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
You have to really believe in what you're doing, be passionate enough about it so that you will put in the hours and hard work that it takes to actually succeed there, and then you'll be successful.
Don't let people who you may respect and who you believe know what they're talking about, don't let them tell you it can't be done because often they will tell you it can't be done, and it's just because they don't have the courage to try.
I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much do anything you want. I always kind of just went ahead and tried things.
When I started eBay, it was a hobby, an experiment to see if people could use the Internet to be empowered through access to an efficient market. I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of a social impact. It was really about helping people connect around a sphere of interest so they could do business.
I started eBay as an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while I had my day job.
One of the things I tend to do is open myself up to a variety of voices. I try to expose myself to the kind of culture shock that occurs when you talk to people who speak a different language.
By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.
I've been asked before, "Who are your heroes?" and these types of questions. I always find it hard to identify a single person or a single book or this sort of thing. I've always been forward looking. I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much anything you want. You're able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish. I was given a sense of confidence and I never really felt the need to -- or I've never had the benefit, I should probably say -- of being inspired by outside heroes.
We ought to be looking at business as a force for good.
In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.
If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things.
In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.
Be an enzyme - a catalyst for change. As a slogan, I don't know if that's ever going to be right up there with Ich Bin Ein Berliner, or “I Have A Dream,” but there's a lot of truth to it.
A lot of people don't just go ahead and try things. They'll have an idea and they'll say - they'll convince themselves or other people will convince them that it can't be done... the first is even more dangerous and serious. It's convincing yourself that it can't be done.