Meg Whitman was president and CEO of eBay from March 1998 through March 2008, when she stepped down from her role. During her decade-long tenure, she helped this Internet pioneer evolve into an unmatched global e-commerce engine that continues to influence and reshape the way people trade, pay and communicate around the world.  Ms. Whitman joined eBay when it was a small online auction site with 30 employees and revenues of $4 million. In September 1998 – only six months after her start – she took eBay public, resulting in the company’s rise in valuation to $2 billion.

Ten years later, eBay Inc. is worth approximately $35 billion and employs 15,000 people around the world. It has come to dominate the online space with a portfolio of brands – notably eBay, PayPal and Skype – that generated nearly $8 billion in sales in 2007, and whose services have users in almost every country on earth. Nearly 1.3 million people around the world make all or part of their living selling on eBay.

Perhaps most significantly, the company’s growth under Ms. Whitman’s leadership has not only been stellar, but also steady: Since its initial public offering to January 2008, eBay enjoyed more than 40 consecutive quarters of sequential revenue growth, a record few companies in its class have ever achieved.

Before eBay, Ms. Whitman was with toymaker Hasbro Inc., overseeing global management and marketing of two of the world's best-known children's brands, Playskool and Mr. Potato Head. Prior to Hasbro, she was president and CEO of Florists Transworld Delivery (FTD), the world’s largest floral products company.

In previous years, she held executive positions at the Stride Rite Corporation and at the Walt Disney Company. Ms. Whitman also worked for eight years at Bain & Company’s San Francisco office, where she was a vice president. She began her career in 1979 at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Among Ms. Whitman’s many accolades, The Wall Street Journal named her one of the 50 women to watch in 2005 and 2006; Fortune consistently ranked her among the top three most powerful women in business; and BusinessWeek included her on its list of the best business managers from 2000 through 2004. She is also one of the few women to have been consecutively ranked (2004 and 2005) among the world’s most influential people by Time Magazine.

Ms. Whitman continues to serve on the Board of Directors for eBay Inc., as well as on the boards of the eBay Foundation, Procter & Gamble and DreamWorks Animation.  She earned a Bachelor of Economics from Princeton University in 1977 and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1979.