Pierre Omidyar quotes

Pierre Omidyar is a French-born businessman and philanthropist, best known as the founder of eBay. His work transformed online commerce by making it easier for people to buy and sell goods worldwide. He has continued to support innovation and social impact through his numerous philanthropic initiatives. Here are 12 of his quotes:

Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.

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

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.

Pierre Omidyar

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

Pierre Omidyar

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

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

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

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

Pierre Omidyar

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

Pierre Omidyar

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.

Pierre Omidyar