In 1995, Craig Newmark started an email list to publicize
events in San Francisco. As “Craig’s List” grew
in popularity, he switched from a mailing list to a
website and added categories. Without consciously
realizing it, he was about to take a big bite out of the
classified ad business.
In 1999, Newmark decided it was time to morph
craigslist.org from a hobby into a real business. Jim
Buckmaster joined on as lead programmer and CTO in
early 2000, and was promoted to CEO later that year.
Dedicated to his mission of building a community
on the Internet, Newmark has held fast to his plan to
keep craigslist as free as possible. All listings are free, except help wanted ads in
select cities and broker apartment listings in New York City. There are no
banner ads.
Despite many opportunities to increase revenues, craigslist never compromised
the experience of its users. And because it is able to operate cheaply and
let users do much of the work, craigslist has only about 20 employees—several
orders of magnitude less than other top-ten sites.
Though eBay purchased a 25 percent stake in the company from a former
craigslist employee in 2004, craigslist remains a privately held company. It continues
to expand, and now has sites for over 300 cities worldwide.
Livingston: How did craigslist get started?
Newmark: It’s now been over 11 years. I don’t know exactly when I started
craigslist. I do know that in ’94 I was at Charles Schwab and I was working with
computer security and some other stuff. But my real contribution there was
evangelizing the Internet—telling people that’s how the equity brokerage business
would work someday.
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.

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