“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Commerce has always been part of my life, but eBay was the inflection point.
My dad was a head teacher and my mum ran a school office. To help fund our holidays, we turned our trips to France into antique-sourcing missions. We’d spend our days at brocantes, hunting for bargains.
The arrival of eBay was a zero-to-one moment. Before eBay, we sold at local fairs to whoever happened to walk by. Suddenly, we could sell to anyone in the world.
As a young kid, I saw what my parents were doing. My dad told me that if I wanted a PlayStation 2, I had to be the one to buy it. We’d find something I could afford in France, bring it home, list it on eBay, and often sell it to someone in the US. (Customs at times flagged our items as munitions. A story for another time.)
Running the store taught me a lot about the internet. My dad named our eBay account “Murdo’s Bunker,” which became our brand. We themed everything around it — even the listing backgrounds, which I customized with basic HTML. There are probably still artifacts of it online somewhere (although, it seems eBay has purged most of that history).
More importantly, I thought: “Holy shit! You can sell anywhere. Anyone can participate online.” That was the first time I realized I could edit and modify “the Internet.”
The auction format in particular created tension. Sitting at a computer with my dad, watching the countdown and seeing bids come in, was always exciting. Once, a WWII postcard set I bought for €10 sold for around €300.
I made money, saw it come into my bank account, and bought my own things. For a 12-year-old, shipping goods across the world felt surreal. It showed me what’s possible when you move fast and use the tools at hand.
My enthusiasm for crypto, tenure in Walmart’s Payments team, and role at Shopify are all the result of the single dot created by those early years in commerce.
Looking back, it’s clear how much that shaped my approach to life and work. Finding a market, building a brand, crafting the buyer’s experience, tinkering with code, and participating in global commerce as a kid was formative. Most importantly, it taught me you don’t need permission; you can just do things.
Thanks to jd for pulling this old story out of me.