“The main reason for me to leave is that eBay does not absorb innovation at the pace I enjoy, and its focus is narrower than Google. So rather than chewing on variations of e-commerce for the next few years, I’m very tempted to play with radically new stuff: satellites images, machine translation, ways to extract knowledge from giant bodies of data," said Louis Monier (pictured), when asked in an interview recently why he was jumping ship and leaving eBay for Google, Inc.

"And frankly," Monier continued, "I’m dying to peek under the hood and see the infrastructure they have created. For someone like me, it’s the ultimate Christmas toy.”

When asked, by interviewer John Battelle, whether Google recruited him, Monier answered:

"I have known Larry and Sergei forever, I want to believe that I had a standing invitation. All it took was one e-mail to Larry."