Pierre Omidyar Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

It is not really work if you are having fun.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.