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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| He emailed his first customer to warn him the product was broken. The response changed everything. A broken laser pointer led to 1.9 billion transactions a year. Pierre Omidyar was 28 years old. Working as a software engineer at General Magic in Silicon Valley. Making decent money. Living comfortably. But he had an idea that wouldn’t leave him alone. What if regular people could buy and sell things directly to each other online? No stores. No middlemen. Just people trading with people. Everyone said it would never work. “People won’t trust strangers with their money.” “Nobody’s going to buy things they can’t see in person.” “The internet is for information, not commerce.” He didn’t listen. Here’s what Omidyar understood that everyone else missed: People are fundamentally good. Given the right structure, strangers will be honest with each other. Trust isn’t about technology. It’s about systems. So on Labor Day, 1995, he wrote some code on his personal website. Called it AuctionWeb. A simple page where people could list things for sale and others could bid on them. Nothing fancy. No investors. No business plan. Just a side project on a weekend. The first item he listed? A broken laser pointer he had lying around. Someone bought it. Omidyar was so confused he emailed the buyer. “You know this is broken, right?” The buyer wrote back: “I collect broken laser pointers.” That’s when Omidyar realized something. There’s a buyer for everything. You just have to connect them. Within weeks, collectors started flooding the site. Beanie Babies. Pez dispensers. Antiques. Random stuff from people’s garages. The site grew so fast it crashed his personal internet account. By February 1996, he was getting so much traffic he had to move to a business server. To cover the costs, he started charging a small fee. Just enough to keep the lights on. That’s when everything changed. His side project started making more money than his day job. Within nine months, he quit General Magic to work on AuctionWeb full time. He renamed it eBay. His first choice was Echo Bay, but someone had already taken that domain. So he shortened it. September 1998. eBay went public. The stock opened at $18 per share. Four months later, it hit $300. Pierre Omidyar became a billionaire. But here’s what matters more than his net worth. Today, eBay connects 134 million active buyers across 190 countries. 2.3 billion items listed at any given moment. 19 million sellers running businesses on the platform. 1.9 billion transactions every year. Nearly $75 billion worth of goods changing hands annually. All because a 28-year-old software engineer wrote some code on a holiday weekend. He didn’t wait for permission. He didn’t raise money first. He didn’t build the perfect product. He built a simple page. Put a broken laser pointer on it. And let the market tell him what it wanted. That broken laser pointer taught him something every entrepreneur needs to learn. You don’t need a perfect product. You need a real test. You don’t need millions in funding. You need one customer willing to pay. You don’t need everyone to believe in your idea. You need to believe in it enough to ship it. What weekend project are you sitting on because you think it’s not ready? What simple test could you run right now instead of planning for another six months? Omidyar didn’t know eBay would become a global marketplace when he wrote that first line of code. He just knew the internet could connect buyers and sellers in ways nobody had tried before. He shipped it. Learned from it. Improved it. Start with what you have. Test with real people. Let the market guide you. Because sometimes the biggest businesses start with the smallest experiments. And sometimes the most valuable thing you can sell is something nobody else thinks is worth buying. Think Big |
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