Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: Did you work with them? How did you find them?
Newmark: I think through the site.
Craig Newmark 253
Livingston: How did you grow the features on the site? Did you always add
new features based on user feedback?
Newmark: When it comes to features visible from the outside, yes. Internally,
we figure out on a continuous basis . . . we figure out what tools we need, and
then we do them. That’s working to this day, because it’s the job, for example, of
customer service to figure out how they can do their jobs better and then to tell
tech what they need. This is business process reengineering, which companies
used to talk about a lot in the late ’80s, but usually didn’t follow through.
Livingston: Did you have investors knocking at your door, offering you money?
Newmark: They started in ’99, and we had a flurry of that last year. That’s how
I have some idea of how much I stepped away from.
Livingston: When they first offered you money, were you tempted at all?
Newmark: Yes. But I decided to hold fast. I’m not implicitly judging anyone
else. We’re not anti-traditional by any means. We just made a specific decision
based on our specific values and followed through.
Livingston: And you make enough money to cover costs?
Newmark: We are doing well. Again, we are currently charging for less than 1
percent of the site. We started to charge for apartment rental listings in New
York City, but we’re still basically free.
Livingston: Did you ever think, “Boy, we can squeeze those brokers for a little
more”?
Newmark: They asked us to charge them, because they feel that it will help
improve the quality of that stuff. Especially the more legitimate brokers—they
want that because they feel that will help control the sleazier brokers. And we
think that will work OK.
Livingston: Are you having an impact on these sleazy brokers?
Newmark: It is working. It’s a long slog, but these brokers increasingly behave.
The deal is that a guy without, let’s say, a firm moral compass, if he thinks that
other brokers are being sleazy, he feels an implicit moral sanction to be sleazy.
Now I’m telling guys like that, “Hey, it’s over.” And that’s working. So we have
brokers who used to be problematic, who are no longer problematic.
Livingston: Will you tell me about one of the most frustrating situations with a
broker?
Newmark: I’m thinking of one, who’s now very well-behaved. They used to do
all sorts of things, all the bad things we’ve talked about, and they would also do
things to try to evade our tools—which worked, by the way, except I have a volunteer
who looks at things. They would post using multiple email addresses,
that kind of thing. I just kept blocking them and blocking them, and they got
tired of being blocked and they finally approached me and said, “Sorry about
this.” And it’s working now.