Andre H.Founder

United States - San Francisco Bay Area

I first fell in love with marketplaces when I was rebuilding my record collection and discovered eBay. It was 1998, and I was a few years out of school, working at Procter & Gamble in Paris. I finally had enough of an income to re-buy my favorite records that had been destroyed nine years earlier when a mortar shell crashed into my family’s Beirut apartment building during the Lebanese Civil War, destroying everything we owned.

After the bombing, I moved to France not only to escape the war ravaging Lebanon, but also to start fresh, to move forward, away from the hardships of the past. Stumbling upon eBay, I was electrified. This notion of leveraging the internet to connect people to buy and sell stuff — at times, rare and quite hard-to-find stuff— struck me as pure genius. What may have been sitting lifeless in someone’s closet in one corner of the world could become another’s prized possession. A neglected Madonna album collecting dust could become the first building block in rebuilding someone else’s lost collection.

Inspired, I took a leap of faith and helped co-found an online marketplace site for Europe, iBazar, much to my family’s chagrin. They were puzzled by my decision to leave a steady job to leap into the unknown like that. But that leap set in motion what would become my life’s work. eBay acquired iBazar in 2001, and from 2001 until I left to join Turo as CEO in 2011, I helped grow eBay from $750 million in revenue to $11.7 billion.

Turo immediately clicked for me — not only was it a marketplace, but it was a marketplace for cars. As a lifelong car enthusiast, I was thrilled to combine two of my greatest passions. Soon after signing on as CEO, I listed my 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera S on the site — it was car #279 on the marketplace and is still available today, the longest-standing currently active car on Turo.

This notion of unlocking the value of something that had been locked away in a home, a closet, a garage, electrified me all those years ago, and continues to electrify me today. Marketplaces attract innovators and entrepreneurial spirits, those driven, creative minds who look at the world and see possibility rather than monolithic, unbreakable boxes. And they attract consumers who value the one-of-a-kind over the mass-produced, the unique over the generic, experience over pure utility.

We have many miles to go to realize our mission of putting the world’s 1.5 billion cars to better use, but thanks to our amazing team and community, we’ve developed playbooks, precedents, and proprietary data to help pave the way for a bright future.