Pierre Omidyar – The Founder of Ebay and a Perfect Role Model for Young Entrepreneurs

When people want to purchase second-hand items online, the first website they turn to is eBay. Pierre Omidyar is the young entrepreneur who founded this famous auction site. Although Omidyar was born in Paris, France in June 1967 and lived most of his life in the United States, he comes from Iranian origins.

One of the most important reasons for this person’s fame is his financial status. Omidyar was able to collect a fortune of $8. 78B and became one of the five richest internet entrepreneurs as Nathan Chandler reports in how stuff work website. However, establishing a flourishing profitable business was not Omidyar’s goal when he first launched eBay as an online auction page on his personal website. In fact, he was not anticipating how widespread and successful his simple yet genius idea would be. "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.

Moreover, another admirable fact about Omidyar is that, nowadays, he spends most of his time and fortune on philanthropy projects. Madeline Farber reported on April 2017 that Omidyar has promised to spend up to 100 Million dollars to help to fight the spread of fake news and what is known as Hate Speech. He started this initiative by giving great sums of money to different organizations and alliances that are specialized in this matter such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the Anti-Defamation League.

However, living in a sophisticated family and being raised by highly educated parents has probably played a significant role in Omidyar’s success. Children tend to mimic their parents’ behavior both negative and positive ones. Therefore, I believe that Omidyar was inspired by his parents’ perseverance and determination. His father is a surgeon who is still practicing medicine at the age of 85, and his mother did her doctorate degree in linguistics at the Sorbonne. Similarly, as Omidyar was inspired by his parents, I think that many of us can benefit from learning more about his inspirational success story. Omidyar was just a confident young teenager who believed in himself and did not hesitate to demonstrate his unique skills whenever there was a chance. In fact, It all started with a simple archiving program which he created for the school library when he 14 years old. In addition, he did not spend his profits on material objects, on the contrary, he decided to dedicate millions of dollars to help humans all over the world.

For these reasons and many others, I consider Pierre Omidyar as an exceptional person who deserves to be a role model for many young entrepreneurs who dream of becoming as successful and influential as he is.