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
By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.
The personal wealth that's coming is absolutely secondary to the stories that I hear about our users who have given themselves some financial independence as well by starting businesses, and all the lives we've touched positively.
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.
I never had it in mind that I would start a company one day and it would really be successful. I have just been motivated by working on interesting technology
I always kind of just went ahead and tried things…
Microloans enable the poor to lift themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship.
I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.
Whatever future you're building, don't try to program everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.