BUILDING  BRIDGES

Supporting businesses by lending good money to good businesses.  

It's the "domino effect" --  Each person's actions in life touches at least one other person's life, and many times, multiples of lives.  Pierre Omidyar's grandparents lived in Iran in the 1960s when they arranged for both of his parents to move to Paris, France for educational purposes.  His father, a medical student, and his mother, a linguistics academic, celebrated Pierre's birth on June 21, 1967 in Paris.  He was six years old when his father brought the family to Maryland when he began his surgical residency at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.

While in high school, Pierre was fascinated with computers and at age 14 wrote his first program to catalogue books for the school library. He graduated from Tufts University in 1988 with a degree in computer science.  He worked for Apple Computer when, in 1991, he and three friends created Ink Development Corp. (later changed to eShop, Inc.), an internet shopping company.  Pierre worked as a software engineer in the business until 1994.  The eShop became a state-of-the-art leader in internet shopping and was sold to Microsoft in June 1996 for its technology and expertise and was integrated into  the Microsoft Merchant product.

When Pierre was just 28 years old, and working as a developer services engineer for General Magic (a mobile/handheld communications company), his continued interest in online marketing concepts led him to create an online auction company, AuctionWeb, in his San Jose apartment. Auction Web was launched on his personal website on Labor Day weekend 1995.  The public was invited to list their items for sale on the website for free at first. He then added fees ranging from $.25 to $2.00, plus a small percentage of each sale to help pay for his internet service provider costs.  His first listed items included Pez dispensers (which his then-girlfriend Pam Wesley collected for sale and trade) and a broken laser pointer (his first sale!), which sold to a buyer who was deliberately collecting broken laser pointers.  Pierre's "experiment" into the online auction concept encouraged honest dealings, and made it easier for people to share passions and build businesses with strangers over the internet.  AuctionWeb expanded quickly by word of mouth and became more popular than he had ever expected!  People began to register goods of an unimaginable variety.  When revenue soon outstripped his salary at General Magic, he decided to dedicate his full attention to his new company.  Fees collected on each sale financed the expansion of the site, which now ran on its own website.  Always with customer service in the forefront of his business plan, a "Feedback Forum" was added to the site which allowed buyers and sellers to rate each other for honesty and reliability.  In 1996, AuctionWeb hosted 250,000 auctions.  In the first month of 1997, it hosted 2 million.  By the middle of that year, it was hosting nearly 800,000 auctions a day.

Pierre changed AuctionWeb's name to eBay in 1997, and began to aggressively advertise the service.  He has served as Chairman of the Board since its incorporation, but also served as Chief Financial Office, President and CEO -- relinquishing these positions one by one. His friend, Jeffrey Skoll, joined the company in 1996, and he hired former Hasbro executive, Meg Whitman, to serve as CEO in 1998 (she retired in 2008).  At the time, eBay had barely 30 employees, half a million users and U.S. revenues of $47 million.  By the time eBay went public that fall, the site had more than a million registered users.  The share price nearly tripled on the first day of trading and Pierre's holdings made him a billionaire overnight.

The rapid expansion of eBay's traffic did not come without growing pains.  In April of 1999 the company bought the auction house Butterfield and Butterfield for an astounding price of $260 million.  Then, in June 1999, the company suffered a number of service interruptions -- one notable outage lasted almost 24 hours, but Pierre moved quickly to regain the confidence of his customer base by having almost 400 eBay employees make 10,000 personal phone calls to top sellers to apologize for the interruption and assure them that everything possible was being done to keep the site up and running in the future.  As other online ventures fell victim to the dot.com bust of 2000, eBay continued to grow and prosper.  eBay bought Half.com on 2000 and fully integrated it into their web community in 2001.  In 2002, eBay acquired the online payment processing firm PayPal (which processes most of its online transactions) for $1.5 billion, compelling many online sellers to employ the service.  (One of the co-founders of PayPal, Elon Musk (age 40), has gone on to co-found SpaceX, which recently completed the first privately-funded Falcon 9 "Dragon" spacecraft delivery of supplies to the International Space Station, with his sights on human exploration and settlement of Mars within 10-20 years.)

Ten years after going public, eBay had expanded around the world, employing more than 15,000 persons to serve a customer base numbering in the hundreds of millions in 30 countries, with especially large precesences in China and India.  In 2009, eBay reported revenues of $8.727 billion.  Pierre's 2012 net worth is estimated at $6.7 billion.  He is the 141st richest person in the world and 50th in the United States, and the second richest person of Iranian descent.  Pierre and his wife, Pamela Wesley, both 44 years old (who married married in 1999), have become devout philanthropists and have established three nonprofits:  Omidyar Network (founded in 2004, gives disadvantaged people the tools they need to achieve financial success); Humanity United (tackles issues of human trafficking and conflict across the world); and HopeLab (uses technology to help improve children's health).  The couple has committed $1 billion to making the world a better place.  In 2010, Pierre joined Bill Gates (Microsoft founder) and investor Warren Buffett on the list of 40 billionaires pledging to donate at least half their wealth to charity.  In fact, Pierre and Pamela Omidyar have resolved to give away all but one percent of their fortune over the next twenty years.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Pierre said, "I created eBay with the belief that people are good.  If you give people the opportunty to do the right thing, you'll rarely be disappointed.  After eBay became so financially successful, I reallly felt a sense of responsibility to put that to good use."

Factoring is selling the right to payment in receivables or invoices to a factor such as Mazon Associates, Inc. at a small discounted rate from face value so that business owners do not have to wait the normal 30-45 days for payment.  Factoring is also referred to as receivables financing.  Over a billion dollars are provided to businesses each year through factoring and is a financial service used by both start-up businesses and multi-million dollar corporations.

If you would like to find out more about our factoring services for your business and/or apply for an account with Mazon Associates, please phone us at 972-554-6967 (toll-free 800-442-2740) or visit our website www.mazon.com.

June 1: Atlantic Hurricane Season Begins; June 5: World Environment Day; June 6: D-Day, Child Health Day; June 7: Boone Day; June 8: Best Friends Day; June 14: Flag Day; June 17: Father's Day, Bunker Hill Day; June 19: Juneteenth; June 20: First Day of Summer; June 27: Helen Keller's Birthday; June 28: World War I Day, Paul Bunyan Day.

In a recent two-month survey of over 6,000 small business owners nationwide, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma and Utah all earned A+'s for their friendliness towards small businesses.  In contrast, small business owners gave California, Hawaii, Vermont and Rhode Island an F, while New York narrowly avoided this lowest category with a D Grade.  Top performing cities included Oklahoma City, Dallas/Ft. Worth and San Antonio.

Wealth, like happiness, is never attained when sought after directly.  It comes as a by-product of providing a useful service.

Henry Ford (1863-1947), Ford Motor Company

Built to Last -- Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras.  Published August 28, 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers.  $18.69 Hardcover; $12.23 Paperback (Amazon). 

"This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor even is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time.  Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?"

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost.  He reduced altitude and spotted a woman tending to the flowers in her garden.  He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me?  I promised a friend that I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground.  You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be an accountant," said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the women. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is, I'm still lost.  Frankly, you've not been much help at all.  If anything, you have delayed my journey."

The woman below responded, "You must be in management."

"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are, or where you're going.  You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air.  You made a promise of which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems.  The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow it's now become my fault!"

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