eBay BOD Has New Tech Committee, Plus Exec Compensation & More From 2025 Proxy Statement
eBay has released their 2025 Proxy Statement, revealing Board of Directors has new Tech Committee, executive compensation and more as part of their annual report.
Lagging technical performance has been a perennial problem for eBay, with constant business impacting glitches cited by Elliott Management as one of the reasons they launched an activist campaign calling for changes at the company in 2019.
Then CEO Devin Wenig infamously said at eBay Open 2018 that technical glitches are unacceptable and really pissed him off.
Interestingly, eBay has recently made a YouTube video they had previously posted of the eBay Open 2018 interview "private", but luckily I still have an exact quote from when the video was still publicly viewable.
The interviewer received audible cheers from the audience when she asked Wenig:
There've been a lot of site glitches recently on eBay. What are you guys doing to get rid of them?
And Wenig responded:
Here's the simple answer - unacceptable, unacceptable. And we're making a lot of changes. When you make changes there are times that things happen but that's not an excuse and it's not ok with me and this summer in particular there have been a number of issues that directly impacted sellers like people not being able to see their view counts and a few other things and it's just not ok.
I'm extremely proud of a lot of things we've done, I'm not proud of that and in fact I hold my team accountable and it's not important, it's an internal matter but, we made changes to people and teams because shipping product that isn't ready is not ok. It's not ok with me and it's not ok with my team.
So the short answer is it's not like we don't get it. We are making a lot of changes and I want to make those changes, we need to make those changes, but making changes and then having to back up and fix things is not cool and I totally get it. Most of the issues from this summer have now been remedied but I was pissed off.
Mazen Rawashdeh was Chief Infrastructure and Architecture Officer at the time, but somehow managed to escape the wrath of a "pissed off" Wenig.
He was then promoted to Chief Technology Officer in 2019, after a brief period where he co-led Core Product & Tech along with Mohan Patt when Steve Fisher was being shuffled from CTO to SVP Payments "in order to focus on a personal matter."
Patt and Fisher both ended up leaving the company, but Rawashdeh remains as CTO while eBay continues to experience by near daily technical problems and operational challenges.
In fact, Rawashdeh was recently given additional responsibilities as part of an executive shakeup with Chief Product Officer Eddie Garcia stepping down and the CPO role being consolidated and split between him and Jordan Sweetnam in his new role as Chief Commercial Officer.
Liz Morton
That shakeup, and additional pressure on Rawashdeh to picked up the pace on the engineering side, seemed to signal the Board may be growing weary of the continued technical misexecution as foreseeable annual problems (like February being a short month) continue to pose a challenge; site search, listing creation, and other seller tools experience all too frequent bugs and outages; AI tools are not ready for primetime or don't live up to the hype; and friendly media coverage can only had the problem for so long.
Liz Morton
In addition to the constant glitches and technical problems, eBay has fallen behind competitors in key areas of innovations like AI powered listing and livestream shopping.
Liz Morton
The 2025 Proxy Statement adds even more context to the discussions that may be going on behind the scenes regarding the current state of eBay's technical operations, revealing that the Board created a new Technology Committee in November 2024 tasked with oversight of the Company’s technology and risks related to cybersecurity, data management and site availability.
The selection of members to serve on the Technology Committee is very interesting.
Mohak Shroff has a significant tech background to draw on in this position, including his correct role as SVP Engineering at LinkedIn.
Aparna Chennapragada has similar tech bona fides with 12+ years at Google and a current position as CPO/VP Generative AI at Microsoft.
Strangely, Shripriya Mahesh was chosen to chair this new Technology Committee despite being the least technical of the three members.
Her previous roles at eBay focused on product marketing and strategy and since leaving eBay in 2006 her career has largely been in film, philanthropy, and venture capital - not exactly the background you would expect for someone leading this newly formed committee.
Either Shroff or Chennapragada would have made much more sense to Chair this committee, but what Mahesh lacks in technology experience, she makes up for in direction connection to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, joining Omidyar's First Look Media as Head Of Product in 2013 and later becoming Partner Emerging Tech at Omidyar Network.
While serving on the eBay Board of Directors, Mahesh has also actively maintained her position as Founding Partner of Spero Ventures - a for-profit venture fund spunout from Omidyar Network in 2018 with Pierre Omidyar as its sole limited partner at the time.
Omidyar Network has recently undertaken yet another "strategy shift", focusing on the tech culture, governance, and business - particularly around "democratizing AI" with the AI Collaborative and initiatives opposing OpenAI's nonprofit to for-profit conversion plans.
On today's OpenAI news - reminder that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has his hands deep in this campaign too, with Omidyar Network Reporters In Residence & AI Collaborative providing backup. https://t.co/IaDoNO0aGq pic.twitter.com/cYjRn8UYGR
— Liz Morton ~ Value Added Resource (@ValueAddedRS) May 5, 2025
Omidyar stepped down from the Board of Directors in September 2020, 3 months after the eBay cyberstalking scandal became public, but is still a major shareholder and retains the honorary title of Director Emeritus.
Liz Morton
That honorary title does not come with voting rights, leaving one to wonder if Mahesh was perhaps appointed to Board and now put in this role overseeing the Technology Committee as an unofficial proxy.
The 2025 Proxy Statement also revealed that ex-Chief Legal Office Marie Oh Huber received ~$6.5M severance when she departed in 2024, despite ongoing cyberstalking scandal lawsuit and other legal trouble at the company during her tenure.
Liz Morton
And CEO Jamie Iannone earned total compensation of $20,349,650 in 2024, down slightly from $21,560,669 in 2023, putting the ratio compared to the median eBay employee’s annual total compensation ($167,976.) at 121:1.
Iannone's compensation package also includes security provisions for IT support/expenses and personal use of the corporate airplane (occasionally with guests.)
