Pierre Omidyar

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Pierre Omidyar with his wife Pam, 2007

Pierre Omidyar (born June 21, 1967 in Paris , Persian پیر امیدیار) is a French - American entrepreneur and founder as well as former Chairman of the Board of the Internet sales platform eBay . He has also appeared as a sponsor of The Intercept .

biography

Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris in 1967. His parents were from Iran and had moved to France to study. His father Cyrus Omidyar trained as a urologist and his mother did a doctorate in linguistics at the Sorbonne . When Omidyar was six, the family moved to Washington, DC . Pierre became interested in programming when he was a teenager . He studied at the University of California, Berkeley for some time . He then moved to Tufts University and graduated in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science .

After completing his studies, he began working as a developer in software engineering at Claris , an Apple subsidiary . There he devoted himself to the development of user applications until he and friends founded Ink Development Corp. founded. This company was later renamed eShop . After selling eShop to Microsoft , Omidyar initially worked in the development department of General Magic .

On the side, he initially drove his new project eBay (initially under the name AuctionWeb) in his spare time, while he worked for General Magic. Omidyar built up this company with highly motivated employees. The aim was to develop an efficient and attractive trading platform. Omidyar was the first to introduce an auction format for private online sales, a system with which every user could act as a buyer as well as a seller.

How Omidyar came up with the idea of ​​founding eBay, according to many texts on the Internet, almost certainly belongs to the realm of urban legends . As a result, his wife, as a passionate PEZ collector, would have expressed her wish to exchange ideas with as many other collectors as possible via the Internet and thus expand her collection. Pierre Omidyar is said to have created a website with these possibilities for his wife. When this proved to be a success and Omidyar saw the need for such systems, he founded eBay in September 1995.

eBay itself maintains this story to this day as a nice company story . In the foyer of the German headquarters in Kleinmachnow , various valuable PEZ collectibles and even a PEZ vending machine are on display in a showcase to cement the invented company history.

Omidyar actually came up with the idea for eBay through the surprisingly successful sale of a defective laser pointer on the AuctionWeb platform, which he had significantly developed, which revealed the potential of an open sales platform on the Internet, such as eBay was supposed to become. With the help of a large number of investors, Omidyar, as a businessman, was interested in profit-oriented business from the start, because after just one year he was charging fees for using his offer. EBay made a profit for the first time in 1996, and in 1998 eBay, still at the helm, became a publicly traded company.

Omidyar now lives in Honolulu , Hawaii with his wife and three children .

Corporate investments

Pierre Omidyar still has a 7.2% stake in eBay and was re-elected to the Board of Directors in 2016. In addition, following the spin-off of the company, he owns a 6.8% stake in PayPal .

The Omidyar Network , which he heads , invested US $ 8 million in Linden Lab , the operator of the 3D world simulation Second Life .

He also appeared as a producer in the film industry, such as Merchants of Doubt (2014) and Spotlight (2015)

As a philanthropist

Pierre Omidyar has retired from active business as a multiple billionaire (about $ 8 billion) and works as a philanthropist .
The US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power , recognized Pierre Omidyar on November 6, 2013 as one of the “new philanthropists” inspired by George Soros : “By example, George defined what it means to be a modern philanthropist, a doer paving the way for Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffet [t], Pam and Pierre Omidyar, and others. George was the first. "

Pierre Omidyar helped Tufts University establish the University College of Citizenship and Public Service (UCCPS), an initiative that promotes student political engagement.

As the founder and chairman of the board of directors of the Omidyar Foundation , Pierre Omidyar serves on the board of trustees of Tufts University and the Santa Fe Institute .
Donations to Germany, for example, came from the New Responsibility Foundation , for which the Omidyar Network provided 16.6 percent of the total 2017 budget (2016: 13.3%). The Corrective research network is another well-known funding project.

He gained notoriety with the establishment of the news magazine The Intercept . The initiative came in response to Edward Snowden's revelations and was funded with $ 250 million through Omidayar's First Look Media portal .

Pierre Omidyar is also one of the main sponsors

  • The Giving Pledge
  • Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund
  • Hopelab, a project to support children and adolescents with cancer
  • Humanity United
  • International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)
  • luminategroup, a consortium led by Ben Scott to support media projects worldwide
  • News Integrity Initiative
  • via Omidyar Network on the Ukrainian Internet TV station hromadske.tv , on Magambe Network in Zimbabwe and Rappler in the Philippines
  • The Bulwark, a media project by neo-conservative columnist William Bill Kristol
  • Ulupono Initiative, a venture finance company

Honors

  • 1999 EY Entrepreneur of The Year National Winner
  • 2011 Honorary Doctorate from Tufts University
  • 2011 together with his wife Pam Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy
  • 2018's Third Most Influential French Entrepreneur by the online magazine Richtopia

Web links

Commons : Pierre Omidyar  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jannifer. Viegas: Pierre Omidyar: The Founder of Ebay. .
  2. ↑ a b c https://www.omidyar.com/people/pierre-omidyar accessed on March 4, 2019
  3. ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=Phf9ZBA5tyUC&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=Pierre+Omidyar+berkeley&source=bl&ots=9_1JgCPsUX&sig=T1FHR6rl4NmUcdGycu_vlTy0s-Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjwz8uvqP_aAhXl3YMKHRnxCuUQ6AEIYzAH#v=onepage&q=Pierre%20Omidyar%20berkeley&f = false
  4. ↑ http://now.tufts.edu/commencement-2011/pierre-omidyar accessed on March 5, 2019
  5. ↑ https://www.forbes.com/profile/pierre-omidyar/ accessed on March 4, 2019
  6. ↑ http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1996/jun96/eshoppr.mspx accessed on March 5, 2019
  7. ^ EBay Inc. - Definitive Proxy Statement. (No longer available online.) In: investors.ebayinc.com. P. 15 , archived from the original on May 29, 2016 ; Retrieved May 29, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / investors.ebayinc.com
  8. ↑ PayPal Holdings - Definitive Proxy Statement. In: investor.paypal-corp.com. P. 36 , accessed on May 29, 2016 .
  9. ↑ https://www.omidyar.com/investees accessed on March 4, 2019
  10. ^ Gregg Kilday: Robert Kenner's Doc 'Merchants of Doubt' Goes to Sony Pictures Classics - Hollywood Reporter . August 7, 2014. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
  11. ↑ Justin Chang: 'Spotlight' Review: Michael Keaton Stars in Drama About Catholic Abuse Scandals . September 3, 2015. Accessed March 5, 2019.
  12. ↑ billionaire list in Forbes
  13. ↑ Samantha Power: Remarks at the International Rescue Committee Freedom Award Dinner. In: Address by the US Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. November 6, 2013, accessed February 22, 2019 .
  14. ↑ https://admissions.tufts.edu/life-at-tufts/citizenship-public-service/ accessed on March 4, 2019
  15. ↑ Financing. In: New Responsibility Foundation. Retrieved November 6, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Financing in 2016. In: Foundation New Responsibility. October 30, 2018, accessed November 5, 2018 .
  17. ↑ CORRECTIV receives funding from the Omidyar Network. In: Correctiv.org. October 5, 2018, accessed May 20, 2019 .
  18. ↑ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/pierre-omidyar-first-look-media.html accessed on March 5, 2019
  19. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20140422140930/http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/the-intercept-enthuellungs-website- geht-online-a- 952467.html accessed on 4. March 2019
  20. ↑ https://givingpledge.org/Search.aspx?q=Pierre%20and%20Pam%20Omidyar accessed on March 4, 2019
  21. ↑ https://www.omidyar.com/news/ethics-and-governance-artificial-intelligence-fund-commits-76-million-organizations-bolster accessed on March 4, 2019
  22. ↑ https://humanityunited.org/team/pam-omidyar/ accessed on March 4, 2019
  23. ↑ https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2017/fact-checking-has-never-been-this-important-come-define-its-future/ accessed on March 4, 2019
  24. ↑ luminategroup portfolio. Retrieved February 22, 2019 .
  25. ↑ a b https://www.mintpressnews.com/ebay-founder-pierre-omidyar-is-funding-a-global-media-information-war/255199/ accessed on March 4, 2019
  26. ↑ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/04/27/look-who-funds-ukraines-anti-putin-internet-tv/#487077c17b5d accessed on March 4, 2019
  27. ↑ Ulupono Initiative: Investing in a Sustainable Hawaii. Retrieved February 22, 2019 .
  28. ^ "Hall of Fame - EY Entrepreneur Of The Year." Hall of Fame - EY Entrepreneur Of The Year. Np, n. D. Web. April 13, 2015. Search: "Pierre Omidyar" < http://eoyhof.ey.com/#!/search >.
  29. ↑ https://now.tufts.edu/commencement-2011/pierre-omidyar accessed on March 5, 2019
  30. ↑ https://www.medalofphilanthropy.org/pamela-and-pierre-omidyar/ accessed on March 4, 2019
  31. ↑ Top 100 French Entrepreneurs 2018: From Claude Posternak to Fleur Pellerin, These Are the Most Influential Entrepreneurs From France . In: Richtopia . Retrieved August 23, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Omidyar, Pierre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur, founder of eBay
DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris