The Perfect Store
Chapter One
Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris in 1967 to a French-Iranian family
that placed a premium on intellectual pursuits. Omidyar's parents
had been sent to France by their families as young adults to get a
better education than was available in Iran in the early 1960s.
Omidyar's father attended medical school; his mother studied
linguistics at the Sorbonne. They met for the first time in their
adopted land-an encounter that was all but inevitable, given the
size of the city's Iranian community-and eventually married. When
Pierre, their only child, was six, they emigrated to the United
States so that his father could begin a urology residency at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Growing up in and around Washington, D.C., Omidyar was a typical
American child, except for his early fascination with computers. In
seventh grade, Omidyar used to sneak out of gym class and make his
way to the unlocked closet where his science teacher stored a cheap
Radio Shack TRS-80. While his classmates played dodge ball and
practiced layups, he used the "trash 80," as it was known, to teach
himself to program in BASIC. Omidyar lived i ... read full excerpt from: The Perfect Store ebook
