Joining the Mafia 104
Several years earlier, in 1995, Pierre Omidyar created
the website AuctionWeb. It was his hobby project where
people could buy and sell products. But the hobby became
a profitable business when Omidyar sold his broken laser
pointer and realized he could charge sellers a percent fee
on their sales. He contacted the winning bidder to ask if he
understood the laser pointer was broken. “I’m a collector of
broken laser pointers,” the buyer replied. AuctionWeb be-
longed to Omidyar’s consulting firm Echo Bay Technology
Group. He tried to register the domain name echobay.com,
but it was already taken. His second choice was the shorter
name eBay.com.^189
Users from eBay began asking Confinity if they could
use their website PayPal to transfer money. First, they tried
to tell the users from eBay to go away because they wanted
to focus on the users with Palm Pilots. Then they realized
the eBay users begged Confinity to be their customers.^186
The number of people who used Palm Pilots would
be considerable less than the number of people who years
later bought smartphones. But the number of people who
used the website version of PayPal grew every day. While
1.5 million customers used the website, only 12 000 used
the Palm Pilot version. As any entrepreneur would have
done, Confinity decided to stop developing the software
for the Palm Pilots, and instead go full speed ahead with
the website version of PayPal.^186
X.com and Confinity were cutthroat competitors be-