Biography

Early life

Omidyar was born in Paris, the son of Iranian immigrant parents who had been sent to France by their parents to attend university. He was given the name of Parviz by his Iranian parents. His mother, Elahé Mir-Jalali Omidyar (Persian: الهه میرجلالی امیدیار‎‎), who did her doctorate in linguistics at the Sorbonne, is a well-known academic. The name of his father, a surgeon who worked as a urologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is undisclosed. Due to his father's work the family moved to the U.S. when Omidyar was a child.

His interest in computers began while he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He graduated from St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, in 1984. He graduated from Tufts University in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts, with a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1988. Shortly after, he went to work for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, where he worked on the team that upgraded MacDraw to MacDraw II. In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development, a pen-based computing startup that later was rebranded as an e-commerce company and renamed eShop.

eBay and later career

In 1995, at the age of 28, Omidyar began to write the original computer code for an online venue to enable the listing of a direct person-to-person auction for collectible items. He created a simple prototype on his personal web page, and on Labor Day, Monday, September 4, 1995, he launched an online service called Auction Web, which would eventually become the auction site eBay. In May 2003, eBay was successfully sued by Thomas Woolston for patent infringement of online auction software Woolston had invented in the late 1990s. The service was hosted on a website Omidyar had originally created for information on the Ebola virus. The first item sold on the site was a broken laser pointer. Omidyar was astonished that anyone would pay for the device in its broken state, but the buyer assured him that he was deliberately collecting broken laser pointers. Similar surprises followed. The business exploded as correspondents began to register trade goods of an unimaginable variety.

Omidyar incorporated the enterprise; the small fee he collected on each sale financed the expansion of the site. The revenue soon outstripped his salary at General Magic and nine months later, Omidyar decided to dedicate his full attention to his new enterprise.

By 1996, when Omidyar signed a licensing deal to offer airline tickets online, the site had hosted 250,000 auctions. In the first month of 1997, it hosted two million. By the middle of that year, eBay was hosting nearly 800,000 auctions a day.

In 1997, Pierre Omidyar changed the company's name to eBay and began to advertise the service aggressively. The word "eBay" was made up on the fly by Omidyar when he was told that his first choice for his web site, "echobay", had already been registered. Not wanting to make a second trip to Sacramento, he came up with "eBay". The frequently repeated story that eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade Pez candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media. This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book, and confirmed by eBay.

Jeffrey Skoll joined the company in 1996. In March 1998, Meg Whitman was brought in as president and CEO, and continued to run the company until January 2008, when she announced her retirement. In September 1998, eBay launched a successful public offering, making both Omidyar and Skoll billionaires. As of July 2008, Omidyar's 178 million eBay shares were worth around $4.45 billion. Omidyar is also an investor of Montage Resort and Spa in Laguna Beach, California.

In 2010, Omidyar launched online an investigative reporting news service, Honolulu Civil Beat, covering civic affairs in Hawaii. The site has been named Best News Website in Hawaii for three consecutive years. On September 4, 2013, Honolulu Civil Beat started a partnership with The Huffington Post, launching the weblog's latest regional addition, HuffPost Hawaii.

In 2013, prompted by the Edward Snowden leaks, Omidyar announced the creation of First Look Media, a journalism venture launched on February 10, 2014 with The Intercept and including such journalists as Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, John Temple, and Jay Rosen.

Film production

Omidyar has been part of the executive producer team for the following films.

• Merchants of Doubt (2014)
• Spotlight (2015)

Omidyar Network

Main article: Omidyar Network

Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. It was established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam. The organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic, social, and political change. To date, Omidyar Network has committed more than $270 million to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual participation across multiple investment areas, including property rights, government transparency, and social media. In 2010, he and his wife established, along with Richard Branson and the Nduna Foundation (founded by Amy Robbins), Enterprise Zimbabwe.

Personal life

Omidyar and his wife live in Henderson, Nevada. According to Forbes, his net worth was $8.5 billion (US) as of September 2013, making him the 123rd richest person in the world.

Awards and honors

• Honorary degree, Doctor of Public Service, Tufts University (2011)
• 1999 EY Entrepreneur of The Year National Winner

Charities

Pierre Omidyar supports the following charitable causes: Education, Health Care.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]