Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Morad Omidyar, born 21 June 1967 is a French-born Iranian American entrepreneur and philanthropist, who is the founder and chairman of the eBay auction site. He became a billionaire at the age of 31 with eBay's 1998 stock market floatation. Omidyar and his wife Pamela are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network in 2004 "in order to expand their efforts beyond non-profits to include for-profits and public policy". Since 2010 Omidyar has been involved in online journalism as head of investigative reporting and public affairs news service Honolulu Civil Beat. And in 2013 he financed a yet to be named journalism venture to include Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.

Biography

Personal life

Omidyar was born in Paris, France to Iranian immigrant parents who had been sent by his grandparents to attend university there. His mother Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar, who did her doctorate in linguistics at the Sorbonne, is a well-known academic. His father was an Iranian surgeon. The family moved to the US when Omidyar was a child.

Omidyar's interest in computers began while he was a student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia in the 9th grade. He graduated from St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland in 1984. Omidyar graduated from Tufts University in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts with a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1988. Shortly after, Omidyar went to work for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, where he worked on the team upgrading MacDraw to MacDraw II. In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development, a pen-based computing startup that was later rebranded as an e-commerce company and renamed eShop.

eBay and later career

In 1995, at the age of 28, Omidyar began to write the original computer code for an online venue to enable the listing of a direct person-to-person auction for collectible items. He created a simple prototype on his personal web page, and on Labor Day, Monday, 4 September 1995 he launched an online service called Auction Web which would eventually become the auction site eBay.

It was hosted on a server Omidyar had created for information on the ebola virus. The first item sold on the site was a broken laser pointer. Omidyar was astonished that anyone would pay for the device in its broken state, but the buyer assured him he was deliberately collecting broken laser pointers. Similar surprises followed. The business exploded as correspondents began to register trade goods of an unimaginable variety.

Omidyar incorporated the enterprise; the small fee he collected on each sale financed the expansion of the site. The revenue soon outstripped his salary at General Magic, and nine months later Omidyar decided to dedicate his full attention to his new enterprise.

By 1996, when Omidyar signed a licensing deal to offer airline tickets online, the site had 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 1997, Pierre Omidyar changed the company's name to eBay and began to advertise the service aggressively. The word "eBay" was made up on the fly by Omidyar when he was told that his first choice for his web site, "echobay", had already been registered. Not wanting to make a second trip to Sacramento, he came up with "eBay". The frequently repeated story that eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade Pez candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media. This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book and confirmed by eBay. The service was free at first, but started charging in order to cover internet service provider costs. eBay still charges 10% of sales as a final sale fee.

Jeffrey Skoll joined the company in 1996. In March 1998, Meg Whitman was brought in as president and CEO, and continued to run the company until January 2008, when she announced her retirement. In September 1998, eBay launched a successful public offering, making both Omidyar and Skoll billionaires. As of July 2008, Omidyar's 178 million eBay shares were worth around $4.45 billion. Omidyar is also an investor of Montage Resort & Spa in Laguna Beach, California.

In 2010, Omidyar launched online investigative reporting news service Honolulu Civil Beat covering civic affairs in Hawaii. The site has been named Best News Website in Hawaii for three consecutive years. On September 4, 2013, Honolulu Civil Beat started a partnership with The Huffington Post, launching the weblog's latest regional addition, HuffPost Hawaii. In 2013 Omidyar financed a yet to be named journalism venture to include Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, and Jay Rosen

Omidyar Network

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, the organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic, social, and political change. To date, Omidyar Network has committed more than $270 million to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual participation across multiple investment areas, including property rights, government transparency, and social media.

Wealth

According to Forbes, Pierre Omidyar is worth $8.5 billion (US) as of September 2013, making him the 123rd richest person in the world.

Awards and honors

• Honorary degree, Doctor of Public Service, Tufts University (2011)

Book References

• The Perfect Store: Inside eBay - Adam Cohen, Back Bay Books 2002 ISBN 978-0-316-16493-1
• Pierre Omidyar: The Founder of eBay - Jennifer Viegas, Rosen Publishing Group 2006 ISBN 978-1-4042-0715-8}}

External links

• The Omidyar Group
• Omidyar Network

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