Pierre Omidyar and Social Entrepreneurship

I wrote in August of last year a blog post about Jeff Skoll... the former eBay founder who has since founded Particpate Media and the Skoll Foundation. So, it seemed only right to do a post about the other eBay founder (really the guy who was there before Skoll, Pierre Omidyar.

Both Skoll and Omidyar have been pioneers in and advocates of the field of Social Entrepreneurship, the sometime for-profit, sometimes non-profit category of business that benefits disadvantaged people. Skoll's efforts are written about in the linked blog post and Omidyar's can be found through the organization he started... the Omidyar Network.

Additonally, lots of interesting mentions of Omidyar can be found through the below search results...

- Omidyar search results on the BusinessWeek site.

- Omidyar search results on the Fast Company site.

Jeff Skoll... Participant Media & Skoll Foundation

I first came across Jeff Skoll in a December 21, 2003 BusinessWeek interview titled "Jeffrey Skoll: Why Delay? Give It Away". The piece was featured in a BW Special Report on philanthropy and reveals glimpses into Skoll's path from aspiring writer, to eBay founder (along with Pierre Omidyar), philanthropist and Hollywood leader focused on social issues.

The result of Skoll's efforts can be found both at the non-profit bearing his name, the Skoll Foundation, and his entertainment company Participant Media (formerly Participant Productions... chronicled in this 2005 BusinessWeek article).

It would certainly be a fair statement to say that Skoll's original idea of being a writer is what stood out to me, but he's a fascinating guy who is involved in a lot of interesting and worthwhile efforts.