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Age: 44
Family: Husband, Griffith Harsh, a neurosurgeon at Stanford; two sons, ages 13 and 16
Pre-Silicon Valley résumé, in chronological order: Princeton, Harvard MBA, Procter & Gamble, Bain & Co., Disney, Stride Rite, FTD, Hasbro/Playskool
First email account: 1997
Number of new items listed daily on eBay, May 1998: 60,000
Number of new items listed daily on eBay, February 2001: 700,000.

When the headhunter first called Meg Whitman in November 1997, she had no trouble saying no to the CEO job at a Web company that she'd never heard of. At the time, Whitman was head of Hasbro's Playskool division -- 600 employees, $600 million in annual sales. She had two sons, her husband was head of neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, and she was Mr. Potato Head's boss.

But the headhunter was the legendary David Beirne, in Silicon Valley, and when he called back, Whitman agreed to fly out and talk to eBay -- ultimately accepting their offer. The company has since become a stealth force in e-commerce. While collectibles make up about 40% of the items sold on eBay in terms of dollar value, Whitman says that eBay is the Internet's number-one seller of consumer electronics, ahead of Amazon.com and Buy.com. And it is number two in books, movies, and music.

Whitman spoke first in a conference room at eBay's San Jose headquarters, and then in a car on the way to the airport.

You were premed at Princeton. What happened?

(laughing) I took calculus, chemistry, and physics my first year. I survived. But I didn't enjoy it. Of course, chemistry, calculus, and physics have nothing to do with being a doctor, but if you're 17 years old, you think, This is what being a doctor is going to be about. After that, I had to find something else to do. I began selling advertising for a magazine that was published by Princeton undergrads. It was more fun than physics.

You'd never heard of eBay when Beirne called?

Never. The site was called Auction Web then, with a subcategory called Auction Classifieds, and that's what it looked like. I remember sitting at my computer saying, I can't believe I'm about to fly across the country to look at a black-and-white auction classified site.

What turned you around?

Really, two things. One is that this Web site had created a functionality for people that did not exist before the Internet. And then Pierre Omidyar, eBay's founder, said that people had met their best friends on eBay, had traveled with other eBay users. That people had connected over a shared area of interest. I said, This is huge. But I knew that I was coming to a startup. There were 19 people here. The books were on QuickBooks.

It's funny, because in press accounts, there's still a little of, "Meg Whitman eventually joined eBay," as if the place was up and rolling, and then they needed a grown-up. But you're as much a part of the culture here as anybody ...