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
Pierre Omidyar quotes about
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.
One of the things that I repeat probably every day here is that our success is built on our community's success.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 always kind of just went ahead and tried things…
Microloans enable the poor to lift themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship.
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.