Sublime

In September 1995, Pierre Omidyar, a 28-year-old computer programmer, finished the code for what would soon become eBay. Searching around for a test item, Omidyar grabbed a broken laser pointer and posted it for sale with a starting price of $1. The laser pointer sold for $14.83. Astonished, Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to make sure he unde

Peter Thiel doesn’t need much of an intro. He has been at both sides of the fundraising table, sometimes concurrently. He first invested in a precursor to what would become PayPal and soon after joined it in the early days as a co-founder and CEO. Later he founded and invested in Palantir, which specializes in big-data analytics. In August 2004, Th

Bezos insisted that Amazon had to have a customer-friendly thirty-day-return policy, but it had no processes in place to handle returns;

Amazon executives reasoned that day that they had the Internet’s most authoritative product catalog and that they should exploit it. That, it turned out, was the central insight that not only turned Amazon into a thriving platform for small online merchants but powers a good deal of its success today.