Stephen Levy: Well, well, stuff like that. No one understand ads, right? But I think it's great to explain it. People, people are fascinated because here's a system. You run these auctions . You're the biggest auctioneer in the world, but the highest bidder isn't necessarily the winning bid, right? And the -- yeah, somehow a big factor in the bid is how good an ad is. How's that work? Right? But that's a way to explain how ads fit in into the whole Google world there. And a lot of people, I guess they just don't get the
Barcelona at a prestigious sounding place so internships have become a kind of commodity now strangely uh there are internship auctions the the most absurd of these was a $42,500 paid for a week-long internship with Anna winter at Vogue uh so these things are offered up at you know sort of society events uh at
But I think the first one was when I was in LA, like shopping for vintage and visiting friends, drinking canned beer in someones backyard, and my auctions were closing, which is just so cool. You get all these e-mails and the auctions go crazy at the last minute, because people think they're going to like sneak in and get a great deal,
So, I think it was probably 2007-- I mean it was only on eBay for like a year and a half-- that my auctions were closing and it was one week's worth of auctions and it was like $2,500 of stuff, which I probably paid like, who knows in total, $100 for. Who knows what my total cost was.
So the idea that people weren't calling it Monopoly, I mean, this comes up in the depositions. before the auctions were added.
demons and other figures in them. and London auctions , in all likelihood 50%, maybe 75%, is
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to We always had auctions .
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to But the online auctions have really helped us put things that we're not sure about on a bigger market that we can get
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to We did it as paper auctions .
and my auctions were closing, which is just so cool. You get all these e-mails and the auctions go crazy at the last minute, because people think they're going to like sneak in and get a great deal, but they actually just drive prices up because all it takes is two people that are willing to spend $100 more.
It must be in the literature somewhere. And I looked through all the literature I could find on auctions and so on. And a year or two later, I discovered actually the basics were in your book, the Roth and Sotomayor book, which was a kind of compendium,
All of those things are really hard to do, but finding rules that tilt the playing field are a lot easier. Warren Buffett says he doesn't participate in open outcry auctions .
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to How long ago did Housing Works implement the auctions that they have storefronts?
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to And also, the auctions were a great way to sort of be a check on that we're getting the right price.
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to So we decided to put them online, and we did online auctions .
But then after four months, Tim and I very quickly fell out, which was very lucky for me, because then I just went straight away after that-- having seen four months of QXL, seeing that online auctions were working, seeing e-commerce was working, thinking I knew a lot more than I did, I thought, right now, I'm going back to that Lastminute idea.
In the U.S. in particular we tend to focus on rewards and patting everybody on the back. In fact fear of loss if you look at let's say, bidding behavior at auctions . People will overbid dramatically more to prevent losing, let's say, $10 as opposed to gaining $10. No big surprise.
And you're like, whoa like it went up $100 in the last three seconds. So, I think it was probably 2007-- I mean it was only on eBay for like a year and a half-- that my auctions were closing and it was one week's worth of auctions and it was like $2,500 of stuff, which I probably paid like, who knows in total, $100
You're up. Thanks for being here, Patton. But whenever I've gotten my hands on movie props or souvenirs, I have friends who do charity auctions for different charities I'm involved in
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to And then it sort of caught fire, and we were able to go, we ended up going online through our auctions , and
So if we start out with a good product and actually have the donations that are high-end, you're going to be able to And we have shophousingworks.com, which does about $1 and 1/2 million a year through our auctions .