You know US-Iranian computer engineer and internet entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, who made history by founding the largest online auction house, eBay. He is also known as the founder of the Omidyar Network investment foundation, which financially supports non-profit and business companies in areas such as education, financial inclusion or civic engagement.
Fascination with online shopping
Parviz Omidyar was born in 1967 to Iranian emigrants in Paris. His mother Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali is a well-known linguist and academic and his father Cyrus a doctor. When he was six years old, his father accepted an offer for an internship in the United States, so the family moved to Baltimore.
Pierre has been interested in computers since his youth and at the age of 14, he wrote a program for cataloguing books in the school library. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1988 from Berkley University, he joined Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, to develop software for Macintosh computers. In 1991, he and three friends founded the software company Ink Development Corp., which offers an online shopping service as a side activity. It was later renamed eShop Inc. and in 1996 it was bought by Microsoft. Omidyar worked for the company as a software engineer until the end of 1994, after which he accepted a position as a service development engineer at General Magic, a mobile communications company. At that time, however, he had been diligently thinking for several years about the potential of online commerce and the technical difficulties associated with the nascent Internet segment.
The birth of eBay
While living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area in California, Omidyar met his future wife, Pamela, who, according to some legend, led him to the idea of creating an online auction house. His wife was said to be a passionate collector of PEZ candy dispensers, and he wanted to help her obtain the dispensers better through such a service. In 1995, he created a simple prototype of a P2P auction hall for the purchase and sale of collectables on his website and launched it in September under the name Auction Web. Omidyar later said that the story that he had the idea of an online auction house in connection with PEZ candy dispensers was "media-exaggerated". According to others, it was conceived as a marketing move to attract attention to the beginning service.
However, the first item sold on the site was not a PEZ candy dispenser, but a rather surprisingly broken laser pointer. Omidyar was taken aback and couldn't understand why anyone would want to pay for something that didn't work. Eventually, he learned from the buyer that he needed a broken laser pointer in his collection. For each sale, Omidyar charged a small fee, which served as a source of financing for the expansion of the service. In a few months, he was already earning more than in the aforementioned company Magic Leap, and in mid-1996 he resigned and focused fully on the technical and business development of his business.
Boom eBay
In the same year, for example, tickets began to be offered in the auction hall, and until then around 250,000 auctions had taken place there. In the middle of the following year, it was almost 800,000 auctions per day. That same year, Omidyar changed the name of the service and the company that ran it to eBay, and the service is starting to do even better. For example, the licensed sale of several popular Beanie Babies plush toys from Ty Warner, which sold here for $ 500 million, is a great success. In 1998, the company went public and on the first day of trading, the price of one share almost tripled. At that time, the service already had a million registered users, and Omidyar literally became a billionaire overnight. However, rapid growth has not gone unnoticed. A year later, the site repeatedly crashes and one such outage lasts almost the whole day. However, the company responds fast enough, apologizes to several thousand prominent users over the phone and soon regains the partially lost trust.
In the new millennium, eBay is such an established brand that it can afford to acquire other companies. In 2001, it bought the online auction house iBazar, a year later PayPal, which operates the well-known online payment system of the same name, and in 2003 another auction house CARad.com and the Chinese e-commerce company EachNet. At that time, eBay diversifies its services and allows users to offer sales, for example with a "best offer" sign or a fixed price. In 2005, it introduced a category for the sale and purchase of surplus industrial machinery and business equipment.
eBay has quickly become an internet giant, which currently operates in more than 180 countries and employs more than 13,000 people. Many companies now use eBay to price their products and services, and today it is not only the largest online line auction hall but is also one of the largest online C2C and B2B marketplaces.
Other activities
Omidyar was the company's boss until 1998, after which he became chairman of the board. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors and has a minority stake in the company. In recent years, he has been involved in charitable and online investigative journalism projects. In addition to the aforementioned Omidyar Network, he founded the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund a year later, in 2005, which provides microloans to entrepreneurs from developing countries. Five years later, he co-founded the investigative-oriented news website Honolulu Civil Beat, and in 2013 he announced the establishment of the media organization First Look Media, which supports independent journalism.