Founders at Work.pdf

Craig Newmark 251
Livingston: Going back to the time when you were still in your apartment, was
there anything that worried you?
Newmark: I can’t think of anything. I may be forgetting a lot, but I think the
only worry I can recall was that, when you run your server on someone else’s
machine, if there’s a problem in the middle of the night, you have an issue. Or,
if you are running it at a service, and they are flaky and have weak customer
service, that’s another problem.
Livingston: Did your site ever go down?
Newmark: I think it did, but in a way that’s reasonable and understandable.
Once in a while, our site has problems this way, but the thing is that we still
manage to keep it up pretty well and keep it fast, which is hard because we’re in
another surge of growth. We’re now getting at least five billion page views a
month. We’re in 170 cities.
Livingston: Back to how you got people to help you with this. Did people come
to you?
Newmark: Well, how can they help me run the site? We spoke about making it
a nonprofit and that made some sense, given my ignorance then. Now I realize
there’s a lot of legal constraints in nonprofits. They’re meant to prevent various
forms of corruption. The thing is, like a lot of laws like that, people who are
crooked always find ways around the laws, and so the constraints just make it
more difficult for the honest people. We are very, very lucky we’re not a nonprofit.
We have our own nonprofit, which is doing some really good things. I’m
on the board there, but my gig is customer service.
Livingston: When you first started, did you worry about spammers and other
people trying to take advantage of your site?
Newmark: We have a really good culture of trust on the site—of goodwill. You
know, we’re finding that pretty much everyone out there shares, more or less,
the same moral compass as we do and as my personal one. People are good.
There are some bad guys out there, but they are a very tiny minority and
our community is self-policing. People want other people to play fair, and
that works. That does mean a certain amount of our time, including mine, but
that’s OK.
Livingston: You set up a way for the community to regulate the site, right?
Newmark: Yes: flagging. Flagging works. By virtue of flagging, we’ve turned
over control of our site, for the most part, on a day-to-day basis to the people
who use the site. We need to figure out better ways of doing that; that’s still in
process.
Livingston: How did you first come up with the idea of flagging?
Newmark: I forget. I think it was my customer service team, not me. I don’t
recall, it was so long ago.
Livingston: But it worked pretty well?