The Pez Dispenser Story eBay Never Happened
Zusammenfassung
The most widely told origin story for eBay — that Pierre Omidyar founded it so his fiancée could trade Pez dispensers — was invented by eBay’s early publicist, Mary Lou Song, in 1996. The real origin was less romantic: Omidyar built the first version over Labor Day weekend 1995 as an experiment in peer-to-peer e-commerce. Song fabricated the Pez story because she thought it was more charming than the truth and more likely to generate media coverage. It worked extremely well. The Pez story ran in major publications worldwide. Song later revealed the fabrication publicly; by then, the story was too established to correct.
The Actual Origin
Pierre Omidyar was a software developer at General Magic, a mobile computing startup, in 1995. He built the first version of what became eBay over the Labor Day weekend — September 2-4, 1995 — as a personal project. The initial concept was a marketplace where individuals could buy and sell items directly with each other, with the price determined by auction rather than by a seller-set price.
The domain was AuctionWeb within eBay Internet (Omidyar’s existing personal web presence). The first item sold on AuctionWeb was a broken laser pointer — Omidyar listed it to test the system, someone bid $14.83, and Omidyar emailed to ask if the buyer understood the pointer was broken. The buyer confirmed he collected broken laser pointers.
Omidyar ran AuctionWeb as a side project while employed at General Magic. The site grew through word of mouth in hobbyist and collector communities. By early 1996, the site was generating enough revenue (from small listing fees) to pay for its own server hosting.
Mary Lou Song’s Decision
Mary Lou Song was eBay’s first PR hire. When journalists asked about eBay’s founding story in 1996-1997, she found the truth — a developer building an auction experiment over a holiday weekend — insufficiently compelling for mainstream media coverage. She invented the fiancée/Pez dispenser story, which provided:
- A human protagonist (the fiancée as collector)
- An emotional hook (building something for a loved one)
- A specific, memorable detail (Pez dispensers rather than generic “collectibles”)
The story appeared in numerous publications. eBay’s subsequent growth and IPO (September 1997, raising $63 million) made the founding story a fixture of business press coverage. The Pez story survived in textbooks, business school cases, and general-interest articles for decades.
Song revealed the fabrication in the 2002 book The Perfect Store by Adam Cohen, who had researched eBay’s history in detail. Omidyar confirmed the real story. The Pez story persists in less careful sources despite the public correction.
What the Story Reveals About PR
The eBay Pez story is a case study in how founding myths are constructed and why they endure. A charming false story, told consistently and repeated by credulous journalists, can displace a true story that is less interesting. The correcting accounts — Song’s admission, Cohen’s book — received far less coverage than the original fabrication.
The story also illustrates the systematic pressure in startup culture toward mythologizing founding. The dot-com era’s press coverage was hungry for narratives; PR professionals supplied them; the narratives attached to companies regardless of accuracy.