And a party called the Anon Salon, which was very theatrical but also technology focused. People just kept emailing me asking for their addresses to be added to the cc list , or eventually to the listserv. As tasks started getting onerous, I would usually write some code to automate them. And I just kept listening. At first, the email was just arts and technology events. Then people asked if I could pass on a post about a job or something for sale. I could sense an apartment shortage growing, so I asked people to send apartment notices, too.
By the end of It was still just me, and at the end of that year I hit about a million page views per month, which was big then. Microsoft Sidewalk [an ill-fated network of online city guides] wanted to run banner ads. But a theme coalescing in my head was: People were already paying too much for less-effective ads, so we could provide a simple platform where the ads would be more effective and yet people would pay less.
That made sense at the time and has worked out pretty well. I was getting increasingly serious about the site and had gotten some volunteer help, but at the end of , some people who had been using the site for years told me at lunch, "Hey, volunteering isn't working.
You gotta get real. You gotta make the site into something reliable. I had been in denial. I could see things starting to not work. Postings didn't get done in a timely way; the database didn't get pruned of old listings in a consistent way. Trying to run a business collecting fees for job postings--I couldn't make it work on a volunteer basis.
Maybe someone with better leadership skills could have, but I couldn't. So I had to get real and go full time. I had to commit. I left what I was doing--programming for a company called Continuity Solutions, which was doing some interesting technology for customer service--and I made Craigslist into a company in early ' I was talking to a lot of bankers and VCs, socially. They were beginning to fantasize about the way the internet could happen.
They were telling me to do the normal Silicon Valley thing: monetize everything. They were saying that this could be a billion-dollar company. But I had already made the decision to not highly monetize when I turned down the banner ads.
I had trouble making tough decisions. I was not any good at the job interview process, and I made mistakes. I found it very difficult to fire anyone. I didn't make major decisions that required some boldness, like adding new cities. I knew we needed to expand in that way, but I guess I didn't have the guts to do it. I thought, for example, that maybe we needed to do some advertising. In an HR magazine, for job postings. So I hired someone to do marketing, and put up a couple of ads, and that was just a wasted effort.
Word of mouth is what really worked. I realized that he could run things better than I could. I was able, to some extent, to divorce my ego from my CEO role. And I'd had a lot of lessons. I'd seen micromanagement be a big problem in the tech industry. I just saw lots of situations where people screwed up by interfering with people who could do the job.
To a shocking degree, Craigslist looks the same today as it did in the '90s. You're not deeply involved in the company anymore, but still: Why? I didn't know how to design fancy. The evolution of Craigslist was based on listening to people as to what they wanted and what was needed. People consistently told us they didn't want fancy stuff; they wanted something simple, straightforward, and fast.
We listened to consensus rather than what someone was trying to talk us into. Or sometimes you may hear, from 10 people who love fancy stuff, that we should do this fancy thing, and then you hear from a million other people saying keep it simple. So you turned over operations to Jim in and--famously--stuck with customer service.
You've stepped back more in recent years, yes? In the past two years, I've delegated more leadership to the customer service team.
Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. There is no banner advertising. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either. At times it has occurred to people that the problems with craigslist could be solved by appealing to its eponym, Craig Newmark.
Newmark is under lots of pressure these days. His company is being sued by eBay, a competitor and minority shareholder angry at being excluded from the company's deliberations. The attorney general of South Carolina has blustered about prosecuting his CEO for facilitating prostitution, and there have been strong challenges from law enforcement agencies in other states, too.
The tabloids have relentlessly played up stories about two so-called craigslist killers, one who allegedly used the site's erotic-services section to lure victims and another who used the help-wanted ads.
Newmark responds to such criticism with extreme serenity. Inquire about his finances and he talks about his hummingbird feeder. When his Twitter page asks him, "What are you doing? Though the company is privately held and does not respond to questions about its finances, it is evident that craigslist earns stupendous amounts of cash.
Should craigslist ever be sold, the price likely would run into the billions. Newmark, by these lights, is a very rich man. When anybody reminds him of this, the craigslist founder says there is nothing he would care to do with that much money, should it ever come into his hands.
He already has a parking space, a hummingbird feeder, a small home with a view, and a shower with strong water pressure. What else is he supposed to want? Frustration over these sorts of replies sometimes becomes comical.
In a July television interview, Charlie Rose spent half the program attempting to get Newmark to admit his good fortune, and failing. Rose is usually kind to his guests, but the scent of unacknowledged wealth brought out his ferocity.
Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.
The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging. Newmark has been working hard to extend the influence of his worldview. His public pronouncements have the delighted yet apologetic tone of a man who has stumbled on a secret hiding in plain sight and who finds it embarrassingly necessary to point out something that should long have been obvious.
He seems to have discovered a new way to run a business. He suspects that it may be the right way to run the world. Public spirited and mild-mannered, politically liberal and socially awkward, Newmark has one trait that mattered a lot in craigslist's success: He is willing to perform the same task again and again.
During the company's first years, Newmark approved nearly every message on the list, and in the decade since he has spent much of his time eliminating offensive ones. Even by the most conservative accounting, he has passed judgment on tens of thousands of classified ads. Very few people could do this and thrive.
Newmark knows that he is not typical. He tends to interpret things literally, and when he was younger other people often confused him. In , while still a college student, he read Language in Thought and Action , the classic book on communication by S. Hayakawa, and it helped him understand himself better. It has to be me,'" he says. Many things in his life are a matter of routine.
When he talks, he calls upon a repertoire of conversational gambits he has been collecting forever, and he has a selection of sound effects on his mobile phone, such as a cymbal crash, that he can trigger to make it clear he is joking. When people misunderstand him, he doesn't get upset. He loves customer service. He taps his phone, triggering a ghostly whaaahahaha. Email has always been an ideal outlet for Newmark's genial nature. Craigslist began in as a mailing list with announcements of events of interest to technical people, and as more of them began to subscribe, he encouraged readers to post their own news, archived the messages on a Web page, and tried to make sure all the content was legitimate.
Within two years, he had thousands of readers, most of whom he didn't know. This was a big responsibility for somebody who is not an extrovert.
It drove him insane. Job postings were an obvious source of revenue, and in they launched a nonprofit called List Foundation. Melone was CEO. Newmark's willingness to cede so much control worried Murphy, who soon quit the venture. For nearly a year, the site was available at two URLs, craigslist. But Melone and Newmark were pulling in different directions, or rather, Melone was pulling and Newmark was digging in his heels.
By the end of the decade, the Internet frenzy was at its peak and the smartest minds of the new industry all agreed that the right strategy was to get big fast in anticipation of a sale or an IPO. Melone wanted to raise prices. Newmark worried about charging for listings at all. Melone wanted to become a dotcom; Newmark was wedded to the idea that craigslist was a community service. Melone was gregarious, a talker.
Newmark had vast powers of passive resistance. A split was inevitable, and one day in late September , craigslist users who came in through the listfoundation. Run by Melone, it offered similar sorts of community listings and had a far more aggressive plan to grow. Melone said that Newmark had authorized the switch; Newmark announced that he'd been blindsided.
This was craigslist's first serious competitive challenge, and perhaps its last. Newmark had some personal qualities that ought to have been fatal in an entrepreneur. Aside from his communication problems and an aversion to exerting authority, he cared nothing for entrepreneurship.
But in the battle with MetroVox he had an asset that more than compensated for these shortcomings: For years he had worked on his site with an uncanny, machine-like constancy, doing all the painstaking and repetitive things that would make most people desperate with frustration and boredom, and he had done them happily.
And now his users paid him back in the most obvious possible way: They stopped using the List Foundation address, resumed posting their free ads at craigslist. Less than a year later, the bubble burst and MetroVox faded away. Newmark abandoned the idea of running craigslist as a nonprofit, which would have required him to learn and follow too many rules. He realized that nobody could stop him from giving away his money if he made too much of it, and in the meantime he handed out a significant portion of his ownership to others as a way to avoid acquiring too much authority.
He also put great distance between himself and any executive responsibility. The current CEO, Jim Buckmaster, joined the site in as a programmer and handles every business and strategic issue.
It was Buckmaster who crafted the current strategy for growth—a slow, bloblike, seemingly unstoppable accretion of new craigslist cities, each an exact clone of the others, launched with no marketing or publicity. Sometimes a new site grows very slowly for a long time. But eventually listings hit a certain volume, after which the site becomes so familiar and essential that it is more or less taken for granted by everybody except the distressed publishers of local newspapers.
Only a fraction of this loss is because of Newmark's company, but as the largest online classified site, craigslist is easy to blame. Because he is the founder of a remarkable Internet company that also happens to be helping the nation's dailies go out of business, Newmark's opinion is eagerly sought, and he spends an increasing amount of time at conferences and international meetings, where he attempts to answer questions about how to best defend the public interest in an era of cheap and ubiquitous media.
As we watch the birds on the patio of Reverie, Newmark tries out some of the phrases he is hoping to use in the coming months as he unfolds the lessons of craigslist. Jim Buckmaster was hired as a programmer in A year later he became CEO. We've had emails from people who've pretty much assembled their entire lives on the site. Yet just as Craigslist is not your typical Silicon Valley concern, and Buckmaster is not much of a typical CEO, evidenced by his essential business reading list, which includes Noam Chomsky and the Greek philosopher Epictetus.
Craigslist has no sales and marketing function and Buckmaster seems genuinely disengaged from conventional corporate profit motives, much to the exasperation of the company's critics.
I notice he is gazing past me, through the window into the street. Famously, Craigslist looks like a website hastily erected sometime around the turn of the century. That's because it was, by Buckmaster himself, in one of his first tasks after joining the company in as a programmer — appropriately enough, having responded to a classified job ad on the site.
Within a year, finding himself taking on more and more management tasks, he was "assigned the role" of CEO. Nor did he tread the usual B-school path to the top.
A biochemistry college dropout, he studied classics in Michigan for much of his 20s, teaching himself about computer programming in his spare time while living in a communal housing scheme. How did this shape his business world view?
He smiles wryly. While its millions of users seem to love Craigslist, the site has attracted criticism in recent years over its carrying of adult services listings, including prostitution. The case of the " Craigslist killer ", who allegedly met and murdered a woman through the site before later killing himself in police custody, became a media obsession in the US, eventually forcing the company — reluctantly — to shut down its adult services category in the US and its erotic services category in all other countries.
For an avowed libertarian like Buckmaster, the decision still rankles. We ended up doing the pragmatic thing.
0コメント