I didn't gain the normal instincts people have for how you relate to others. I have since learned social skills and I can simulate them for short periods, but I do feel somewhat detached. What did those giant, traditional organizations teach you? I learned that my social skills --or lack thereof--really held me back professionally. And when you have big organizations, people form factions or silos, which sometimes operate at cross-purposes--and there are people who want to do a good job, and some people who just want to advance themselves.
I realized the dividing line between small and big, when it comes to organizations, seems to be the Dunbar number [the maximum number of social relationships any person can manage cognitively] of In college, we were on the arpanet. I sensed it would be big, but I wasn't passionate about it then. You graduated from Case Western in in the early days of arpanet, when it was basically used by scientists.
It had immense potential, but I was too focused on class work. I should have focused on what I could do with the tools that were right there. I could've reached out to people with similar interests. Later, in '84, I read Neuromancer , by William Gibson. That vision of what cyberspace could be, and the way regular people--having no power or influence--could work together to accumulate power from the grass roots up kicked off the imaginations of many people.
I started seeing that vision again in the early '90s. I'd started spending time on the WELL, a small but highly influential virtual community. I left IBM and went to Schwab in , and it had a brown-bag-luncheon series where I went around the company saying, "Here's the internet.
It's going to be how we do business someday. Craigslist is now in cities in some countries, and remains one of the most-trafficked sites in the U. But it began with a single email in you simply shared interesting things going on in San Francisco. What was in that first email?
The first ones had to do with two events: Joe's Digital Diner, where people would show the use of multimedia technology. It was just emerging then. Around a dozen of us would come and have dinner--always spaghetti and meatballs--around a big table. And a party called the Anon Salon, which was very theatrical but also technology focused. People just kept emailing me asking for their addresses to be added to the cc list , or eventually to the listserv.
As tasks started getting onerous, I would usually write some code to automate them. And I just kept listening. At first, the email was just arts and technology events. Then people asked if I could pass on a post about a job or something for sale. I could sense an apartment shortage growing, so I asked people to send apartment notices, too. By the end of It was still just me, and at the end of that year I hit about a million page views per month, which was big then.
Microsoft Sidewalk [an ill-fated network of online city guides] wanted to run banner ads. But a theme coalescing in my head was: People were already paying too much for less-effective ads, so we could provide a simple platform where the ads would be more effective and yet people would pay less.
That made sense at the time and has worked out pretty well. I was getting increasingly serious about the site and had gotten some volunteer help, but at the end of , some people who had been using the site for years told me at lunch, "Hey, volunteering isn't working. You gotta get real. You gotta make the site into something reliable. At some point in the s, the site introduced a small but important feature that lets users view images online, on the same page as category listings, and when you hover your cursor on the thumbnail image, that makes it appear larger.
Craigslist developers shy away from third-party software and stick to the essentials. Ordinary people who browse the classified ads monitor the content that gets posted. Users flag posts to draw attention to those that are particularly interesting, those that detract from the site, and those that openly violate the Terms of Use. This way, the Craigslist team can keep both the staff number and expenses low.
Its 50 employees can focus their attention on coordinating transactions for job and housing posts, helping members troubleshoot problems, and responding to reports of abuse or illegal behavior.
Getting a CEO with excellent management skills was actually one more business improvement based on external opinions. Newmark openly admits his lack of social skills and aversion to being the boss. The software engineer who managed to develop his idea into a world-famous brand never gets too excited about success. He sees it as part of the progress, recognizes the milestone, and then gets back to work.
That probably helps accepting failures with ease and to keep calm even during hard times. As a philanthropist, Newmark believes business must be socially-responsible and people-oriented.
Who would have guessed? Newmark is sipping a latte inside reverie, a cozy coffeehouse with apricot walls and soft jazz in Cole Valley, a slowly gentrifying area of San Francisco just southeast of Haight-Ashbury. He stops by about 10 times a week, on his way to or from the office. Several children are in the coffeehouse today with their parents.
Newmark wiggles his fingers at the toddler and laughs from his belly. She flaps her arms and rewards him with a drooling grin. He has made friends here, knows their names and the names of their kids and dogs. He relaxes enough to free-associate, a Newmark conversational trademark. His discomfort is with first encounters—and as every shy person with a computer knows, those encounters come easier over the Internet, especially to Craigslist visitors.
Newmark grew up in Morristown, N. His mother worked as a bookkeeper and reared him and a younger brother. It came when he was a sophomore, in a language communications course. It had to be me. While he was at his first job, as a software programmer for IBM, he enrolled in ballet and jazz dance classes to meet women. He ended up in the hospital with a hernia.
He has had girlfriends off and on. Right and go crazy about her and settle down. In , he became an independent contractor and began developing software for Bank of America, Xircom now Intel and Sun Microsystems. Newmark tried to help. Soon friends told friends about the e-mails they were getting from a fellow named Craig, hailing them as gift baskets of sorts, filled with information about San Francisco culture.
He obliged. In return, those readers contributed their own bits of San Francisco news for Newmark to recycle, including job openings and available housing. By the middle of , Newmark crossed a threshold. The site has been ground zero for as many as murders since the site started accepting classified ads, according to Craigslist Killings, a blog that tracks every incident. The stats are grim and macabre: There have been shootings, stabbings, and strangulations; some clearly premeditated, some related to theft, sex, or passion.
And in at least one case, a teen reportedly posted an ad on Craigslist asking to be murdered. The year-old Colorado woman Natalie Bollinger was subsequently killed by Joseph Lopez, who was sentenced to 48 years in prison. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has been very up-front over the years in discussing his lack of social skills, organizational aptitude, and business acumen.
In part, that is why he decided to keep his Craigslist organization small, citing a concept in psychology known as Dunbar's number, which suggests that there's a cognitive limit to the number of people with whom any person can maintain stable social relationships. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that this number is no more than , and so Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster have endeavored to limit the size of Craigslist to allow him and the other employees to have healthy working relationships.
The current company staff comprises just 50 employees. For years, Craigslist operated the internet's most popular personal classifieds, but the entire section abruptly disappeared in The reason? The bill allowed law enforcement to prosecute websites which allowed sex workers to use the site. Because of concerns that sex workers relied on the personal ads on Craigslist, the site opted to shut it down entirely rather than build in safeguards.
Craigslist bid farewell to nearly 20 years of personal ads with the message , "To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness! Back in , a creative criminal with a flair for the dramatic robbed an armored truck parked outside a Bank of America in Monroe, Washington. But rather than doing it alone, Anthony Curcio crowdsourced his robbery by placing an ad on Craigslist for road maintenance workers.
He asked applicants to meet near the bank wearing yellow safety vests, goggles, a blue shirt, and respirator mask — the same disguise he was wearing when he overpowered the guard with pepper spray, stole money, and fled the scene. Police arrived to find several men matching the suspect's exact description.
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