eBay

The broker has only two options - buy or sell, else he perishes. Pierre Omidyar was no broker, so he decided there was a better method to play the Internet valuation game. He developed a web site, eBay, which allow you to buy and sell products. Today, this site is the best-known, most visible auction site on the Internet. The features it offers are simply astounding and at last count it had more than 2.1 million members bids every day.

Omidyar had a passion for computer right from the days; he started off with simple programs like library catalogues. Believe it or not, he developed eBay as a part-time hobby while working as software engineer. At a time, when the concept of charging for services provided on the net was non-existent, Omidyar, asked users to pay for listing on his auction site. And pay they all did, for who would want to lose out on the most visible face to sell a product, however weird or rare it might be eBay has as many as 1.8 million different items for sell in countless categories.

The road to success is not quite all that smooth through. In the first year of its operation, Omidyar was literally operating eBay out of his home, along with his friend Skoll. What makes eBay different from most other venture capital funded Internet sites, is the fact that the popularity of ebay grew more as a result of word-of-mouth than by high flying advertised campains. Omidyar owns about31 percent of ebay, and with a market capitalization of more than $20 billion, his net worth stands at approximately $5.5 billion. The coming months will of course test his true skills, as the competition hots up with more and more site like yahoo! And Amazon getting into the auction bandwagon.