Pierre Omidyar Quotations

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.

My dad was a physician. As a kid, I remember driving around with him on weekends so he could do his rounds at the hospital and talk to patients. We'd spend time in the car talking about what was going on with them, their stories.

News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.

eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system.

When I started eBay, it was a hobby, an experiment to see if people could use the Internet to be empowered through access to an efficient market. I actually wasn't thinking about it in terms of a social impact. It was really about helping people connect around a sphere of interest so they could do business.

I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.

If you give people the opportunity to do the right thing, you'll rarely be disappointed.

I'm a technologist by origin and by training, but I'm focused on philanthropy.

If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things.

I had the notion that, OK, so now we have all of this wealth, we could buy not only one expensive car, we could buy all of them. As soon as you realize that you could buy all of them, then none of them are particularly interesting or satisfying.

Microfinance initiatives are very high-touch models. The loan officer meets with local groups of borrowers every week, they share tips and techniques. There's a lot of training and learning that goes on, which adds to the cost of the model.

In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.

A lot of people don't just go ahead and try things.

I do like to fly under the radar. When I walk around town, the only people I want to recognise me and call me by my name are the folks at Starbucks.

In terms of my belief that one individual can make a difference - that belief comes from my parents.

Long-term sustainable change happens if people discover their own power.

You can invest in companies, you can help grow companies, you can be a venture capitalist - and be a philanthropist at the same time.

When you have mass surveillance, it's impossible to meet the intent of the First Amendment because reporters can't talk to sources because sources are afraid to talk.

As a philanthropist, I try to help people take ownership. Everything I've done is rooted in the notion that every human being is born equally capable. What people lack is equal opportunity.

Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement.

Ebay's success as a company depends on the success of the community of sellers.

What makes eBay successful - the real value and the real power at eBay - is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.

What I'm really focused on is connecting people around shared interests, so together they can make good stuff happen. I'm more focused on helping people discover their power as individuals, but through those connections with one another.

In the same way that you're driven in your business to keep innovating - Facebook is a wonderful example of constant innovation - think about doing that in philanthropy.

I have always been of the opinion that the right kind of journalism is a critical part of our democracy.

We believe that business can be a tool for social good, ... Microfinance has already shown that enabling the poor to empower themselves economically can be good business.

One of the things that I repeat probably every day here is that our success is built on our community's success.

People naturally gravitate towards eBay because it's the largest marketplace. We're the original. We've been around the longest and so far, we've been able to hold our own.

My parents made me believe I could do anything I wanted to do. They were really into empowering me.

You know, what we used to say around here was that it's a different company every three months. And that's really the Internet business. It's so fast moving that three years, it might as well be 30 years in any other industry. So it has been very, wild ride.

Technologists come at a problem from the point of view that the system is working a certain way, and if I engage in that system and actually change the rules of the system, I can make it work a different way.

Advertisers don't want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it's extremely difficult to do that. And very few people today actually read those serious news stories on the Web now.

A well-functioning microfinance bank can actually be a profitable business as well. So it became a perfect proof point that, through business, you can provide an experience that leads to individual self-empowerment.

a little bit of the ponytail about it.

It's a challenge to invest as much as we want,

The revenues came in at $500, and I thought, 'This is pretty good,'

The interesting thing was, I started eBay off as a hobby so it was free of charge.

In the early days of eBay, I articulated for the very first time this belief that people are basically good.

I developed an interest in supporting independent journalists in a way that leverages their work to the greatest extent possible, all in support of the public interest.

The personal wealth that's coming is absolutely secondary to the stories that I hear about our users who have given themselves some financial independence as well by starting businesses, and all the lives we've touched positively.

Give the individual the power to be a producer as well as a consumer.

I want people to be entrepreneurs, but I want them to do it for the right reasons, because they think they can change the world, because they think they have got something of value to give to the world. Not because they think they can make a lot of money.

We believe that business can be a tool for social good.

What makes eBay successful.. the real value and the real power at eBay is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.

Whatever future you're building, don't try to program everything.

I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.

I never had it in mind that I would start a company one day and it would really be successful. I have just been motivated by working on interesting technology

You have to really believe in what you're doing, be passionate enough about it so that you will put in the hours and hard work that it takes to actually succeed there, and then you'll be successful.

Don't let people who you may respect and who you believe know what they're talking about, don't let them tell you it can't be done because often they will tell you it can't be done, and it's just because they don't have the courage to try.

I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much do anything you want. I always kind of just went ahead and tried things.

I started eBay as an experiment, as a side hobby basically, while I had my day job.

One of the things I tend to do is open myself up to a variety of voices. I try to expose myself to the kind of culture shock that occurs when you talk to people who speak a different language.

By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.

I've been asked before, "Who are your heroes?" and these types of questions. I always find it hard to identify a single person or a single book or this sort of thing. I've always been forward looking. I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much anything you want. You're able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish. I was given a sense of confidence and I never really felt the need to -- or I've never had the benefit, I should probably say -- of being inspired by outside heroes.

We ought to be looking at business as a force for good.

Be an enzyme - a catalyst for change. As a slogan, I don't know if that's ever going to be right up there with Ich Bin Ein Berliner, or “I Have A Dream,” but there's a lot of truth to it.

A lot of people don't just go ahead and try things. They'll have an idea and they'll say - they'll convince themselves or other people will convince them that it can't be done... the first is even more dangerous and serious. It's convincing yourself that it can't be done.

I just kind of had this naïve approach to - well, gee, you know, why not. I'll just go ahead and do it.

You're able to accomplish anything you set out to accomplish.

When you look at the accomplishments of accomplished people and you say, 'Boy, that must have been really hard,'...that was probably hard. And conversely, when you look at something that looks easy, that was probably hard. And so you're never going to know which is which until you actually go out and do it.

I was just pursuing what I enjoyed doing. I mean, I was pursuing my passion.

An honest, open environment can bring out the best in people.

I always kind of just went ahead and tried things…

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

What we say here every day is that our success is really based on our members' success, our community's success. We've created an infrastructure and laid some basic ground rules to create this marketplace.

We believe people are basically good. We believe everyone has something to contribute. We encourage you to treat others the way that you want to be treated.

To truly prepare for the unexpected, you've got to position yourself to keep a couple of options open so when the door of opportunity opens, you're close enough to squeeze through.

Microloans enable the poor to lift themselves out of poverty through entrepreneurship.

You'll fail at some things - that's a learning experience that you need so that you can take that on to the next experience. What you learn from those challenges and those failures are what will get you past the next ones...I was the pretty consistent bull and the cheerleader on eBay actually.

When you don't know what to expect, prepare for the unexpected.

We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people.

I've got a passion for solving a problem that I think I can solve in a new way. And that maybe it helps that nobody has done it before as well.

You should pursue your passion. If you're passionate about something and you work hard, then I think you will be successful.

Build a platform - prepare for the unexpected...you' ll know you're successful when the platform you've built serves you in unexpected ways.

It is not really work if you are having fun.

People were doing business with one another through the Internet already, through bulletin boards. But on the Web, we could make it interactive, we could create an auction, we could create a real marketplace. And that's really what triggered my imagination, if you will, and that's what I did.