eBay is celebrating their 25th anniversary and highlighting many of their eBay success stories. Over a Labor Day weekend 25 years ago, Pierre Omidyar wrote the code for what became eBay. Started as an experiment, eBay is fueled by a bold notion that creating a truly open, fair and honest marketplace would level the playing field and foster economic opportunity for all. In 1995, Pierre made what would become the first sale made on eBay — a broken laser pointer — and spurred not just the start of our marketplace but paved the way for ecommerce as we know it today.
We pioneered a bold model of shopping and selling that was, and still is, about empowering people and creating prosperity. Our marketplace is filled with storied firsts — from helping catapult the Beanie Babies craze in 1997 to being one of the first companies to launch an iPhone ecommerce app in 2008; hosting a record-setting charity auction for a power lunch with Warren Buffet that went for $3.46 million in 2012 to enabling shoppers to search by image in 2017.
Since the beginning, we’ve put people at the center. And our desire to help our community thrive is greater now than it has ever been.
eBay is open to everyone. We extend a hand to untapped communities with programs that encourage small business creation and lend new life to local main streets. Our nonprofit charitable foundation was one of the first created with pre-IPO money to give back to the community; we’ve given over $1 billion through eBay for Charity to more than 96,000 nonprofits globally. More recently, in the wake of COVID-19, we’ve also announced nearly $15 million in giving through our eBay Foundation to organizations around the world to support nonprofits and entrepreneurs amid this pandemic. We’ve also launched accelerator programs, like Up & Running, geared specifically toward retailers to help them transition to selling online.
Everything we do is with our community in mind: the entrepreneurs and businesses who rely on our platform to fuel their livelihoods, the buyers who look to eBay to match them with just the right thing and the employees who strive to deliver for our customers every day. We are stewards of this awesome responsibility, empowering people no matter their location to realize their dreams through entrepreneurship and reach a global network through our marketplace. Now, we are focused on where we are headed next.
