Word: publicly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...their travels over the years, she and her husband had acquired acres of stuff. She started posting lots of it for auction. When she was well enough, she began attending public auctions and buying up lots. Today she tests her strength, challenging herself with eBay, working as much as her illness allows. "For me," she says, "it wasn't the sale. It was being part of something again. It was the contact with people. I guess I used it to make me feel better...
...long as there has been an Internet, of course, there have been anti-Internet fuddy-duddies, pessimists who lament the end of face-to-face sociability as people retreat from the bustling public square to their computers for the anonymous encounters of cyberspace. With some justification, the pessimists can trace the decline of shopping, that most social of activities, from the mom-and-pop corner shop, where everyone knows everyone else, to the department store, where we might recognize one of the cashiers, and from there to the vast warehouse of the superstore, where no one knows anyone--and finally...
...cyber and--surprise, surprise--they've been up to the task. Toys "R" Us, the bumbling, old-economy slow mover, has in the past two quarters come on like light sabers in the toy space, setting up a subsidiary, Toysrus.com and prepping that company to go public sometime next year...