Let’s be frank for a moment. Progress rarely happens in an orderly fashion. It is driven instead by curve-ball ideas and events.

For example, raise your glasses to Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Back in 1995 he had the idea of creating an online auction site. Legend has it that the idea was inspired by Omidyar’s girlfriend, Pam Wesley, who was looking for a way of trading her PEZ sweet dispensers. 

Whatever the inspiration, Pierre created a site called Auctionweb without giving much thought what to do with it. People prophesied that the site wouldn’t work because strangers wouldn’t give money to each other.

They were almost right too. In 1998, 8% of the items on eBay were Beanie Babies. However, Pierre stuck with the idea and by 2006 revenue had hit US $6 billion with eBay adding approximately 6 million auction items every day.

Sweet.