Coffee With Pierre

By ADAM COHEN

It was a scene from a bad spy novel. There I was leaning against a kiosk on the Champs Elysees, furtively looking at a small black-and-white photo and trying to spot the elusive Pierre, an Internet legend who tries to stay out of the spotlight. I surveyed the tables at Fouquet's, the fashionable outdoor cafe where we had agreed to meet. No dice. How hard can it be to pick out a geek entrepreneur who's worth more than $5 billion?

When Pierre spotted me--the reporter's notebook was the tip-off--it was clear why I was drawing blanks. He looked nothing like the old photo I had dug up. He had abandoned his Internet-guru getup--the gawky glasses, the long ponytail--and now looked like any other well-dressed, thirtysomething Parisian. No car and driver. No p.r. entourage.

After creating one of the Net's top brands, a company with a market value of some $20 billion, Pierre Omidyar hit the delete key. Months before eBay's IPO--the traditional media coronation for a Silicon Valley wunderkind--he stepped aside in favor of onetime Hasbro exec Meg Whitman. "I've obviously tried to push her to the forefront," he says. "Meg's the public face of the company." Omidyar moved to France in part to get in touch with his roots--he was born in Paris and lived there until he was six. But he's also working on eBay's expansion plans, making regular visits to the company's London and Berlin offices to give advice and plot strategy.

Yet even 5,600 miles from eBay's San Jose headquarters, he remains the quiet guiding spirit behind the company. Over a few coffees, he set out his personal philosophy--libertarian, communitarian and a bit New Agey. It's a world view that's evident in eBay's headquarters and throughout what Omidyar likes to call the "eBay experience."

In the 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.

In 1995, and on his way to becoming a millionaire from a pre-eBay start-up, Omidyar was captivated by the still nascent Internet. Living in Silicon Valley, where companies were going public daily, he was troubled by how imperfectly the financial markets seemed to be operating. "Institutions and large investors had all the inside information," he says. "What I wanted to do was create a marketplace where everyone had access to the same information." Out of this democratic impulse, the clunky website that would eventually grow into eBay was born.

Omidyar had a typical programmer's view of the Net. He saw it as a freewheeling, authority-defying medium, and he was proud of his fledgling site's noncorporate orientation. "The first commercial efforts were from larger companies that were saying, 'Gee, we can use the Internet to sell stuff to people,'" he says. "Clearly, if you're coming from a democratic, libertarian point of view, having corporations just cram more products down people's throats doesn't seem like a lot of fun. I really wanted to give the individual the power to be a producer as well." eBay has hewed closely to this vision. It emphasizes community, and it doesn't run advertisements.

Omidyar says he tried to imbue eBay with a "founding culture" based on the moral principles he absorbed in childhood. "My mother always taught me to treat other people the way I want to be treated and to have respect for other people," he says. "Those are just good basic values to have in a crowded world." As it happened, there were also good business reasons to carry the Golden Rule into cyberspace. Unlike traditional e-tailers, who can control the consumer's experience, eBay is almost completely dependent on how users interact. "We really have to encourage our customers to treat each other well," Omidyar says. "You can't tell people to do that. You have to encourage them to adopt a certain set of values."

Omidyar seems to realize that given his anticorporate values, it's more than a little ironic that he's one of the richest human beings on the planet. And clearly he's uncomfortable with his wealth. "What one person needs, and what one family needs and all of their future generations need is a tiny, tiny fraction of this total number," he says of his net worth. "That means we have an awesome responsibility to see that the wealth is put to good use." In addition to eBay's foundation, Omidyar and his wife are developing one of their own. He says he wants it to advance the same values as eBay: "Empowering people and helping them be the best they can be."

--A.C.