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
What makes eBay successful - the real value and the real power at eBay - is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.
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.
The interesting thing was, I started eBay off as a hobby so it was free of charge.
eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system.
What makes eBay successful.. the real value and the real power at eBay is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.
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.
By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.
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.
You'll fail at some things - that's a learning experience that you need so that you can take that on to the next experience. What you learn from those challenges and those failures are what will get you past the next ones...I was the pretty consistent bull and the cheerleader on eBay actually.
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.
I have always been of the opinion that the right kind of journalism is a critical part of our democracy.
What I'm really focused on is connecting people around shared interests, so together they can make good stuff happen. I'm more focused on helping people discover their power as individuals, but through those connections with one another.
Ebay's success as a company depends on the success of the community of sellers.