#32 is different from others because he is a programmer. He is Pierre Omidyar, born on June 21, 1967, a French-Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist/economist. If you have not heard of him you may know him as the founder/chairman of the eBay.
Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris, France. He moved to Maryland with his family when his physician father began his residency at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. Pierre developed an interest in computing while still at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School (Maryland) in Bethesda. He taught himself BASIC on a TRS-80. In 1988 he graduated in computer science from Tufts University, and joined Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary. In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development Corp. with three friends. The company included an Internet shopping segment and was later renamed eShop Inc. 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.
Omidyar was intrigued by the technical problem of establishing an online venue for direct person-to-person auction of collectible items. Omidyar was 28 when he sat down over a long holiday weekend to write the original computer code for eBay. He created a simple prototype on his personal web page, and launched Auction Web as a sole proprietorship on Labor Day weekend in 1995. Auction Web was later renamed “eBay”, after Echo Bay, Omidyar’s consulting firm, when “echobay.com” was unavailable. The service was free at first, but started charging in order to cover Internet service provider costs. Pierre turned eBay into the most successful company of the dotcom era. In September 1998, eBay launched a successful public offering, make Omidyar a billionaire.
From a keynote speech at Tufts University:
“So people often say to me - “when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day.” Well… nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn’t my business - it was my hobby. I had to build a system that was self-sustaining… because I had a real job to go to every morning.
I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback — even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat.”
Find out more at Pierre Omidyar’s Blog
