Pierre Omidyar

Omidyar wrote AuctionWeb over a long weekend in 1995, and the first item sold was a broken laser pointer, bought by a collector of broken laser pointers. That story captures the point: someone will want almost anything if the market is big enough. Feedback ratings let strangers trust each other, and listing and final value fees made the secondhand trade profitable at scale. Jeff Skoll and later Meg Whitman did much of the work of building eBay into a company.