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've got a passion for solving a problem that I think I can solve in a new way. And that maybe it helps that nobody has done it before as well.
When you don't know what to expect, prepare for the unexpected.
Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.
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.
To truly prepare for the unexpected, you've got to position yourself to keep a couple of options open so when the door of opportunity opens, you're close enough to squeeze through.
What we say here every day is that our success is really based on our members' success, our community's success. We've created an infrastructure and laid some basic ground rules to create this marketplace.
In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.
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.
We ought to be looking at business as a force for good.
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.
In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.
I just kind of had this naïve approach to - well, gee, you know, why not. I'll just go ahead and do it.
You're able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish.
When you look at the accomplishments of accomplished people and you say, 'Boy, that must have been really hard,'...that was probably hard. And conversely, when you look at something that looks easy, that was probably hard. And so you're never going to know which is which until you actually go out and do it.