Good morning. Ben Weiss here, filling in for Sheryl.
“I am a bit of a boomerang,” Peggy Alford told Fortune.
In the early aughts, Alford worked at eBay, where she focused on mergers-and-acquisitions due diligence. She left in 2005 but, as of Monday, she’s back at the online auction house—as the newly minted CFO.
She returns to eBay as the company continues to return to its roots. The marketplace started in 1995 as a home for quirky collector’s items, like rare Pokémon cards, niche Beatles posters, and vintage leather jackets. But, as it rode the dot-com boom to new financial heights, the e-commerce giant expanded beyond just niche items.
“For a little while, eBay was trying to become the place where you buy and sell everything,” Alford said. “And now the focus is on, ‘Let’s go back to the rich history of collectors and people that need a personalized, customized experience.’”
Instead of trying to compete with the everything marketplace Amazon, eBay has now tried to refocus on secondhand goods, like vintage designer fashion, under CEO Jamie Iannone. Over the past two years, for example, it’s sponsored the Met Gala, where celebrities at the fashion spectacle say they’re wearing Courrèges—and eBay.
In many ways, Alford’s career tracks with eBay’s almost three-decades-long history.
After she left the online auction house in 2005, she entered the C-suite of Rent.com, an apartment and homes rental listings website that eBay acquired for $415 million in 2004.
Then, in 2011, she jumped ship to another eBay acquisition: PayPal. The online auction house had acquired the fintech giant in 2002 for $1.5 billion, and Alford had helped vet the purchase when she was first at eBay, she said.
At PayPal, which eBay spun off into a separate company in 2015, Alford rose through the ranks to become an executive vice president. She parlayed her experience to land a spot on the board of social media giant Meta.
Now, as she decorates her brand new office in eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, California, Alford is focused on advising eBay on one of its newest focuses: AI.
The buzzy tech vertical is something other eBay executives have been touting. Nitzan Mekel, chief AI officer at the online auction house, recently unveiled a personalized AI shopper at Fortune Brainstorm AI in London.
And Alford didn’t discount the possibility of AI deals once she settles into her new role. “We’ll obviously be looking at M&A as well,” she said. “We have a rich balance sheet, and so the ability to make strategic investments in M&A is an area that will be definitely in focus.”
