Pierre Omidyar was born on July 21, 1967 in Paris, France. He and his family then moved to the Maryland once his father obtained residency at John Hopkins University Medical Center. At age 14 the young ambitious student would skip class just to play with computers. He was so interested in these machines and how they worked that he went to work for a local library writing computer programs to catalog books for $6/hr. From writing programs in high school Pierre went on to Tufts University located in Medford, Massachusetts. He ended up graduating on time, unlike most drop-out entrepreneurs, in 1988 with a bachelor's degree in computer science. .
From this point Omidyar decided to work for a company that developed software for Macintosh. Having connections with Apple, Pierre then chose to move to its subsidiary, Claris. By 1991 Pierre had been recruited to help start a software company named Ink Development Corporation. In the end, this company was so successful that it was noticed and quickly purchased by Microsoft in 1996. [1].
How it all started.
Over dinner one night in 1995 Pam Wesley, Pierre's girlfriend, mentioned that they were very few PEZ collector's in the San Francisco Bay area. This frustrated her so Pierre suggested that she searched on the internet for fellow collectors like herself with hopes of trading with them. Pierre toke it upon himself to develop a webpage called Auction Web to help Pam in her search. To his amazement the site was engulfed with visitors viewing and trying to purchase the items listed on the page. He soon had to set up a separate site in order to control the growing masses, and dubbed it eBay. In 1996 his ISP told him that he was creating far too much traffic for the server to handle. In order to counteract this he decided to start charging between $.25 - $2.00 for every item the user posted, then he would take an additional percentage off of the top of every purchase made.
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