Pierre Omidyar

Omidyar attended Punahou School in Honolulu for a couple of years (and currently serves on its Board of Trustees). His interest in computers began while he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He graduated from St. Andrew's Episcopal School, Potomac, Maryland, in 1984. He graduated from Tufts University in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts, with a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1988. He also had studied at the University of California, Berkeley during his undergraduate years.

Shortly after, he went to work for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, where he worked on the team that upgraded MacDraw to MacDraw II. In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development, a pen-based computing startup that later was rebranded as an e-commerce company and was renamed eShop Inc. Microsoft acquired eShop on June 11, 1996, for less than $50 million and Omidyar earned $1 million from the deal.

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, September 4, 1995, he launched an online service called Auction Web, which would eventually become the auction site eBay.

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 two million. By the middle of that year, eBay was hosting nearly 800,000 auctions a day.

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.

In 1997, Omidyar changed the company's name from AuctionWeb to eBay, and began to advertise the service aggressively. The name "eBay" was his second choice. His first choice was already registered to a Canadian mining company, Echo Bay Mines. He originally wanted Echo Bay, the name of a recreational area near Lake Mead, Nevada, because it "sounded cool." When he found out that echobay.com was taken, he simply dropped the "cho", and ebay.com was born. 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.

In 2002, eBay bought PayPal, an online payment company. Later, in 2014, they spun PayPal off and currently Omidyar owns 6% of it.

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. It was established in 2004 by 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 $992 million to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual participation across multiple investment areas, including Property Rights, Governance & Citizen Engagement, Education, Financial Inclusion and Consumer & Internet Mobile. In 2010, he and his wife established, along with Richard Branson and the Nduna Foundation (founded by Amy Robbins), Enterprise Zimbabwe.

In 2010, Omidyar launched an 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 HuffPost, launching the weblog's latest regional addition, HuffPost Hawaii.

In 2013, prompted by the Edward Snowden leaks, Omidyar announced the creation of First Look Media, a journalism venture launched on February 10, 2014, with The Intercept and including such journalists as Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, John Temple, and Jay Rosen.

In 2018 Omidyar established the global philanthropic organisation Luminate. He separated the organization into a separate unit from his ten-year Governance & Engagement initiative.

Omidyar is a major donor to Democratic Party candidates and organizations. In 2019 alone, he donated approximately $500 million to charitable causes that he supports.

In 2020, Omidyar stepped down from the board of eBay as part of a broader overhaul of the company. He will stay as director emeritus, an honorary title.

Power Sheet – June 21, 2016

Power Sheet - June 21, 2016