, they're working on something interesting, and so you should partner with them to see what's going on. And then obviously our operating teams. The leader of our motors business knows motor— the motors industry better than anyone and knows emerging partners within that industry and says, hey, this partner's getting traction. You should go and have a discussion with, with the CEO.
