If you have heard of Participant Media, then you may have read about Jeff Skoll. This film production company was founded by Jeff Skoll in 2004. Jeff Skoll graduated from Stanford University Business School, with an MBA at the Palo Alto campus. He found a way to make his MBA work for him, when he started working at Ebay with Pierre Omidyar and Margaret 'Meg' Whitman. As some of you know, Ebay started in the mid 1990s as a pure e-commerce auction website. Many netizens would peruse on Ebay to buy art, or to get other cool products through an internet auction. Ebay had their competitors too, including Amazon. Ebay would become one of the most popular auction companies, on the internet. Ebay stood for electronic (or echo) bay. Meg Whitman was the CEO of Ebay for 10 years, from 1998 to 2008. Pierre Omidyar is one of the main founders of Ebay. In the late summer of 1995, he and other coworkers decided to start Ebay as an electronic marketplace for sellers and buyers of various products. One of Pierre's coworkers was Jeff Skoll. With Jeff on board to help Pierre, it seemed that Ebay might only be a two man shop. Nope!! Jeff S. and Pierre O. decided that Meg Whitman was the right person to be the CEO. Meg W. became one of the few tech. female CEOs in Silicon Valley that steered the company in the right manner, through the recession in 2001 and the end of the .com [.dot com] boom in 2000-2002. Next, Meg decided that 2008 would be her last year with Ebay. But, it was ok for her to leave the internet juggernaut. Ebay had become a huge company with upwards of $5-$8 billion in sales. She would leave to start her new career as the CEO of Hewlett Packard, a huge computer reseller/software corporation. Let's go back to Jeff Skoll, as he is the main reason why I am writing this internet journalism story. Jeff Skoll has his name on the basc/mba emphasis [program] at university of toronto, which is his alma mater. The Rotman School of Management at university of toronto campus is one of the best colleges in Canada, thanks to the basc/mba program emphasis. Some of you may wonder why Participant Media means so much to me, and to the great Jeff Skoll. It is a film production company that helped Albert (Al) Gore, former VP of the US; to educate the world about Global Warming. Davis Guggenheim directed the movie, 'an Inconvenient Truth'; in 2006, and Al Gore helped the documentary further to win two Academy Awards in 2007. As for Jeff Skoll and participant media, there have been a few hits like 'Syriana;' 'Good Night, and Good luck;' plus 'North Country.' Syriana garnered an academy award for best supporting actor for George Clooney. Finally, let's circle back to Jeff Skoll. Participant Media has helped Jeff to branch out of tech. and business, to movie making which he loves to do. The other hits of Participant Media are 'Fast Food Nation' (2006), 'The World According to Sesame Street' (2006), Waiting for "Superman" (2010), 'Lincoln' (2012), and 'Spotlight (2015).' At the 2016 academy awards ceremony aka the oscars, Spotlight won the best picture academy award. In 2019, Green Book won the best picture award and they were helped by Participant Media. Finally, today's young internet entrepreneurs should look to Jeff Skoll and the future. Jeff may be in his fifties, but he has gained the knowledge of IT and business since the late 1990s. This era to today is almost 20 glorious years or more, of how the internet changed the lives of many netizens [portmanteau for network and citizens]. As this story written by G. Ripley comes to end, the readers should think of Jeff Skoll as one of the few tech. minds that will continue to teach humans how to improve their career; and work life. Remember that Meg Whitman; Pierre Omidyar; and Jeff Skoll are workers in the IT industry. Yet, they are philanthropists that care about the world becoming a better place for the next 100 years. Good bye to all my tech. and non-technology folks. You are the future, that helps an app. support analyst like myself to stay in this business driven world replete with new technologies that expand the internet and mankind.
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