Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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
Pierre Omidyar

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

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

In order to access private capital, you have to provide competitive return on investment. In order to give competitive returns to investors, you've got to operate on a profitable basis and be thinking of yourself as a business.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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
Pierre Omidyar

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

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

A well-functioning microfinance bank can actually be a profitable business as well. So it became a perfect proof point that, through business, you can provide an experience that leads to individual self-empowerment.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

In the early days of eBay, I articulated for the very first time this belief that people are basically good.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

A lot of people don't just go ahead and try things.

Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar

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