Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris on June 21, 1967 to Iranian parents who migrated there for a better education. Omidyar attended Punahou school in Honolulu for a couple of years. His interest in computers began while he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He graduated from St. Andrew's Episcopal School, Potomac, Maryland, in 1984. In 1998 he graduated from Tufts University in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts, with a bachelor's degree in computer science. Later he went to work for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, where he worked on the team that upgraded MacDraw to MacDraw II.
By the end of 1998, the eBay boasted 2.1 million members and generated $750 million in revenues, enough business to attract the attention of e-commerce giant Amazon.com, which started running its own auctions in 1999. Smaller auction sites have joined the fray, as have conventional marketers like clothing companies, who started offering auctions on surplus products. So successful did the online auction site become that some industry observers predicted that Internet auctions would become the dominant e-commerce model in the future.
In January 2000, Omidyar accepted his first board position outside of eBay. He joined the board of directors of ePeople, an online marketplace for technical support. He later started the philanthropic firm Omidyar Network. With an avowed interest in journalism, he also launched First Look Media in collaboration with Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian reporter who published government documents leaked by the National Security Agency's Edward Snowden. The company's first online publication appeared in early 2014, The Intercept. The venture stresses "the fundamental importance of a free and independent press" for a democratic society, according to Omidyar in a statement.