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
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.
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.
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.
I do like to fly under the radar. When I walk around town, the only people I want to recognise me and call me by my name are the folks at Starbucks.
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.
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.