September 3, 1995. A French-born Iranian-American computer programmer Pierre Omidyar started a website that auctioned used, broken and second hand stuff. It was his hobby.

Soon the traffic on his site increased and he needed to pay $250 more for hosting.
Instead of paying from his own pocket, he asked the users to pay a nominal fee for listing an item (10¢ back then, 25¢ now) and a % of the final sale price.
Those little payments turned into $1,000 the first month, $2,500 the second month, then $5,000, then $10,000, etc.

January 1997. The site hosted 2,000,000 auctions (8 times more than in 1996).

September 1997. Omidyar had tried to register a new domain name echobay.com, but found it already taken, so he shortened it to his second choice, eBay.com. The company changed its name to eBay.com.

1997. Looking for funding:
eBay got refused by Bessemer Venture Partners: “Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You’ve GOT to be kidding, no-brainer pass.”
eBay received $6.7M funding from Benchmark Capital.

March 1998. Hired a new president and CEO. The company had 30 employees, 500K users and $4.7M revenue.

September 21, 1998. eBay went public. The founder became a billionaire overnight.
An investment by Benchmark Capital a year ago in eBay yielded a 50,000% return.

From 1998 till today, eBay bought 53 companies (auction websites, marketplaces, ecommerce systems, etc.).

2000s. eBay expanded product categories beyond collectibles into almost any saleable item.

October 2002. The company bought PayPal.

2005. eBay bought Skype for $2.5 billion (and sold it to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion).

2017. eBay is worth $36.6 billion.

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay