The business story
Born in Paris in 1967 to Iranian immigrant parents; BS in computer science from Tufts (1988). Launched Auction Web on 4 September 1995, renamed eBay in 1997; the September 1998 IPO made him a billionaire. Founded the Omidyar Network (2004), signed the Giving Pledge (2010), and founded Honolulu Civil Beat (2010) and First Look Media (2013).
Early life and background
Pierre Omidyar was born on 21 June 1967 in Paris to Iranian immigrant parents: his mother a linguist with a Sorbonne doctorate, his father a urologist. He holds Iranian, French and US citizenship. The family moved to the United States during his childhood for his father's medical training, and he grew up mainly around Washington, D.C.
At St Andrew's Episcopal School in Maryland he became absorbed by computers and taught himself to program. He completed a computer science degree at Tufts in 1988, then followed a familiar path for programmers of that period: writing software, working at a pen-computing startup and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Building eBay
On 4 September 1995, over Labor Day weekend, Omidyar launched Auction Web as a section of his personal website. The popular story about Pez dispensers was a later invention for the press. His actual interest was intellectual: whether software and reputation could support an efficient market in which individuals set prices and traded directly.
Users arrived through word of mouth, each new buyer drawing more sellers and vice versa. When his internet provider moved him to a business rate, he began charging sellers listing and sale fees, and the site turned profitable almost at once. Its feedback system, where buyers and sellers rated each other after each trade, became an early, widely copied way of building trust between strangers online.
The company became eBay in 1997. Omidyar brought in professional managers, including Meg Whitman as CEO in 1998, and in September of that year eBay went public, making him a billionaire at 31. Because it earned a fee on real transactions from the start, eBay came through the dot-com collapse that ended so many of its peers. It later acquired PayPal in 2002 and eventually spun it back out.
