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Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar was born on July 21, 1967 in Paris, France. He and his family then moved to the Maryland once his father obtained residency at John Hopkins University Medical Center. At age 14 the young ambitious student would skip class just to play with computers. He was so interested in these machines and how they worked that he went to work for a local library writing computer programs to catalog books for $6/hr. From writing programs in high school Pierre went on to Tufts University located in Medford, Massachusetts. He ended up graduating on time, unlike most drop-out entrepreneurs, in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

From this point Omidyar decided to work for a company that developed software for Macintosh. Having connections with Apple, Pierre then chose to move to its subsidiary, Claris. By 1991 Pierre had been recruited to help start a software company named Ink Development Corporation. In the end, this company was so successful that it was noticed and quickly purchased by Microsoft in 1996. [1]

Over dinner one night in 1995 Pam Wesley, Pierre’s girlfriend, mentioned that

Pierre knew that people were a little skeptical about trusting people on the internet, so he thought of an idea that would identify the quality of the eBay sellers. A system of positive/ negative ratings was created in order to achieve this goal. Every time an eBay user made a sale he/she would be ranked upon the overall quality of the sale. Based upon positive and negative points, the sellers would soon have an established ranking after a few sales. The catch to this system is that if the seller receives four negative ratings, he/she would be kicked off of eBay and not allowed to return. This idea alone gave people the confidence they needed in order to go through with the entire purchasing process.