Ebay, the multibillion-dollar online auction company that changed e-commerce, all started with Pez. Software developer Pierre Omidyar was having dinner one night in 1995 with his girlfriend, an avid Pez collector. She bemoaned the lack of fellow collectors in the San Francisco Bay area, and he suggested using the Internet to find trading partners. To help her, he posted a page called Auction Web on his personal Web site letting people list items for auction—including his girlfriend's Pez dispensers. To his amazement, the site attracted so many buyers and sellers that he soon had to set up a separate site devoted to auctions, which he dubbed eBay. By charging between 25¢ and $2 to sellers for posting their auction notice, and taking a small percentage of the sale, the company made money simply by setting up a place for buyers and sellers to meet.

Unlike many other high-tech entrepreneurs, Omidyar didn't set out to become an Internet tycoon. Born in Paris, he moved to Maryland as a child when his father accepted a residency at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center. He wrote his first computer program at age 14, to catalog books for the school library. He graduated from Tufts University in 1988 with a degree in computer science and went to work for a company that developed Macintosh software. Later, he worked for the Apple subsidiary Claris, then helped start a software company in 1991 called Ink Development Corp. » The company later changed its name to eShop and was purchased by Microsoft in 1996.