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

Pierre Omidyar

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Pierre Omidyar
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: June 21
Computer Scientist
Economist
Entrepreneur
Manager
Philanthropist
Programmer
Paris
France
Pierre Morad Omidyar
Pierre M. Omidyar
Ought
Looking
Force
Business
Good

More quotes by Pierre Omidyar

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The personal wealth that's coming is absolutely secondary to the stories that I hear about our users who have given themselves some financial independence as well by starting businesses, and all the lives we've touched positively.
Pierre Omidyar
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When you look at the accomplishments of accomplished people and you say, “Boy, that must have been really hard,” ... that was probably easy. And conversely, when you look at something that looks easy, that was probably hard. And so you’re never going to know which is which until you actually go and do it.
Pierre Omidyar
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You’ll fail at some things, that’s a learning experience that you need so that you can take that on to the next experience... What you learn from those challenges and those failures are what will get you past the next ones... I was the pretty consistent bull and the cheerleader on eBay actually.
Pierre Omidyar
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I never had it in mind that I would start a company one day and it would really be successful. I have just been motivated by working on interesting technology
Pierre Omidyar
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When you don't know what to expect, prepare for the unexpected.
Pierre Omidyar
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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. It was really about helping people connect around a sphere of interest so they could do business.
Pierre Omidyar
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We believe that business can be a tool for social good.
Pierre Omidyar
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People were doing business with one another through the Internet already, through bulletin boards. But on the Web, we could make it interactive, we could create an auction, we could create a real marketplace. And that's really what triggered my imagination, if you will, and that's what I did.
Pierre Omidyar
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By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth.
Pierre Omidyar
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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.
Pierre Omidyar
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It is not really work if you are having fun.
Pierre Omidyar
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In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.
Pierre Omidyar
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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.
Pierre Omidyar
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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.
Pierre Omidyar
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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.
Pierre Omidyar
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Long-term sustainable change happens if people discover their own power.
Pierre Omidyar
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I was raised with the notion that you can do pretty much do anything you want. I always kind of just went ahead and tried things.
Pierre Omidyar
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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.
Pierre Omidyar
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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.
Pierre Omidyar
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Don't let people who you may respect and who you believe know what they're talking about, don't let them tell you it can't be done because often they will tell you it can't be done, and it's just because they don't have the courage to try.
Pierre Omidyar