craigs list

Craig Newmark created one of the most popular websites on earth. Now hes on a mission to figure out what it all means. By Darren Gluckman

raig Newmarkwho has brushed shoulders with Steve Jobs and Leonard Cohen, and discussed the video game Angry Birds with Mad Men star Jon Hammis not a people person. The morning we speak, he has risen early to ensure that the dog food he keeps in his home is off the floor. A contractor is coming, with a big chocolate lab who knows where

Craig keeps the canine chow, and Craigwho doesnt have a dog himselfdoesnt want the pooch tearing into it and making a mess of things. Why would a non-dog owner keep dog food? My deal is that the neighborhood dogs know that I carry treats for them, he explains. And dogs arent the only beneficiaries of his largesse. I live on the edge of a forested area in town. I have

bird feeders up, birdbaths. Ive done a lot of bird photography. I do most of my work at home, so they come around, and its kind of fun watching the birds and squirrels. Its fitting, perhaps, that someone who has described himself as socially inept and a hardwired nerd with symptoms that Im told border on Aspergers syndrome communes so avidly with animals. People, though, are

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another story. He can simulate social skills, he says. I can do that for an hour, maybe two, but thats tops. So, there may be some irony in the fact that Craig (it seems wrong to refer to such an accomplished eponymist as Newmark), with his aversion to interpersonal connection, has over 120,000 friends on Facebook and is the founder of a wildly successful business whose mission and operational essence is fostering human connectionssocial, commercial, and otherwise. That business, craigslist.org, generates over 20 billion (thats right, billion) page views per month and is the seventh-most-visited English language website in the world. Not bad for someone with a limited social skill set. In fact, this deficiencyand the challenges it posed early onmay lie at the root of his success. In a conversation intended to promote his new philanthropic venture, craigconnects.org, Craig explains that his driving ethos was born of an adolescent sense of social exclusion. In high school, I felt left out, disenfranchised. He sought solace in his identity as a uniformed nerd. I really did wear a plastic pocket protector, he insists, along with thick black glasses. And at two points when the glasses had broken, I taped them together while waiting for new frames. So this is not an exaggeration in any manner. After school, instead of hanging out with other kids, he would go home and read science fiction and eat chocolate chip cookies with milk. The plastic pocket protector wasnt just protecting against leaks, it was a defense against loneliness, a retreat into an identity that made sense of isolation. I remember what that felt like, he says, and that motivates me to be as inclusive as possible. Inclusiveness is at the core of craigslists suite of local, user-driven, ad-free services, most of which are without charge, and through which you may flog your used 17' canoe (NOT SEAWORTHY), seek an incense-tolerant vegan roommate for your split-level one-and-a-half-bedroom subterranean, or offer your grease monkey services to despondent lemon drivers. Community listings include classes in how to get your ex back, and discussion boards permitting spirited debates on atheism, haikus, and what constitutes the proper equipment for an emergency wedding kit. Notwithstanding the .org, and the companys professed pride in its non-commercial nature, public service mission, and non-corporate culture, it is, in fact, a corporation and makes a sizeable profit, though arguably much less than if it allowed advertising. Its revenues, chiefly dePhoto by StePhanie CanCiello

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rived from charges for job listings and real estate postings in certain markets, are estimated to be in the range of $100 million annually. Yet for all its feel-goodness, the business has faced criticism. It has been accused of imperiling the existence of local newspapers, which rely on local classified ads for the bulk of their revenue. Craig counters that, in any event, many of the free listings on craigslist would never have been put out in local papers in the first place, given the cost and the process involved in doing so. Of course, the newspaper business in general has been hard-hit by the Internet, and it would be churlish to assign much blame to craigslist for the challenges faced by traditional print media. And the company received adverse attention in 2009 after an American medical student, Philip Markoff, was alleged to have robbed several women and killed one of them, after arranging for escort or erotic services through craigslist. In the short-lived media hailstorm that followed, the company resisted pressures to remove or sanitize its Casual Encounters section. Craig founded the business in 1995, developing it out of
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Craig Newmark
an informal e-mail list of regular goings-on in San Francis- timate level. His father served in the Pacific in World War co, where he still lives, and where he then worked for IBM. II. He was a sergeant with a specialty in blowing things But despite being the founder and chairman of craigslists up. Stateside, in Morristown, New Jersey, where Craig was board, he has no day-to-day management role. Instead raised, his father sold insurance and meat (not simultaand with a startling degree of humility and self-awareness, neously). He was a heavy smoker who died of lung cancer especially for a high-achieving tech-firm founderhis role when Craig was 13. I dont have a good grip on how that within craigslist (apart from occasional board-related du- affected me, he says, though his commitment to veterans ties) is that of a plain ol customer service rep, dealing with affairs and his support for military families may be a prodquotidian user issues as they arise and executing search- uct of that boyhood trauma. Some details about a tech titans tech: and-destroy missions targeting scammers and spammers. BlackBerry or iPhone? Neither: I use Android-style He reports not to the CEO but to the manager of customer phones. Its open. I like the use of alternative browsers and service. Craig appointed the current CEO, Jim Buckmaster, in keyboards. Im using a Motorola Droid Bionic. But tonight 2000, because people helped me understand that my the Google Nexus Prime will be announced, and I have a management skills are limited, which is to say I learned feeling Ill do what I can to get one of those. What about that as a manager, I suck. I didnt have the patience for de- your desktop setup? A MacBook Air 11-inch. Its hooked tail. Regarding interviewing new people, thats an intense- up to a big screen. But the deal is when Im on the road, I ly social activity and I just wasnt good at it. I am a really want the smallest notebook I can carry. I dont do heavyduty stuff on my desk, so I dont need a fancy system. good customer service rep, so thats what I do. Hes an icon, but doesnt hobnob with his fellows. But Craig isnt here to discuss craigslist, which, with local I dont really hang out with the big guys, he says. Espeiterations on every continent save Antarctica, doesnt need talking up. His publicist chimes in to nudge us off craigslist cially given my work in customer service, I tend to identify and on to craigconnects, Craigs relatively new online venture aimed squarely at social philanthropy. Its sloganConnecting the world for the common goodexpresses its purpose clearly enough, but how it intends to achieve global philanthropic connectivity remains unclear, perhaps even to Craig. In the long range, lets say over 20 years, Id like to figure out how to get everyone in the world connected for everyones individual idea of what the common good is. In the meantime, the organizations featured on the site include those that evaluate the accountability and financial transparency of nonprofits, encourage microfinance loans for those without access to traditional banking systems, promote open government initiatives, and support military families and veterans. Craigslist CeO Jim Buckmaster with newmark. This last cause resonates on an inPhoto by Jeff Chiu/aP Photo

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Craig Newmark
very strongly with the grassroots, with people who never get a break, who dont have any voice. Every day I hear from people who only manage to get through the day by using our free section, or maybe they put food on the table with our barter section. I did meet Steve Jobs once, years ago. More often Ive met Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] from Google. And I remember once meeting Jeff Bezos from Amazon. And I learned from them, in chatting, that these rich guys arent any happier than anyone else, and that helped reinforce a lesson that Id absorbed years earlier: You gotta know when enough is enough. So the deal is, if you get enough money for your future, maybe enough to help your friends and family, then its more satisfying to change the world rather than accumulating more cash. Indeed, if cashing out were a goal, he couldve done so many times over, and for hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly more, given the reach and notoriety of the craigslist brand. Mind you, hes not exactly living handto-mouth. At various points, both Google and the private equity firm Warburg Pincus have been potential investors. In 2004, and under strict terms that were subsequently the subject of bitter litigation, eBay acquired a 28 percent stake in craigslist, as a result of which he received a reported $9.5 millionnot exactly a trivial amount, but a relatively paltry sum in Silicon Valley terms. It raises the question: If doing good works, however defined, is more meaningful than amassing your own private Fort Knox, why not simply cash out and channel that money to the organizations you support? Why not directly infuse the organizations you support with some serious craigslist lucre? The deal is that it does people more good to keep the money that they would have spent, say, on a roommate ad than for me to take that and then try to give it away. The deal isthis phrase is a constantly recurring touchstone as he speaksthe deal is that theres plenty of money around now for philanthropic purposes, like at the Gates Foundation, and theyre finding that its very difficult to give money away in a way thats effective and sustainable. The lesson there is that the people who would have spent that money on a roommate ad need it a lot more than nonprofits that might not use it in an effective and sustainable way. Lets say they would have spent 40 or 100 bucks. They can do more good with that money, even for themselves, than I could do with it. In other words, theres greater philanthropic efficiency in allowing economically disadvantaged persons free access to craigslist services than there is in giving to charitable organizations with the attendant transaction costs and risks of suboptimal distribution of funds. But craigconnects does reflect his support for NPR and the Huffington Post, and he has advocated on behalf of the current president (he argues that the press has been much tougher on Obama than it was on his predecessor), but he doesnt cop to a liberal bias. Im a libertarian pragmatist, he says. I chat with folks at the Cato Institute. Thats fine as far as political philosophy goes, but is there a spiritual dimension to his work? Despite his Jewish background, he says hes completely secular. Nevertheless, he admits to a spiritual guide, albeit one who doesnt claim the role: Leonard Cohen. I met him once, briefly. I told him that I liked his work and that he was my rabbi. He doesnt recall the balladeers response. He does, however, remember his chat with Don Draper. This comes up in a discussion of his favorite television shows, which include The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, House, The Simpsons, 30 Rock, and Hamms Mad Men. I was at the same party with him and I had seen him interviewed talking about Angry Birds, Craig recalls. So what did you talk about? That the game qualifies you to be a 16th-century artillery captain, since its all about elevations and yardage. Ive completed all levels that are currently available and Im waiting for the next update. Craigs life is largely, but not exclusively, online. Asked whether he sees any value in being unplugged, for one day a week, say, or even an hour, he is emphatic. No. Id feel worse. Id be missing things. Even when I fly, I choose flights with Wi-Fi. When I visit London next month, Ill be offline for eight to 10 hours and people will wonder what happened to me. And yet the day after this conversation, he is attending an event for veterans and giving a talk at the University of San Francisco. When its pointed out that he leads a fairly social life for somebody who doesnt necessarily prefer that kind of interaction, he responds like the quintessential nerd. Or a 16th-century artillery captain: Thats what my mission requires.
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