Pierre Omidyar

I have been described as a nerd aspiring to be a geek.

I found this startling fact while I was working on Wall Street which was that web usage was growing at 2300% a year. Things don't grow that fast. It's very unusual and picked books primarily because there are more than 3,000,000 different books active and in print worldwide in all languages so when you have that huge number of products like you do in the book category, you can build a store online that can only exist online.

On any given day, users are adding 300 to 400,000 new items every single day and if you go to the site today, you'll see over 3,000,000 items for sale.

This person-to-person trading that's happening between individuals is really a very significant global phenomenon.

I think if you think about it you know, collectors are very passionate people and when you give them a place where they can all of a sudden find all those collectibles that they've been searching for in one place, they really do get hooked.

One of the ways I made the decision to start amazon.com to try and think about it in terms of a regret minimization framework and the idea is when you're 80, you want to look back and minimize the regrets and I think a lot of people behave this way, just very few of them speak of it in such a nerdy way.

Emails turns off the politeness gene in the human being. It sort of wonderful you know because people will tell you what they really think. And that's what you want.