‘Wallets and eyeballs’: how eBay turned the internet into a marketplace

The story of the modern web is often told through the stories of Google, Facebook, Amazon. But eBay was the first conquerorOne weekend in September 1995, a software engineer made a website. It wasn’t his first. At 28, Pierre Omidyar had followed the standard accelerated trajectory of Silicon Valley: he had learned to code in seventh grade, and was on track to becoming a millionaire before the age of 30, after having his startup bought by Microsoft. Now he worked for a company that made sof