In 1995, shortly after conducting a successful online auction for broken costing $14 Pierre a laser pointer Omidyar realized that the Internet enabled market efficiency by allowing millions of buyers and sellers to view products and conduct transactions. This inspired him to launch AuctionWeb, online marketplace for n buyers and sellers. AuctionWeb officially became eBay in 1997 and hosted more auctions per month in that year than it did in all of 1996. within four years and with the help of Meg Whitman, eBay grew from a programmer's experiment into a major publicly traded company, trading on NASDAQ with the symbol EBAY