Founders at Work.pdf

248 Founders at Work
I saw a lot of people helping other people out, and I figured, “Well, I should
do something.” In early ’95—I don’t know when—I started sending out notices
about cool events—what I thought were cool events—to friends. It may have
been 10 to 12 people, CC list, using Pine, and that worked out pretty well.
These were usually arts and technology events, like the Anon Salon or Joe’s
Digital Diner. More people wanted to be added to the list. They were calling it
“Craig’s List.” Over time, they suggested other kinds of things, like jobs or stuff
for sale.
In the middle of ’95, the CC listing broke and I had to give the thing a formal
name and use a listserv. Somebody offered Majordomo and I was going to
call it “SFEvents,” but the people who were calling it craigslist said, “Keep calling
it that. It will signify that it will be personal and quirky.” They were right.
That’s a microcosm of our whole history: people would suggest things to me,
and then I would figure out what seemed to make sense—what a lot of people
were asking for—and then I’d do it. Even now, with a whole company behind it,
we listen. We do stuff, we follow through, and then we listen more. What we do
is almost 100 percent based on what people ask us to do.
The biggest entrepreneurial lesson I’ve learned has been that you really do
need to follow your instincts. I trusted some people who my instincts were
telling me were untrustworthy, and in some cases they proved to be very
untrustworthy. But that’s fixed now.
I got lucky in that I realized relatively early that I’m not a good manager. Jim
Buckmaster is CEO and he does a great job and that’s why my title is currently
“Customer Service Rep and Founder.” Sometimes I exploit that George
Costanza magic I have and I act in a glamorous figurehead role, where I’ll do
public speaking or whatever. But I spend 40 hours a week or more doing customer
service. I was doing that minutes ago. I’ll be doing so again in minutes.
The biggest single project I have now is dealing with misbehaving apartment
brokers—rental brokers in New York City.
The biggest problems are different forms of bait and switch, where they
post an ad for an apartment in the no-fee section, but they actually charge a sizable
fee for renting it. The standard is 15 percent of a year’s rent, which can
easily be $3,000 or $4,000. That’s a lot of money. So we can handle some forms
of that. The bigger forms will require better forms of reporting, which I’m starting
to think about, but which might not happen until later.
Livingston: Take me back to 1995. Craigslist began as an email list, but at some
point you decided to put it online. How did you program it?
Newmark: Sometime in late ’95 I realized that, “Hey, I have a lot of this email
sitting in folders.” At this point, I think I’m operating on a Solaris system and
I’m using Pine. I have email in several categories and I can write Perl code,
which turns the email logs into web pages. So I had instant publishing.
Everything has grown since that. I was, in fact, using Pine as my database tool
until late ’99, at which point we switched to MySQL.
Through the first years, probably through ’98, it was mostly Solaris,
although there was a period of maybe a year with Linux. But we used something