Background

Pierre Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, in Paris, France, to Iranian settlers, Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar, and her husband, Cyrus Omidyar. His parents moved to Paris to attend school in their teens. Due to his father's job, the family moved around several times. When Pierre was six, the family moved from France to Maryland, the United States. He later moved to Hawaii, where he completed the eighth and ninth grade.

His mother is a renowned linguistics scholar, and his father was employed at Johns Hopkins University as a surgeon, and now practices in Aliso Viejo, California. Omidyar had become a naturalized American citizen. His parents got divorced, so he lived with his mother and spent weekends with his father.

Education

Omidyar attended Punahou School in Honolulu for a couple of years. He discovered his passion for technology at an early age, while he was a student at the Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He was sneaking out of gym class in high school to play on a computer. At age 14, the school library hired him, paying him $6 an hour to write a program to print catalog cards. He eventually completed his secondary education in 1984, from St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Maryland.

In 1988, Pierre earned his bachelor's degree from Massachusetts' Tufts University, with a specialization in computer science. He never considered himself a good student though he passed with a Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 3.01. He also attended the University of California, Berkeley during his undergraduate years.

Career

After graduation, Omidyar worked for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, developing software for the Macintosh. His next move was to become an engineer for General Magic, Inc., an innovative Silicon Valley maker of interactive, online software. Omidyar tasted entrepreneurial success in 1991 when he and three friends founded Ink Development Corp. Later renamed eShop Inc., the company was one of the early pioneers of online shopping.

Omidyar worked as a software engineer for eShop until the end of 1994 when he became a developer services engineer for General Magic, a mobile communication platform company. In 1996, eShop was sold to Microsoft, but Omidyar remained fascinated by the technical challenges of online commerce.

The idea for eBay emerged in 1995 when Omidyar's girlfriend Pamela, an avid collector of Pez candy dispensers, expressed her desire to interact with other collectors in their area. Recognizing that the Internet could help make this possible, the 31-year-old Omidyar created Auction Web, a rudimentary online auction site which simply allowed sellers to post items for sale by describing the merchandise, setting a minimum bid, and choosing the length of the auction, which could range anywhere from three to ten days.

Buyers could then bid on an object, and the highest bidder at the end of the auction was able to purchase the object for the bid price. Payment and delivery were handled by the buyer and seller. At the time, the site offered no search engine, no guarantees of any type regarding the merchandise sold, and no dispute resolution services.

To his amazement, the site attracted so many buyers and sellers that he soon had to set up a separate site devoted to auctions, which he dubbed eBay. Three months after its launch, Omidyar asked his friend Jeff Skoll to help add in features to expand the usefulness and safety of the site. Omidyar was surprised by the popularity of the website and began to charge a small commission fee on each item sold.

The popularity of the site soared and by mid-1996 the site was hosting nearly 800,000 auctions a day. By charging between 25 cents and $2 to sellers for posting their auction notice, and taking a small percentage of the sale, the company made money simply by setting up a place for buyers and sellers to meet.

From collectibles, the site quickly expanded into a vast range of saleable items, including furniture, electronics, home appliances, cars, and other vehicles. In 1996, Omidyar signed a licensing deal to offer airline tickets online. In 1996, Auction Web-hosted 250,000 auctions. In the first month of 1997, it hosted 2 million. By the middle of that year, eBay was hosting nearly 800,000 auctions a day.

In May 1998, Omidyar was named eBay's chairman, at which time he announced the appointment of Meg Whitman as president and chief executive officer. eBay continued to thrive under the direction of Whitman, who expanded the company's services through new site launches (in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom), acquisitions, and joint ventures. At the time, eBay had barely 30 employees, half a million users, and the United States revenues of $47 million. By the time eBay went public that fall, the site had more than a million registered users. The share price nearly tripled on the first day of trading and Omidyar’s holdings made him a billionaire overnight.

The rapid expansion of eBay’s traffic did not come without growing pains. In 1999 the company suffered a number of service interruptions, one lasting 22 hours, but Omidyar moved quickly to regain the confidence of the site’s customer base. The company made 10,000 phone calls to the site’s top users to apologize for the interruption and assure them that everything possible would be done to keep the site up and running in the future. As other online ventures fell victim to the dot.com bust of 2000, eBay continued to grow and prosper.

In 2002, eBay acquired the online payment processing firm PayPal, which it uses to process most of its online transactions, compelling many online sellers to employ the service. At the same time, eBay diversified its services, allowing sellers to engage in fixed-price and "best offer" sales as well as conventional auctions. Software developers can create applications to integrate into the site through the eBay Developers Program. In 2005, eBay opened a category for buying and selling surplus industrial machinery and business equipment. Many large companies now use eBay to set prices for their products and services.

He later started the philanthropic firm Omidyar Network. With an avowed interest in journalism, he also launched First Look Media in collaboration with Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian reporter who published government documents leaked by the National Security Agency's Edward Snowden. He’s also become involved with movie production, and his film Spotlight won the 2015 Best Picture Oscar for its portrayal of the Boston Globe‘s investigation of sexual abuse committed by Catholic priests.

Pierre Omidyar stepped down from the board of directors of eBay in September 2020. He remains the company’s largest single shareholder, with a net worth of over $10 billion.

Achievements

• 

  What began as a hobby for Pierre Omidyar, who was looking for an interesting way to please his girlfriend and to dabble in cyberspace, spawned one of the Internet's most successful companies, surviving in an environment where many failed in the dot.com downturn. According to Forbes, his net worth was US$12.3 billion as of March 2020. In 1999, Pierre won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Works

More photos

• design

  • eBay

Religion

Pierre Omidyar is a follower of Buddhism.

Politics

Omidyar is a Democrat. He regularly donates to Democratic candidates and organizations. He openly opposes Donald Trump.

Views

As a philanthropist, technologist, and innovator, Pierre is driven by the idea that change is possible given the right combination of insight, innovation, talent, and timing. Omidyar and his wife are the founders of the Omidyar Network, which is intended to help people by harnessing the power of the markets. In practice, this means that it provides a helping hand to both nonprofits and for-profit businesses with a positive impact by giving grants to the first and investing in the second.

Working across sectors and geographies, Pierre and Pam Omidyar have contributed more than $3 billion to causes ranging from economic advancement for the underserved, to human rights, to government accountability and press freedom initiatives. Pierre is also the founder of First Look Media - a new-model media company devoted to supporting independent voices. At home in Hawaii, Pierre is the founder and publisher of Honolulu Civil Beat, a local news service that encourages greater civic engagement through media.

Over the past 10 years, Omidyar has been a staunch supporter of a free press. For example, last year he pledged $4.5 million to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) that broke the Panama Papers story. He launched First Look Media in 2013 to promote investigative journalism. It also funds fact-checking organizations across the world like The Intercept, which was initially founded to report on the documents released by Edward Snowden.

Pierre and Pamela Omidyar, along with Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffet, became a part of the list of billionaires in 2010, who promised half of their wealth to philanthropic causes: The Giving Pledge. They are also the biggest private contributors to the eradication of human trafficking. To date, they have invested $115 million to this cause in five different countries.

Quotations: "In Silicon Valley, we say if you haven't tried something and failed, and actually learned something from that failure, then why would I want to work with you?"

"If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things."

"If you give people the opportunity to do the right thing, you'll rarely be disappointed."

"Long-term sustainable change happens if people discover their own power."

"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."

"Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity."

Personality

Pierre Omidyar was interested in little gadgets during his childhood, especially calculators. He used to go shopping, in order to purchase calculators. Just as most children have a fascination with breaking things for no reason and then trying to fix them, Pierre was no different. However, he was never able to fix any of his gadgets.

Interests

• Politicians

  Barack Obama

Connections

While living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, Omidyar met and married Pamela Wesley, a graduate student in biology who later embarked on a career as a management consultant. The couple has three children.

Father:

Cyrus Omidyar

Mother:

Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar

Spouse:

Pam Omidyar

The couple is known to be extremely charitable and has donated millions of dollars to support various organizations.

Friend:

Richard Branson

References

• Pierre Omidyar: The Founder of Ebay Meet the reclusive Omidyar and learn that his company's success lies in its philosophy that community is important above all else. Ebays users if you consider them employees number the second largest in the world, only behind Wal-Mart.
  2006
• The Perfect Store: Inside eBay When Pierre Omidyar launched a clunky website from a spare bedroom over Labor Day weekend of 1995, he wanted to see if he could use the Internet to create a perfect market. He never guessed his old-computer parts and Beanie Baby exchange would revolutionize the world of commerce.
  2002
• Pierre M. Omidyar: Creator of Ebay The book describes the life and accomplishments of the man who founded the Internet auction site eBay, and tells how this site was developed and how the company achieved success.
  2007
• Pierre Omidyar on Twitter