Biographies of Silicon Valley protagonists

A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"

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Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar (France, 1967) was the only son of a French-Iranian family that immigrated to Washington when he was six. An Apple II hacker in his teen years, Omidyar enrolled in Tufts University (near Boston) to study computer science, but moved to California in 1988 U.C. Berkeley to complete his undergraduate degree in Computer Science while working at Innovative Data Design writing programs for the Mac. He later found a job at Claris, an Apple-funded spin-off, but lost his job in 1991. He then founded his own company, Ink Development, which later changed name to eShop, a web-based retailer. In 1994 he split from his partners and joined General Magic, a start-up founded by Apple's legendary engineers Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld to create a hand-held computer and communication device. In his spare time he worked on his own website, Echo Bay, abbreviated as eBay. Omidyar held pseudo-libertarian beliefs. In particular, he detested the big corporations that owned commerce in the capitalist world, and instead trusted that people are fundamentally cooperative social animals. Therefore in september 1995 he set out to create a system that would enable individuals to sell and buy without contributing to the wealth of big business, thus indirectly creating an alternative community. He implemented a software platform for on-line auctions and called it AuctionWeb, hosted on his website www.ebay.com. The idea caught fire and Omidyar started charging a fee for each successful sale to pay for the increased traffic. His revenues doubled almost every month. In 1996 Microsoft bought eShop and Omidyar, who still owned part of it, became a millionaire. In june he quit General Magic to concentrate on his hobby, and in august he hired Jeff Skoll, a graduate from Stanford's business school, to run its skyrocketing business. In june 1997 Benchmark Capital invested several million dollars in eBay, as it was renamed in september. In march 1998 Meg Whitman, a general-purpose executive of "corporate America", was hired to run the company, and in september eBay's IPO turned Omidyar into a billionaire (and, of course, the richest Iranian). In 2004 he founded the philanthropic non-profit organization Omidyar Network, based in Redwood City, to support alternative forms of free-market capitalism.

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