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Since that Thanksgiving, however, Skoll had reconsidered. He could see, from his vantage point at Knight-Ridder, that the Internet had the potential to completely transform how goods were sold. One reason Knight-Ridder had established Skoll's unit was that the newspaper giant realized the Internet posed a significant threat to classi- fied ads, one of its major sources of revenue. On the Internet, sellers could have considerably more space to describe their items and post photographs than they would in a print ad. The audience would not be limited to readers of a single newspaper, or of any newspapers at all. Online ads could be interactive, allowing buyers and sellers to contact each other by e-mail. Not least, the Internet allowed for dynamic pricing, which meant sellers did not need to choose a price in advance — they could charge whatever the market would bear. These advantages were, of course, all built into Omidyar's online auction model. Skoll eventually realized that "what Pierre was doing was a lot bigger than just a simple website." In February 1996, Skoll had agreed to do consulting work for AuctionWeb. By August, the site was so successful that Skoll quit his job and signed on full-time.

In Skoll, Omidyar found a yang to his yin. "It was the perfect balance," says Omidyar. "I tended to think more intuitively, and he could say, 'Okay, let's see how we can actually get that done.'" Skoll was the hard-driving one, the one focused on business development and fending off the competition. The more easygoing Omidyar tended the website and nurtured the AuctionWeb community.

When Skoll reported for work, AuctionWeb was still operating out of Omidyar's home. Skoll wanted to move the company to Palo Alto, which he considered to be the "epicenter" of the Internet boom, or at least to nearby Santa Clara. But the Silicon Valley real-estate market was so tight AuctionWeb could not find office space in either city. While they looked for offices, Omidyar and Skoll moved AuctionWeb's headquarters from Omidyar's home to Skoll's, a group house in Los Altos Hills that he shared with a few of his former business-school classmates. Skoll's home had more room than Omidyar's, but it was still nothing like a real office. One of Skoll's housemates worked at the NASA Ames Technology Center, a NASAfunded high-tech incubator in Sunnyvale. He helped AuctionWeb get temporary offices there, a one-room space that could barely fit Omidyar, Skoll, and Agarpao. It was clearly not a long-term solution.

Omidyar suggested expanding the search for permanent quarters to the city of Campbell. A sprawl of suburban homes and office parks, Campbell paid tribute to its long-lost agricultural heritage every May, when it played host to California's largest prune festival. Campbell was not as fashionable as Palo Alto, and it was certainly not the epicenter of the boom. But what Campbell lacked in hipness and frenetic activity, it made up for with more practical attributes. Rents were lower and, more important, there might actually be some offices to be had. From Omidyar's perspective, Campbell had another advantage: he lived there.

The real-estate agent that Omidyar and Skoll pointed toward Campbell came back with a dentist's-office-sized suite on the second floor of 2005 Hamilton Avenue. The suite was located in the The Chinese book I Ching teaches that the yin embodies elements of the yang, and vice versa, and so it was with Omidyar and Skoll. Omidyar, the antimaterialist, was already a millionaire, and would become the wealthier of the two from his stake in eBay. Skoll, the corporate-minded MBA, would later assume a very different role at eBay, that of in-house champion of the community.

Greylands Business Park, a clump of low-rise brick buildings that cried out "business" far more than "park." Greylands was directly across the street from one sprawling shopping center, and diagonally across from an even larger one. The prospective headquarters were as blandly utilitarian as AuctionWeb's website, but they were a clear improvement over the room in the NASA incubator. Omidyar and Skoll told the agent they would take it.

There was just one problem. To evaluate AuctionWeb's financial situation, the landlord wanted Omidyar and Skoll to fax over a balance sheet. AuctionWeb did not have one, and it seemed unlikely the landlord would be satisfied with what the company did have: Agarpao's extensive list of cash deposits. Determined not to let the office space get away, Skoll sat down and began taking inventory. "What are the servers worth?" he asked Omidyar. They guessed about $5,000. Liabilities? They listed that month's phone bill, which had not yet been paid. When he was done, Skoll had a rudimentary balance sheet, which he faxed off. The landlord was unpersuaded. Before AuctionWeb could move in, Omidyar, the only partner who actually had some assets, had to personally guarantee the lease.

Skoll's other priority, after office space, was professionalizing the AuctionWeb site. Skoll argued that the San Francisco Tufts Alliance, the biotech start-up, and Ebola Information-which were all still on eBay.com-were distracting and, in the case of the Ebola page, more than a little creepy. Omidyar, perhaps partly to tweak Skoll, put up a defense of the Ebola page. McKinley's, an Internet search engine that rated websites, had awarded Ebola Information four stars, he reminded Skoll, while it gave AuctionWeb only three. It simply made no sense, Omidyar argued, to remove the one page that could be driving the most traffic to eBay.com. Skoll was not convinced. In the end, Omidyar gave in and reluctantly removed everything but AuctionWeb from the eBay site.

In May 1996, Jim Griffith was sitting at a computer in an art studio in West Rutland, Vermont, shopping for computer parts.

Griffith, who has the bushy white beard, rounded physique, and biting wit of a mischievous St. Nicholas, had come to Vermont in a last-ditch effort to pull his life back together. He was coming off two hard decades of living in New York, where he had started out pounding the sidewalks of the casting-call circuit, struggling to make it as an actor. When his matinee dreams died, he threw his creative energy into a career as a decorative artist, doing ornate painting in the homes of the city's moneyed classes. His friend, Broadway director John Tillinger, introduced Griffith around, and in time his paintbrush was rubbing up against some of the toniest walls in Manhattan, including those of Lauren Bacall's home in the Dakota apartment building.

After ten years of painting upscale apartments, Griffith burned out. The combination of an especially disastrous work project and a head-on collision with middle age pushed him over the edge. He and his partner decided to get out of the city and start over in West Rutland. Griffith had planned to paint murals there and send them to clients back in New York, but he found it was too difficult to line up assignments from out of state. He ended up working as an administrative assistant for the Carving Studio, a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to teaching stone carving.

Copyright © 2002 by Adam Cohen

Tags: Career & Money

About the Author

Adam Cohen is a senior writer for the Nation section of Time, where he covers law and politics. He has also written for Chicago Magazine, Chicago Tribune and The Harvard Law Review. He lives in New York.