Pierre Omidyar, every mention
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every year anyone David Rosenthal 22Ben Gilbert 3
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Pierre Omidyar comes up
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 1:11:03 David Rosenthal So June of 1997, actually well before June, Pierre Omidyar, who we talked about on the amazon.com episode, had been working a few years prior at a little pen computing company called
- ▶ 1:12:10 David Rosenthal And Pierre had been working there as an engineer during the time.
- ▶ 1:12:16 David Rosenthal And after Ink, do you know where Pierre goes after Ink?
- ▶ 1:12:57 Ben Gilbert In retrospect, it actually makes sense that Pierre would go to General Magic, given his background in pen computing.
- ▶ 1:13:10 David Rosenthal Pierre starts tinkering around on the early internet and starts a collection of internet services that he calls eBay for electronic Bay Area, although there would be lots of retrospective justifications of that name.
- ▶ 1:13:54 David Rosenthal So we're telling all this history because A, it's awesome to tell eBay history, especially having done Amazon earlier this season, but kind of painting the picture here of like, Pierre's this like engineer, this is a side project.
- ▶ 1:14:41 David Rosenthal And at first, Pierre is like just hosting these auctions for free.
- ▶ 1:15:26 Ben Gilbert It is funny that like if Pierre hadn't
- ▶ 1:16:03 David Rosenthal So Pierre after he brings on Jeff's like, actually, you know, okay, I'm open to building this as a business.
- ▶ 1:17:10 David Rosenthal They give Pierre and Jeff a term sheet to invest 6.7 million dollars total in the company in a series A financing at a twenty million dollar pre-money
- ▶ 1:17:23 David Rosenthal Pierre and Jeff have one other term sheet, a competing term sheet, shall we say, but the terms they offer are a little different.
- ▶ 1:17:44 David Rosenthal Jeff Skoll had worked very briefly after graduating from Stanford GSB for a few months before Pierre recruited him to come help open the mail at eBay.
- ▶ 1:18:35 David Rosenthal The reason you would get acquired is they offer Pierre and Jeff
- ▶ 1:20:09 David Rosenthal Equity-backed loans to Pierre and Jeff in the amount of 750,000 dollars each as a way to, like, prevent them essentially, give them an incentive not to take the acquisition offer from Knight Ritter.
- ▶ 1:20:34 Ben Gilbert If this Washington Post article is true, is a total of 1.5 million dollars was paid to Pierre and Jeff to say, hey, make yourselves comfortable.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 2:10:30 David Rosenthal eBay is auctions, it's Beanie Babies, it's PEZ dispensers, which by the way, that whole legend of Pierre started eBay so his wife could collect PEZ dispensers.
- ▶ 2:11:23 David Rosenthal So eBay started as AuctionWeb in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar.
- ▶ 2:13:19 David Rosenthal And Pierre fly up to Seattle.
- ▶ 2:13:43 David Rosenthal Jeff and Jeff take them on a tour of the Seattle Fulfillment Center, and Pierre's like, he's such an, like, engineer.
- ▶ 2:14:08 David Rosenthal So Meg and Pierre get back to Silicon Valley, and supposedly, according to Brad, Pierre's like, wow, that was really cool.
- ▶ 2:14:21 David Rosenthal And Meg supposedly says, I think this is from an interview with Pierre in the book.
- ▶ 2:14:25 David Rosenthal Meg says, Pierre, this is not a direct quote.
- ▶ 2:14:29 David Rosenthal Pierre, warehouses are not cool.
- ▶ 2:16:17 David Rosenthal What happens after this meeting with Meg and Pierre, I think really illustrates just how special Jeff and Amazon as a company are, because he makes a mental and emotional leap that I, I don't know many people could have made.
- ▶ 2:19:04 David Rosenthal Of course, Meg and Pierre, they're not dumb at eBay.