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Craig Newmark Quotes

Article Overview: Craig Newmark Quotes

Craig Newmark Quotes

I lived the Dilbert life.

I didn't have a clue, just did what felt right.

We weren't poor, but not incredibly far from there.

I remember realizing that it wasn't everyone else who had a communication problem. It had to be me. I miss what other people would find obvious.

I've been a San Franciscan all my life, although I only moved here in mid '93.

I decided that I would start sending people notices about cool events, usually ones that involved arts and technology. And from there, via word of mouth, the news of the list spread.

People wanted to be added. People wanted more stuff like jobs or stuff to sell posted there. And then I said ‘How ‘bout apartments?' and it just grew like that. People wanted more.

We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.

I saw that we needed to get serious and run it as an actual company.

I now own less than 50 percent. It was a good investment.

Although I never figured that part of Craigslist might be owned by a public company, Meg Whitman and Pierre Omidyar (eBay) showed that they were interested in us for all the right reasons.

Our philosophy is that we're basically making enough money to pay the bills, with a little left.

I share that naïveté.

There's no genius behind it. It's persistence and listening to people.

From the very beginning, I was involved in talking to people, listening to people. And it hasn't stopped. The idea was that people send me information; I'd ask them about it, listen, try to do something about it - and then ask for more feedback.

People can see that when they report a problem to us, we take it seriously. We want life to be fair, even though it's not.

They can be very aggressive. We get complaints that they'll list apartments on Craigslist as having no fees, then try to extract a fee when people show up. That's a difference of two months' rent.

I call them. I say this is Craig from Craigslist. They say, ‘Oh yeah, and I'm the Easter Bunny'. I reason with them. And if that doesn't work, we block their listings. Since we're the most popular listing service there - 800,000 listings a month in the New York metro area - it's effective.

Community people let me know that the volunteer operation was failing, and helped me get out of denial.

I'd like Jeff (Bezos) to listen to customers a little more. I'm a sucker for mystery series, but I still can't get a straightforward list of my favourite stuff.

Ninety percent of the function of our site is based on suggestions from users.

We needed to stay the course. That's hard to do if someone else owns 51 percent of your shares.

I had to take measures to keep myself from going nuts. He's a much better manager than I am, and because the guy who started a company is not always the right guy to lead it into the future.

Frankly, as a manager, I kinda suck, but fortunately Jim didn't.

People that start companies, and lack management skills, they fail.

Getting out of the way is really important.

We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.

We didn't care that the site wasn't being used how we had imagined.

The Internet is about inclusion. On the Net, no one should be left out.

We're innovative in many small ways. When we see something that could be done better, we do it. This is the notion of kaizen, the Japanese practice of continuous business process reengineering.

Someone posted a job ad to take the CPA ethics test for them.

Sometimes you gotta be fast so you don't waste the time of others.

There are different flavours of libertarianism, but my take is that its core values are ‘treat people like you want to be treated' and ‘live and let live,' which works for most humans.

We provide a useful service, helping people with everyday stuff like jobs and housing and we do it in this culture of trust that seems to relate to a value system where the core values are treating people like you want to be treated.

It has helped people who have a hard time meeting other people. They're using the site and becoming friends, lovers, and every possible twist on those two situations.

A break from how difficult our lives are. It's like, if you're walking out of your apartment building and somebody is coming the other way with an armful of groceries, you hold the door. It feels good - it's the neighbourly thing to do.

I remember hearing at IBM that if you focus on your customers, then treat them as you want to be treated, that's more effective and profitable. That's works, though people often forget it.

Large organizations are usually dysfunctional. In hierarchies people tell their boss what their boss wants to hear; that business process for engineering is a great idea and usually not done; that line workers in a company want to do things right but they get beaten down by the prevailing corporate culture; and that customer service is extremely important but not taken seriously.

We have our lapses, but I think we do this as well as anyone I've ever heard of.

I admit that when I think of the money one could make from all this, I get a little twinge. But I'm pretty happy with nerd values: Get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world.

I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, because I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like programming. You know, what else do we need?

It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing. We work with our community to figure out what is the right way to make money to cover the bills.

Its function is to help other non-profits do better at helping people and become more effective. I sent two big contributions - big for me - to one group providing eye exams and glasses to poor Israeli kids and the other group, same amount of money, to Palestinian kids. The theme here is giving everyone a break.

I've never wanted to believe we're ‘bigtime' and don't focus on that. At times I kinda realized something was really going on, like hitting one million page views per month, end of '97, hitting a billion, August '04, and recently, we were a clue on Jeopardy.

I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme.

As a manager, I'm not very good. I don't have the skills or the temperament.

Follow through with basic values, and remember to provide good customer service.

We are neither a nonprofit nor a conventional for-profit commercial company. On paper, we're a for-profit, but we just don't run like that.

Really, the only thing I'm missing in terms of quality of life is a permanent parking space!

Geek chic? Screw it, I'm a nerd. A recovering nerd.

I don't. There's always more to do.

Related Articles
  Lesson #2: “Getting out of the way is really important”
  De-Classifying Craigslist: How Newmark Took the Site to the Top
  Lesson #1: “There’s no genius behind it. It’s persistence and listening to people.”
  “I Lived the Dilbert Life”: The Early Years of Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark
  Lesson #3: When we see something that could be done better, we do it

Article Tags: clue, communication problem, craig newmark, jobs, word of mouth



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Facebook application - Hi Kevin - thanks for the suggestion! The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? I like your idea as well. We've got a rollout schedule of new features for the site that we are working on first before we can get to the Facebook app. We're also not sure how hard it is to integrate into Facebook. It looks like there is a php way to do it which is great because that is our core competency.
Re: New Famous Entrepreneur - Craig Newmark - Craigslist has got both positive and negative feedbacks although I admit I've used Craigslist as also one of my good references for finding listings, jobs, etc that'll benefit my business. Well, Craig has done a great job setting up this website and it was the people around who makes the bad impressions. I hope that won't hurt the whole Craigslist reputation though.
Facebook applications - ....[quote:36s714h1]The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? [/quote:36s714h1] So far my own foray into Facebook has been a complete bust, though I expected that from the start. But if I do an Application for my own particular field of interest, such as Your Favorite Sci Fi movie...that might get people going. So Evan when you figure out how to do this please let me know how complicated it is!!
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