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Lesson #4: Learn to Expect the Unexpected

Article Overview: “Whatever future you’re building, don’t try to program everything,” says Omidyar. “Five Year Plans never worked for the Soviet Union – in fact, if anything, central planning contributed to its fall. Chances are, central planning won’t work any better for any of us.”

Lesson #4: Learn to Expect the Unexpected

“Whatever future you’re building, don’t try to program everything,” says Omidyar. “Five Year Plans never worked for the Soviet Union – in fact, if anything, central planning contributed to its fall. Chances are, central planning won’t work any better for any of us.”

When Omidyar first launched eBay, he needed to find a way to make it a self-sustaining system. It was after all just a side hobby, and most of his time had to be dedicated towards his actual paying job. Today, eBay is able to adapt to its user needs with relatively little intervention from the company itself. It was thus almost accidental that eBay was readily suited for rapid growth, but in preparing for the unexpected, Omidyar could come to expect success.

“By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth – it could achieve a certain degree of self-organization,” says Omidyar. “Build a platform – prepare for the unexpected…you’ll know you’re successful when the platform you’ve built serves you in unexpected ways.”

However, perhaps contrary to popular belief, Omidyar warns that preparing for the unexpected requires more than simply sitting back and accepting what life throws at you. “To truly prepare for the unexpected, you’ve got to position yourself to keep a couple of options open,” says Omidyar, “so when the door of opportunity opens, you’re close enough to squeeze through.”

In a fitting metaphor for the Internet guru, Omidyar compares life to a software program – something linear in nature. “We all face the temptation to freeze-frame the past, and project it into the future,” he says. However, the future doesn’t always follow a straight line. “So as a software engineer, you learn to strive for a certain flexibility in design. You learn to avoid being locked in to a single solution – to build a platform that can be used for a number of purposes.”

For the first three years of eBay’s existence, the company grew at a rate of 20 to 30 percent every single month, far above the average for any business’ start-up phase. Every time Omidyar and his team were doing projections for growth in order to budget accurately, they would say, “Well this can’t last…there’s no way you can grow this fast.” Despite their tremendous and unbelievable success, Omidyar was still forced to plan for the unexpected. Would their growth continue at the rate it had been? Would they soon reach a peak and level off? Just as he couldn’t anticipate his company’s rapid rate of growth up to that point, there was no way that he could predict the future. Instead, he had to be ready for anything.

Today, Omidyar believes that the Internet is making it even more necessary for entrepreneurs to be flexible. “The Internet is changing everything, and has changed the world in such a short period of time, and will continue to change things in very positive ways that we have yet to anticipate,” he says. “I’m very excited by the prospect of what we haven’t seen yet.”

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Article Tags: contrary to popular belief, ebay, existence, fitting metaphor, flexibility, guiding principles, internet guru, job, organic growth, perce, rapid growth, self organization, single solution, software engineer, software program, soviet union, straight line, temptation



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