Pierre Omidyar Quotes
101 Pierre Omidyar Quotes
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[March 2008] The iPhone is very cool.
Pierre Omidyar
[On the beginnings of ebay.] I said, ‘Well, listen, we’ve got the web. I can create an interactive application here. I can create an auction mechanism. Let me just do that and make that available to the people who are already doing business, who are already buying and selling on Usenet, and then just see what happens.’… And that’s how it go started.
Pierre Omidyar
I was a young guy. I was driven to be one of the first to go try that out, so I went and did that.
Pierre Omidyar
I’ve only said with eBay that the best ideas came from the community, that really was the innovation that came from the community.
Pierre Omidyar
The really cool companies out there today. They’re the ones that are the most plugged into the people they’re serving and take the great ideas from the community and implement them.
Pierre Omidyar
[On the early days of eBay.] I had had to upgrade my service provider account because the little $30 a month account that I was running the thing on, you know, it was exceeding its capacity. So they upgraded me to a $250 a month account and then a $500 a month account. So I had to create a revenue model.
Pierre Omidyar
By August of ’96 I had found somebody to help me build the company, to work with as my original partner. That was Jeff Skoll.
Pierre Omidyar
[On eBay’s early growth.] It was terrifying you know. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.
Pierre Omidyar
You know, now 2008, 10 years after the IPO, you know, there’s 250 – 300 million users throughout the world, just an incredible amount of volume of transactions going through there, and you know, lots of people making a living, you know, trading on the original eBay.
Pierre Omidyar
[On the eBay feeback system.] Because I’m a programmer, I was a software engineer by trade, I naturally said, ‘Well listen, if there’s gonna be negative, there has to be positive. You know, you can’t just do a negative without a positive.’
Pierre Omidyar
Let’s give each other praise where praise is due.
Pierre Omidyar
[On the positive/negative feedback system on eBay.] It just had this incredibly powerful thing from a human perspective. But then also from a business perspective it was really the thing that allowed eBay to succeed, because it gave people a chance, a way to know that they could actually trust a complete stranger.
Pierre Omidyar
[On the positive/negative feedback system on eBay.] Honestly, at the time it was to solve a practical problem that I had, which is that I couldn’t manage all the complaints myself. That was it.
Pierre Omidyar
I didn’t, you know… I didn’t have this vision, ‘Oh, it’s gonna take over the world. It’s gonna be this fantastic thing overnight.’ I didn’t have that kinda delusion either. But I did say, ‘You know what? There’s something worth trying here. It’s not crazy.’ And so a little bit of disrespect of the elders, of what came before you, I think is important.
Pierre Omidyar
What I really tried to do was learn as much as possible from the people that came before me, have respect for at least the motivations of the people that come before me and people in the establishment.
Pierre Omidyar
When I identify a need and I see a particular innovative way to address that need, I’m actually just driven to go and build that thing. And if I can’t build it myself to convince somebody else to go do it.
Pierre Omidyar
The gratification of going off and trying something, trying something new that addresses a need… it’s just really cool.
Pierre Omidyar
Empowering individuals and helping individuals make a difference.
Pierre Omidyar
The idea traditionally was, you go to the business world, you make a lot of money and then when you’re tired of doing that you retire from that and then you start giving it away creating foundations and, you know, whatnot. And that will be your legacy… I’m too young to be thinking about that path, and so really tried to think about being more active and innovative and creative in the pursuit of philanthropy.
Pierre Omidyar
Microfinance is really exciting.
Pierre Omidyar
[On mentors in his life.] I always have trouble with that question. I always have trouble with that question because I can never identify… key people. I mean, cearly my parents were critical in bringing me up and in shaping my world and giving me the confidence to think that I oculd actually do stuff… and actually get it done…
Pierre Omidyar
Most of my inspiration really comes through… a process of synthesis.
Pierre Omidyar
If I had to pick one thing to just let people remember in the future, is embrace individuality, empower the individual.
Pierre Omidyar
I've got a passion for solving a problem that I think I can solve in a new way.
Pierre Omidyar
There's a sense of pride of doing something brand new, and I'm particularly inspired by problems that seem easily solvable.
Pierre Omidyar
The whole idea there was just to help people do business with one another on the Internet. And people thought it was impossible… remember this is 1995…
Pierre Omidyar
People are basically good, honest people.
Pierre Omidyar
[On eBay’s success being an accident.] The business success was, absolutely…
Pierre Omidyar
I wanted to create an efficient market where individuals could benefit from participating in an efficient market, kind of level the playing field. And I thought, ‘Gee, the Internet, the web, it's perfect for this.’
Pierre Omidyar
Within nine months the revenue was more than I was making on my day job, and that's kind of when the light bulb went off. ‘Knock, knock, knock. You've got a business here, do something about it.’ So that's when that really started.
Pierre Omidyar
If you think about it, commerce and trade is at the base of all human activity…
Pierre Omidyar
Fundamentally everything we do in human activities is related to trade and there's something, I think, that's wired in human beings that drives us to commerce.
Pierre Omidyar
You know, not everyone is a jerk.
Pierre Omidyar
[On eBay] It's all about treating each other the way you want to be treated yourself so that you can do business with one another.
Pierre Omidyar
When we went to raise money, rather than trying to convince people to invest in eBay, we had to tell people to stop knocking on the door.
Pierre Omidyar
I brought on Meg [Whitman] in March of '98 - she really woke up to the fact that infrastructure and technology was critical…
Pierre Omidyar
‘If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger,’ and it's true.
Pierre Omidyar
I was the pretty consistent bull and the cheerleader on eBay… I've always had kind of this unshakable faith that it's going to endure.
Pierre Omidyar
What eBay did really was to create a new market, one that wasn't really there before.
Pierre Omidyar
I founded the company on the notion that people were basically good, and that if you give them the benefit of the doubt you're rarely disappointed.
Pierre Omidyar
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