Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Morad Omidyaris a French-born Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder of the eBay auction site where he served as Chairman from 1998 to 2015. He became a billionaire at the age of 31 with eBay's 1998 initial public offering. Omidyar and his wife Pamela are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network in 2004 in order to expand their efforts beyond nonprofits to include for-profits and public policy...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth21 June 1967
CityParis, France
CountryFrance
I'm a technologist by origin and by training, but I'm focused on philanthropy.
If you give people the opportunity to do the right thing, you'll rarely be disappointed.
I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.
News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.
My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories.
You know, what we used to say around here was that it's a different company every three months. And that's really the Internet business. It's so fast moving that three years, it might as well be 30 years in any other industry. So it has been very, wild ride.
One of the things that I repeat probably every day here is that our success is built on our community's success.
It's a challenge to invest as much as we want,
We believe that business can be a tool for social good, ... Microfinance has already shown that enabling the poor to empower themselves economically can be good business.
a little bit of the ponytail about it.
A well-functioning microfinance bank can actually be a profitable business as well. So it became a perfect proof point that, through business, you can provide an experience that leads to individual self-empowerment.
Advertisers don't want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it's extremely difficult to do that. And very few people today actually read those serious news stories on the Web now.
People naturally gravitate towards eBay because it's the largest marketplace. We're the original. We've been around the longest and so far, we've been able to hold our own.
My parents made me believe I could do anything I wanted to do. They were really into empowering me.