Ideas birth businesses, industries, philosophies and even countries. Ideas are the reason for wealth creation or the lack of it. It’s amazing how a life can change through an idea. It’s more amazing how the entire world can change through a simple idea.
Pierre Omidyar was 28 years old when he thought of an idea to establish an online venue for direct person to person auction of collectible items.
It was a simple idea but it was one that was destined to alter the business world and transform him into one of the top 150 richest men in the world. That idea would turn out to be eBay the auction site – the internet super brand. When Pierre got his idea, he sat down over a long holiday weekend to write the original computer code for what eventually became eBay. He created a simple prototype on his personal web page, and launched an online service which he – at that time – called Auction Web as a sole proprietorship in 1995. The business exploded as correspondents began to register trade goods of enormous variety.
Omidyar incorporated the enterprise; the small fee he collected on each sale financed the expansion of the site. The money he made from his small business soon exceeded what he was earning from his salary at his then place of employment – General Magic. Omidyar was a smart man. He didn’t waste time to quit his job and dedicate his full attention to his new enterprise. Business expanded through word of mouth, and Auction Web added a Feedback Forum, allowing buyers and sellers to rate each other for honesty and reliability.
Omidyar changed the company’s name to eBay in 1997 and began to advertise the service aggressively. By the middle of that year, eBay was hosting nearly 800,000 auctions a day. By the time eBay went public in 1998, the site had more than a million registered users. By the end of the year, the value of Omidyar’s personal stake in the company was nearly $3 billion.
In 2003, eBay enjoyed sales of over $2 billion. As of this writing, eBay has more than 95 million registered users, selling more than 45,000 categories of merchandise. Through strategic acquisitions involving some buying and selling of its own, eBay is expanding in Europe and Asia, with particular emphasis on the world’s two largest potential markets, China and India.
Pierre Omidyar turned eBay into the most successful company of the dotcom era. EBay – his idea – likewise turned its founder into a multibillionaire.
His is one of the many examples of how entrepreneurs simply take ideas that meet a market need and transform such ideas into enterprises that not only realize the ideas but also end up creating opportunities for countless number of people and tilt socio economic dynamics of entire societies.
But what makes Pierre’s story interesting is the uniqueness of his idea. eBay is simply all about creating a platform – a market place – for person to person trading albeit a special market place – the web. Pierre didn’t waste a minute in pursuing that idea. He went after it with the type of zeal often seen in mission minded entrepreneurs. But even he didn’t fully see how much that idea would impact the world.
Dipo Davies, a Nigerian entrepreneur I once met, is the brilliant young man behind Real House Communications. Mr. Davies admires Pierre Omidyar a lot. Maybe that’s why they have a few things in common. Real House Communications is a company that shares eBay’s idea of ‘creating a market place for buyers and sellers’. It all started with CASTLES, the real estate magazine that took Lagos by storm. CASTLES filled an apparent gap in Nigeria’s real estate and publishing industries- it created a ‘market place’ for stakeholders in real estate. With CASTLES, Dipo Davies demonstrated innovation, creativity and the power of one good idea.
It’s impossible to mention all the examples I come across every day that demonstrate how powerful ideas are. If only we can start taking ideas more seriously and more importantly, if only we can start to get busy turning them into reality.
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