That’s a microcosm...
That’s a microcosm of our whole history: people would suggest things to me,
and then I would figure out what seemed to make sense—what a lot of people
were asking for—and then I’d do it. Even now, with a whole company behind it,
we listen. We do stuff, we follow through, and then we listen more. What we do
is almost 100 percent based on what people ask us to do.
The biggest entrepreneurial lesson I’ve learned has been that you really do
need to follow your instincts. I trusted some people who my instincts were
telling me were untrustworthy, and in some cases they proved to be very
untrustworthy. But that’s fixed now.
I got lucky in that I realized relatively early that I’m not a good manager. Jim
Buckmaster is CEO and he does a great job and that’s why my title is currently
“Customer Service Rep and Founder.” Sometimes I exploit that George
Costanza magic I have and I act in a glamorous figurehead role, where I’ll do
public speaking or whatever. But I spend 40 hours a week or more doing customer
service. I was doing that minutes ago. I’ll be doing so again in minutes.
The biggest single project I have now is dealing with misbehaving apartment
brokers—rental brokers in New York City.
The biggest problems are different forms of bait and switch, where they
post an ad for an apartment in the no-fee section, but they actually charge a sizable
fee for renting it. The standard is 15 percent of a year’s rent, which can
easily be $3,000 or $4,000. That’s a lot of money. So we can handle some forms
of that. The bigger forms will require better forms of reporting, which I’m starting
to think about, but which might not happen until later.
Livingston: Take me back to 1995. Craigslist began as an email list, but at some
point you decided to put it online. How did you program it?
Newmark: Sometime in late ’95 I realized that, “Hey, I have a lot of this email
sitting in folders.” At this point, I think I’m operating on a Solaris system and
I’m using Pine. I have email in several categories and I can write Perl code,
which turns the email logs into web pages. So I had instant publishing.
Everything has grown since that. I was, in fact, using Pine as my database tool
until late ’99, at which point we switched to MySQL.
Through the first years, probably through ’98, it was mostly Solaris,
although there was a period of maybe a year with Linux. But we used something
in the UNIX/Linux family all the time. We used Apache relatively early. Perl,
now more mod_perl. And MySQL since ’99. Now we’re running it on over 120
| ← In 1995, Craig | Linux servers—small, cheap → |