Pierre Omidyar Interview (page: 3 / 8) Founder and Chairman, eBay	Print Interview

Was there ever any doubt in your mind that computer science was what you wanted to do?

Pierre Omidyar: I always wanted to be involved with computers. My original kind of career choice, what I thought I was going to do was more computer engineering, which was, I thought -- you know, figure out the hardware and the software and combine the two to learn about computers. When I got to college at Tufts I was accepted into the engineering school to do an electrical engineering and computer engineering program. I learned quickly there in my first semester -- actually my second -- well, I learned very quickly that the engineering program was a little bit too rigorous for me, and I took a class. I took a chemistry class, and I think that was second semester of freshman year, because it was required for the engineering program, taking chemistry. I had no interest in chemistry. And I had worked -- I worked so hard for that class trying to understand what was going on and study for the test and everything, and did so poorly. I remember for the mid-term I had studied harder than I had for anything else and got 25 out of 100 on the test. And it was at that point I said, "You know what, this is kind of ridiculous." So I transferred out of the engineering college and went to liberal arts and just did the pure computer science.
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What else do you recall from college in terms of influences and life changing experiences or ideas?

Pierre Omidyar: When I was in college I taught myself how to program the Macintosh. A big foundation actually for that was a class. It was actually -- so it wasn't completely self-taught -- it was a C programming class called "Data Structures." It was the big kind of the "weed-out" class for the computer science program. I learned how to program C. A great, great professor. Probably one of the best I've ever had, and a couple of things stem from that story. The first is that that professor eventually had to leave the school. He was a great teacher but apparently he had never published anything, and so they axed him. He had to leave and that was a scandal, at least in my mind. So I don't know what exactly that taught me, but it did have an impact on me and -- yeah. And then second, you know, I learned how to program C, and then I used that ability to teach myself how to program the Macintosh which I was just very excited about learning everything I could about it. And of course, that's how I began actually my professional career was after college -- actually a year before graduating from college -- I took a summer job in California working at a software company for the Macintosh.
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Did it enter your mind at that point in your life what was going to happen?

Pierre Omidyar: No, no, no, not at all.

I was just pursuing what I enjoyed doing. I mean, I was pursuing my passion. And the whole -- you know, the ability to create software that could have a benefit or an impact on people that used it was what was driving me. And so I was driven by, you know, mass market software and the whole notion of just being able to do neat things. And like most software people, it is very much a passion more than anything else. And so, like people have said, it is not really work, you know, if you are having fun, it's not work so that was the case with me.
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What do you think motivates you to do what you do?

Pierre Omidyar: It's probably pretty complicated. I think I have a passion.

I've got a passion for solving a problem that I think I can solve in a new way. And that maybe it helps that nobody has done it before as well. I mean, we always have -- you know, there's a sense of pride of doing something brand new, and I'm particularly inspired by problems that seem easily solvable. Not the difficult problems that some of the physicists that are here, for example, are talking about, but problems that seem easily solvable, that no one has bothered to attack because they think it's impossible, you know. And so with eBay, the whole idea there was just to help people do business with one another on the Internet. And people thought it was impossible because how could people on the Internet -- remember this is 1995 -- how could they trust each other? How could they get to know each other? And I thought that was silly. You know, it was a silly concern because people are basically good, honest people. So that was very motivating. It was, "Gee, I'll just do it. I'll just show them. Let's see what happens."
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