The Marketplace

Sell nothing yourself; open a place where sellers and buyers meet, and take a commission. The first thing sold on AuctionWeb, opened by Pierre Omidyar on 3 September 1995, was a broken laser pointer, for fourteen dollars and eighty-three cents. The story sounds too good to be true, but the buyer was a real person — Mark Fraser of Canada — who explained that he collected broken laser pointers and gave interviews about it years later. This map carries a great many myths; this one is the verified article. In May 1997, Rakuten Ichiba opened with six employees, one server and thirteen shops. And the theory of these places as two-sided markets came from Rochet and Tirole in 2003 — practice was walking eight years ahead of it.