When Iranian-American entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar founded eBay (USA:EBAY) in his living room in 1995, he took one of the most established ways of doing business and adapted it to a rapidly evolving technological age.
Created when the World Wide Web was still in its infancy—and its upstart rival Amazon was barely a year old—the company’s business model was built on the core idea of connecting buyers and sellers and allowing them to trade goods.
Nearly 30 years later, despite intense competition from both generalist and specialty e-commerce operators, eBay is still thriving. He bought and sold many companies to be able to expand and enter new markets. These include PayPal, a global payments processor that was acquired in 2002 and then spun off in 2015, and ticket agency StubHub, acquired in 2007 and sold to Viagogo in 2020. It also owns the UK online car marketplace Motors.co.uk.