Former eBay Exec Looks to Build Nest-Like Experience for Retailers

Almost a year ago, Healey Cypher was proudly showing Forbes around eBay’s retail innovation lab, a secretive arm of the e-commerce giant that he had built from scratch to develop technology for brick-and-mortar stores. Having cobbled together funds and uncovered a forgotten office space a few miles from the company’s San Jose headquarters, the 31-year-old earned a shiny new title for himself, head of retail innovation, and a team of 17 employees to tinker on ideas like connected dressing rooms and touchscreen shopping mall displays. A few months later, that project was thrown into uncertainty as eBay began preparing for its split from PayPal , laying off thousands of employees and cutting some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in funding that was being funneled to programs like Cypher’s lab. By the beginning of 2015, he found himself with no team and no direction, and the retail innovation lab was later packaged with the eBay Enterprise unit to also be spun off from the company’s core marketplace business.