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
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.
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.
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.
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.
We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.
The revenues came in at $500, and I thought, 'This is pretty good,'
The interesting thing was, I started eBay off as a hobby so it was free of charge.
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.
Technologists come at a problem from the point of view that the system is working a certain way, and if I engage in that system and actually change the rules of the system, I can make it work a different way.
a little bit of the ponytail about it.
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,
In the early days of eBay, I articulated for the very first time this belief that people are basically good.
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.