Word: moneys
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stuck.) There were no Pez dispensers--that came later--but there were listings for a whole lot of computer hardware. eBay started out free, but it quickly attracted so much traffic that Omidyar's Internet service upped his monthly bill to $250. Now that it was costing him real money, Omidyar decided to start charging. He concocted a fee scale similar to the one eBay uses today: a nominal fee for listing an item (10[cents] back then, as little as 25[cents] now) and a percent of the final sale price...
...someone ended up taking it off his hands for $14. Meanwhile, the site's revenues kept doubling: they were $2,500 the second month, then $5,000, then $10,000. Omidyar eventually had another insight. "I said O.K., I've got a hobby that's making me more money than my day job," he recalls. "So it might be time to quit...
eBay is also one of the Internet's greatest financial success stories. It has defied the 11th Commandment: Internet Start-Ups Shall Bleed Red Ink. It's made money from its first month of operation. After only four years, eBay is worth some $20 billion--more than Sears and J.C. Penney combined--and its stock price has surged 25-fold. The rewards for the key players have been lavish. Whitman, after less than two years at the company, controls shares worth about $1 billion. Skoll's net worth is more than $3 billion. Omidyar's 30% ownership adds...
...great Silicon Valley divide between techies and money people, Omidyar admits, he's a classic technowonk. A computer buff in high school and a computer-science major at Tufts University, he fit all the stereotypes. "I was the typical nerd or geek," he says. "I forget which one is the good one now." After his junior year, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for a programming internship and never looked back...
...fashion show--on eBay, in full view of anyone with a modem and a yen to bid on the clothes she puts up for auction. Bids race through cyberspace, winners are declared, and Wicker mails the goods to the lucky buyers--and cashes their money orders and cashier's checks, sometimes for a tidy profit and always with the thrill of a successful sale. "I've been waiting for eBay my whole life," she says...