Ron Gura, head of eBay’s Innovation Center was guest lecturer at Ono Academic College’s Entrepreneurship Club, and revealed the key to success

 

The team is the most important thing and a manager’s key to success is aiming to build a team of people who are better than you, head of eBay’s Innovation Center in Israel Ron Gura told Ono Academic College’s Entrepreneurship Club. “If I succeed in choosing people who are better than me, whatever concerns arise will simply fall to the side,” he explained to his audience. This has been key to him in the process of establishing and managing The Gifts Project, which was acquired by eBay in 2011. Contrary to management intuition that suggests a manager has more knowledge and background than the team, he says that his approach ensures having the resources to achieve success. “My message is that who I work with is about 100% of what I have. Before having a design, before having customers, you start out by building up something with just a team of friends.”

 

Gura explains that a successful team stems from this sort of small group of people who have some kind of technical background but not necessarily with a lot of experience. “They are simply people who like to do what they do.  They are people who enjoy working together, who come to work and don't even feel like they're working and aren’t watching the clock.”

 

The Gift Project, founded in 2009, became a great success, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. “Seven weeks after launching the full application, we found it didn’t work very well. The credit card system was not exactly secure. When the gift arrived, it wasn’t delivered by messenger with a greeting card and beautifully wrapped. In the world of consumerism on the Internet, the issue of intellectual property is less important. It is important to understand the market as quickly as possible, what works and what doesn't work.”

 

Relating to the process of raising funds, Gura recommended for the Ono Academic College audience that entrepreneurs raise what is needed but not more and not all at once: “I’m glad that I didn’t take 2 million dollars all at once and divided it into stages.”

 

He concluded by suggesting that a company celebrate every little success. “Everyone loves to celebrate. But I say, celebrate everything: the first 100 users; the first contract – knowing that there will be harder days, days when we don’t know how things are going to work out, when it seems like everything might break down tomorrow. Those days when we are on top should be remembered to give us strength to get through the harder days.”

 

The Entrepreneurship Club of Ono Academic College meets once a month and allows students, alumni, faculty and friends of Ono Academic College to participate in lectures on entrepreneurship from industry leaders, present projects and meet other entrepreneurs in town. The club was launched in January 2011.