Many years ago, when I rented a condo with a couple of other roommates who had just graduated college with me, I had a friend named Timo who lived with me. (Yes, Timo. Like my name with an “o” at the end). We would greet each other enthusiastically – “Timo!!!” “Timmy!” and shared a mutual fondness for Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Good times. Good times.
One day, Timo saw his cubicle-mate working on some code that didn’t look familiar. “What cha workin’ on, Pierre?”, he asked. Turns out this fellow Pierre was putting together code for a web site (and at the time the commercial web was brand spanking new) called Auction Web to match buyers and sellers. That Pierre was, of course, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.
One of Pierre’s core beliefs was that people, on the whole, were honest and respectable, and that creating a community of totally anonymous buyers and sellers could succeed based on the general premise that the community would be relatively moral and self-policing. His thesis was correct, and eBay’s tremendous success has made Pierre a billionaire many times over.