Pierre Omidyar - Founder of E-BAY

How many of us really wish to have a second income which will finally give us that financial stability. We try to do anything and everything possible and await a miracle to happen. But for few miracles has become the story of their life. Pierre Omidyar a software engineer in mid 90’s developed a website to sell the Pez sweet dispensers which was collected as hobby by his then girl friend and now wife Pam Wesely. Ah! What a lovely story it sounds a corporate giant emerging from the dust of living.

In year 2002 Adam Cohen revealed the actual story saying the Pez sweet dispenser story was fabricated to give the human touch to a technology based materialistic company. In 1997 when the story of Pez dispenser was thrown to the public even the giant and fact thirsty Newyokers had also bought it.

E-Bay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in year 1995 as Auction Web. Pierre was a computer programmer who had exposure to computer since an early age as 8, something about the machine really fascinated him and slowly he developed a fixation for it. This helped him in to earn his pocket money in high school. ^pence an hour for printing the library cards for the card catalogue. As its been famously said, people who start early in life definitely make a niche for themselves.

Pierre Omidyar wanted to name the website as echobay.com but as luck would have it the name was registered with a mining company’s website so he simply shortened it and called it ebay.com. The first item sold on e-bay was a broken laser printer which shocked the founder and he asked the bidder the reason why e bought the item. The bidder responded saying he was a collector of broken laser printer. Some believe this was the idea which the later PR’s of the company cooked up as Pez candy dispenser story. The company got its first venture capital money from Benchmark capital and since then has not been a looking back. The company grew 10 to 20 fold in a small span of 3 years.

The company manages of the biggest online auction and shopping website where people, business man, corporate buy and sell huge variety of goods and services worldwide. In addition to original e-bay Inc. the company also own other business like Skype, pay pal etc.