Craigslist's Craig: 'It Just Feels Right'

Name: Craig Newmark

Title: Founder and customer service representative

Organization: Craigslist

Location: San Francisco

In high school, he was: A nerd. "I literally [wore] a plastic pocket protector and thick black glasses, taped together. I was a complete nerd. I had the social skills associated with the cliche. I'm different now."

Favorite vacation spot: "I don't know what the word vacation means."

Favorite recent film: The final cut of "Blade Runner"

Reaction to his celebrity: "If [people] think I'm a celebrity, they need to get out more. I tell them I'm a 'celebutant.' I'm the Paris Hilton of the Internet."

From the Beginning

Question: How did Craigslist happen?

Craig Newmark: The effort started in 1994. I was at Charles Schwab (Nasdaq: SCHW) , working on overall security architecture. While I was looking around at the Internet , I saw a lot of people helping each other out and thought that I should do something too. So in 1995, I began to e-mail a bunch of friends about art and technical events in San Francisco.

Over the months that followed, people kept asking if I could add the occasional job posting and listings for things to sell, too. Then I said, "Let's add apartment listings, too."

It was all done through a very simple e-mail, a cc: list. This is the sort of pattern we still have today: People suggest stuff to us, we do what makes sense, and then we ask for more feedback.

I left Schwab [for freelance work] around the same time I began Craigslist. I was going to call it "SF Events," since it was still mostly events, but friends told me that they already called it "Craigslist," that I had created a brand unintentionally and that I should keep calling it that because it was personal and quirky.

The thing just kept growing. Later on in 1995, I remembered that I was a programmer and that I could turn code into HTML, so I would be able to do instant publishing. It suddenly occurred to me that I could write code and that I could make Craigslist into a Web site where the code would do most of the work for me.

Question: How did things develop from there?

Newmark: The first three years of Craigslist, I ran this by myself, and it somehow built critical mass. At the end of 1997, [we] hit a million page views a month. Then the folks from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Sidewalk wanted to run banner ads on the site, and at market rates, that would be all the money I needed to live. [But] I figured, "Hey, I'm an overpaid programmer, I don't need the money, and many banner ads are pretty dumb," so I decided not to run them. And the third milestone [was] a few people approached me about running Craigslist on a volunteer basis. I tried that in 1998, where we would all work together on a volunteer basis. We tried it, but it failed. Things just didn't get done. It just started slowly dying.

Question: How did Craigslist survive that tumultuous period of experimentation?

Newmark: Well, when I'm committed to something, I'm committed. Then, at the end of 1998, some people approached me and helped get me out of denial about what was going on, and then I made Craigslist into a real company in the beginning of 1999. I did a mediocre job at best, because I'm not very good at the business end of the operation. I had the first ideas about it, but most of what we do is based on what people in the community suggest. Fortunately, in 2000 I hired a guy named Jim Buckmaster. He's turned out to be a natural manager, and he does a great job with it.

A Unique Path

Question: How does the company make money?

Newmark: The idea is that we're a community service. Almost 100 percent of the site is free, but we do charge for job postings in 11 cities. We charge for apartment listings in New York City.

Question: Why only in New York City?

Newmark: The apartment brokers who we charge asked us to charge them because they figured it would cut down on the perceived need to post and repost the same places and get rid of some of the scammers. The principle behind this - in 2000, I asked a lot of people, "What's the right way for us to pay the bills, and maybe do better than that?" People told us to charge people who already paid too much for less-effective ads. Specifically, the consensus was, it was OK to charge employers and recruiters and to charge apartment brokers and real estate agents. And so we've done that, but only a little.

Question: And this makes enough money for your 25 San Francisco-based employees to get their paychecks?

Newmark: Right. It ain't bad. We just do what feels right and plug away.

Question: Your official title is founder and customer service representative. Why is that?

Newmark: Jim is a much better CEO. And my skills are not management skills. However, I'm a really good customer service representative. I'm part of a customer service team, and we handle things like cases of abuse from users of the Web site.

Looking Ahead

Question: Five years from now, what do you see changing at Craigslist? Where else can you take this?

Newmark: It's going to be more of the same, more cities, more languages. It's now in English, and we've recently introduced Spanish, starting with Madrid (Spain). We're just starting. We have to improve technologies, like multicity search. In some cases, we need to be able to search in nearby cities rather than doing multiple searches. We always need to improve customer service. For example, we need better tools to detect and remove spam listings.

One thing we found doing customer service is that there are not that many bad guys out there. However, the bad guys make a lot more noise.

Question: Will we ever see a massive redesign of the Web site from the white, mostly text-based listings to something with more pizazz and color?

Newmark: We're pretty much not really changing. We do one thing well, and we don't want to screw it up. And regarding our look and feel, someone said that our site has the visual appeal of a pipe wrench, and that was intended and taken as a compliment. We don't need much new fancy stuff in general. We need tools that get the job done.

Question: Why has Craigslist been so successful?

Newmark: We were an early mover doing what we do, and it does help that the site is almost all free. We think we have a really good culture of trust, and that's because without consciously doing so, we have stood by some core shared values. The fundamental value is that we feel you should treat people like you want to be treated, which means that you provide good customer service, and it means that you should have a "live and let live attitude," and it means that now and then you give the other person a break. These are values that most everyone in the world shares. And there's nothing noble or altruist or pious about this; it just feels right.