Pierre Omidyar - Founder of eBay

The 76th richest person in the world according to Forbes magazine, Pierre Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, in Paris and grew up pred... thumbnail 1 summary
The 76th richest person in the world according to Forbes magazine, Pierre Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, in Paris and grew up predominantly in Washington, D.C. An early interest in computers led to his attending Tufts University, where he graduated with a degree in computer science in 1988. After college, he worked for Apple subsidiary Claris, as part of the team working on the new version of the vector-based drawing program MacDraw.

In the summer of 1995, when he was 28, Omidyar wrote up the code for what would soon become the eBay website. Web commerce was still fairly new at the time, and Auction Web -- as it was called -- premiered with no fanfare as part of Omidyar's personal website. The first sale was of a broken laser pointer for $14.83, and the site quickly built up steam, causing him to put it on its own domain, renamed as eBay -- for Echo Bay, his consulting company. The next year, Jeffrey Skoll was hired as company president and a third-party deal was struck to allow eBay to sell plane tickets. In 1998, eBay went public, making Omidyar and Skoll billionaires, and international eBay sites were soon opened in dozens of countries.

In 2004, Omidyar and his wife Pam founded the Omidyar Network; where the earlier Omidyar Foundation had funded non-profit projects, the Network also provides money for profit ventures that advance its goals. Omidyar believes one of the side effects of the eBay phenomenon has been its illustration of the trust that can exist between strangers, who are exchanging money and goods online without mutual friends, face to face meetings, or physical proof beyond photographs. Equal funds are earmarked for non-profit and profit concerns. Omidyar is also an investor in Meetup.com, a site that he believes will profit from its connection of strangers just as eBay has.