Zitat des Tages von Pierre Omidyar:
You can invest in companies, you can help grow companies, you can be a venture capitalist - and be a philanthropist at the same time.
News organisations that have been around a while have a lot of traditions and ways of doing things that may have served them for many years but perhaps make them less flexible in the digital era. As an entrepreneur, it just makes more sense to start something new.
I do like to fly under the radar. When I walk around town, the only people I want to recognise me and call me by my name are the folks at Starbucks.
I had the notion that, OK, so now we have all of this wealth, we could buy not only one expensive car, we could buy all of them. As soon as you realize that you could buy all of them, then none of them are particularly interesting or satisfying.
What I'm really focused on is connecting people around shared interests, so together they can make good stuff happen. I'm more focused on helping people discover their power as individuals, but through those connections with one another.
A well-functioning microfinance bank can actually be a profitable business as well. So it became a perfect proof point that, through business, you can provide an experience that leads to individual self-empowerment.
eBay's business is based on enabling someone to do business with another person, and to do that, they first have to develop some measure of trust, either in the other person or the system.
What makes eBay successful - the real value and the real power at eBay - is the community. It's the buyers and sellers coming together and forming a marketplace.
When you have mass surveillance, it's impossible to meet the intent of the First Amendment because reporters can't talk to sources because sources are afraid to talk.
I'm a technologist by origin and by training, but I'm focused on philanthropy.
In February of 1996, about six months after I created eBay, I started receiving a spate of complaints. Everyone was complaining about each other. I felt very much like I was a parent who had to adjudicate the brothers beating each other up.
Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity.
In the same way that you're driven in your business to keep innovating - Facebook is a wonderful example of constant innovation - think about doing that in philanthropy.
Long-term sustainable change happens if people discover their own power.
Technologists come at a problem from the point of view that the system is working a certain way, and if I engage in that system and actually change the rules of the system, I can make it work a different way.
Companies in Silicon Valley invest a lot in understanding their users and what drives user engagement.
Microfinance initiatives are very high-touch models. The loan officer meets with local groups of borrowers every week, they share tips and techniques. There's a lot of training and learning that goes on, which adds to the cost of the model.
If you can get over this initial distrust that people have of strangers, you can do remarkable things.
I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.
Advertisers don't want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it's extremely difficult to do that. And very few people today actually read those serious news stories on the Web now.
In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.
