Aaron Strout:                             

So, I'd like to introduce today's special guest.  He has an interesting title, a customer service rep and founder of well-know San Francisco company Craigslist.  It's now a household name.  Welcome, Craig – Craig Newmark.

Craig Newmark:                   

Hey.  I'm glad to be here.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, Craig, I'd like to ask you some questions, but before we get started why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background.  I know you've probably answered this question a million times, how you came to found Craigslist, and then we can go ahead and jump in and start asking some of the questions.

Craig Newmark:                   

Well, I grew up being fairly good with technology and computers, wearing a plastic pocket protector and thick black glasses tapped together with all the nerd stereotype goes with.  I've been working with computers all my adult life.  Started Craigslist as a way of giving back to the community maybe 14 years ago, maybe 13 and just keep plugging away with it.

Aaron Strout:                             

And if I'm correct in saying this, you started it really just for some friends and the focus was on the San Francisco area.  Maybe you did have in your mind that this would grow to a national or international phenomena, but was – I think if I remember the story correctly, this was just a listserve, and you got tired of sort of not having a means to be able to advertise things locally and not necessarily have to pay the fees of the local newspaper, etc.

Craig Newmark:                   

Oh, it started off much more simply.  I have as few thoughts in my head as possible.

Aaron Strout:                             

(Laughter)

Craig Newmark:                   

It started as a CC list for 10, 12 friends about arts and technology events in San Francisco and grew from there based on community feedback and suggestions.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, any thoughts about how fast it's grown and how far it's come since then?  Do you sit back and look over those 13 years and say, "Wow, I can't believe it's gotten this big?"

Craig Newmark:                   

Mostly it's pretty surreal, a little flattering, but the deal is that now and then I'll look at the numbers I may feel a warm glow, and then it's back to customer service.

Aaron Strout:                             

Yeah.  So, to that end, that segues into our first question nicely.  A couple years ago you were interviewed by Nightline.  You commented that you start each day answering customer service calls, and I assume you do a lot of that with customer service rep in your title.  Talk a little bit about that, and talk about how that keeps you probably as in touch as any executive at a company could be seeing first hand what people are asking about, talking about, complaining about.

Craig Newmark:                   

I get up, and first thing is I do whatever customer service has accumulated over the night, or let's say for the first few hours of the day on the East Coast because we start getting a lot of stuff from New York and so on before I actually get up.  I go ahead and do it, and it is pretty useful to stay in touch with what's real.  That's something our CEO, Jim Buckmaster, does as well.  The idea is that sometimes when your job is dealing with big stuff you lose sight of what people are really concerned with.  You start to live in a bubble, and living in a bubble is a really bad thing.

Aaron Strout:                             

How do you feed that back into the company?  I know a lot of companies have outsourced their communities.  Some are actually crowdsourcing them using their customers – and I think actually Craigslist does this to a degree, but how do you make sure that feedback gets heard by the rest of the folks within your company?

Craig Newmark:                   

It's pretty automatic for us.  The whole company survives and thrives on the idea that we're always listening and following through on whatever we can figure out makes sense.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, moving to our next question.  You guys have taken a bit of a Google approach, or I'll say Google has taken a Craigslist approach because you guys have actually been around a lot longer than they have.  You've resisted the temptation to build the slick interface, the ruby on rails, Ajax.  You have a fairly straightforward, lowbrow look and feel.  Have you been tempted to change the user interface?  What's stopped you from doing that, and obviously, you've seen success in keeping sort of the simpler approach.

Craig Newmark:                   

Yeah.  Now and then we look at some exotic technology and think from a technologist point of view how cool that would be, and then we realize that the design virtues of the site are that it is simple and fast and that's what really serves human needs.  Me, I'm not so fast, but I'm definitely simple.

Aaron Strout:                             

Personally, I've been using Craigslist for a number of years, and one of the things I love about it is the simplicity of it.  It's easy to read.  It's easy to find.  It's not new UIs that come along regularly.  So, I, for one, appreciate the simple approach.

My next question is what are some of the biggest challenges Craigslist faces really, and you, I'm sure, supporting that, as they grow, as you have more and more users everyday, probably more and more types of items, services that come up?  How do you manage that?

Craig Newmark:                   

Well, our big challenge now – there's a number of them.  The most irritating are the spammers, people who post hundreds of ads per day on our site for all sorts of services, some of which we might prefer that they didn’t.  We have to get smarter about dealing with that, and there are other minor challenges too, but that's the one that's – that I feel most personally.

Aaron Strout:                             

Yeah.  I think something that all of us are dealing with.  Have you guys come across any technology or techniques that you found better than others to combat that?  Obviously it's something that the spammers are getting trickier and trickier and better and better at everyday.

Craig Newmark:                   

Well, what works for us most is our flagging for removal system, which you might think of as crowdsourcing, where if you see an ad that's wrong for whatever purpose you can flag it for removal.  If other people agree with you, they vote for its removal by flagging also, and if enough people flag, the ad's removed automatically.  That works pretty well.  We're building in better code to notice that and maybe find other stuff from the same spammer.

Aaron Strout:                             

Do you ever get any flame wars as a result of that?  People sort of getting irked because I'm sure 99 out of 100 are correctly identified, but there's probably a couple of false positives that crop up occasionally.

Craig Newmark:                   

You're right.  There are problems with the system.  It is flawed, just like anything democratic.  We do have probably some false positives, and we investigate them when we report them to us, and usually we do find that the person complaining was doing a little spamming or maybe just didn’t read the guidelines.  Often they post in the wrong categories.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, in the same vein, there was a story that was in the news recently about someone trying to hire a hit man on Craigslist.  This didn’t come up as a false positive.  Is this type of thing an anomaly?  I mean, you could probably tell stories all day long, but has it forced you to make any changes in the way you monitor ads on Craigslist, or these are the types of things that get voted down or brought up to a senior-level attention immediately?

Craig Newmark:                   

This kind of thing is very, very rare, probably much less frequent than any other medium.  One of the reasons have to do with the flagging mechanism.  Another reason is that we're very, very good about working with the cops, about helping with the simple forensics involved and following through, and this week, in fact, I give a class normally taught by the former head of NYPD computer crimes who has described our efforts as being, quote/unquote, "top notch."  The deal is that there's a lot of misinformation posted about this in the news, often during slow news days.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, to that end, how do you combat the balance of people's privacy and, obviously, cooperating with the authorities and making sure that people aren't doing the wrong thing, and certainly in this case they clearly were?  I know a lot of technology companies they collect a lot of people's data, have been scrutinized closely by privacy advocates, and it is a fine line.

Craig Newmark:                   

There's several questions at one in there.  The biggest issue is how it relates to rule of law and American values.  You may recall that until the last few years we had a Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Which were the deepest framework of law in this country, and we operate as if the Bill of Rights was still in effect.  That is that whenever there's a possible criminal matter or anything involving people's privacy we balance the rights of the accused with the need to help the cops and victims out really fast and to do a good job of it.

The specific governing law is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and what we do is if someone needs the information in an ad which is still in our database what we do is we look for the proper judicial oversight.  On the other hand, if the ad involvements an imminent threat the law does allow us to work with the potential victim or cops right away.  We keep very little personal information around, so that prevents us from getting into some kinds of potential trouble.  So, we've thought through a lot of this.  Again, the hard part is balancing the rights of the accused versus the rights of the victim and doing a good job for the cops.

Aaron Strout:                             

Well, so it sounds like you're taking the right approach.  Obviously, from a personal perspective what I've seen in talking to people there is still a strong sense of community around Craigslist, and I think that's rare.  I've been one of the first users of eBay, and I know around some of the power sellers I think there is still that sense, but I really get a feeling of do-goodery – if there is such a word – from the people.  I've sold shutters.  I've sold concert tickets, Red Sox tickets, things like that on Craigslist, and the people that I interact with I think part of it's the face-to-face nature because a lot of times you do exchange the good face-to-face, and that doesn’t happen with a log of other items or services or different sites.  But I definitely get more of a sense of camaraderie, so I think kudos to you guys for doing a good job on that front.

To that end, I will sort of head into a question that's a little bit on the opposite end of the spectrum.  A local paper – I don't necessarily call them a super credible source, but they did bring up an interesting point, The San Francisco Bay Guardian compared you guys to Wal-Mart in the sense that – I'll say you're sort of anti-community in the fact that you're taking away some of the local paper's livelihoods by being a place where people can go and much more cheaply and easily put up their help wanted or items for sale ads.  Any thoughts on that?

Craig Newmark:                   

Well, we provide a community service, much like other media do.  People have told us that we do a better job for the community than some of the other – some other mechanisms.  They've done so by voting on that with their clicks online, and the reality is that while we do have a minor affect on classified revenues and so on, the reality according to newspaper publishers and industry analysts is that there are websites and so on which have a much bigger effect.  For example, the ones that actively pursue the customers of the newspapers.  Right now the newspaper industry is in crisis, but they have much bigger problems, particularly newspapers and chains which go for very large profit margins.

Aaron Strout:                             

Next question.  What's next for Craigslist?  You guys – you've been around for 13 years.  You've grown in terms of your footprint across the nation.  Are you planning on adding any radically different services or new technology or new functionality over the next 6 to 12 months?

Craig Newmark:                   

Basically what you'll see from us is more of the same, more cities, for example.  We recently implemented multiple language support very quietly, and we need to go beyond Spanish into other languages.  We are confidently doing internal innovations to keep the site fast.  But again, the message is mostly we do one thing really well.  We don’t want to screw it up.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, two final questions and more of a personal nature, one fairly easy to answer I think and the other maybe a little tougher.  I'm sure you've been asked this a number of times, but I'd love for the listeners to hear.  You're sitting on what a lot of people consider a goldmine.  I'm sure you've been approached by the Yahoos, the Googles, the Microsofts of the world.  There's ten ways until Saturday that you could monetize Craigslist a hundred times, a million times over.  It seems like there's a huge opportunity there, and you've managed to really stay true to the community.  What keeps you going, and how have you resisted?

Craig Newmark:                   

Well, for me just personally I've been thinking more and more about what are my values, what are the values that I share with people and what it takes to make me happy.  I joke about nerd values meaning once you live comfortably and provide for your future what's the point of making more, and both Jim Buckmaster and I, we know some of these really rich guys that are not happier than anyone else.  So, what's the point of all that money?  It's more often a burden than fun.

Aaron Strout:                             

That's a fair point, and kudos to you guys for staying true to what you believe.  Last question a little easier.  One that I like to ask all of the folks that I podcast with: if you were only able to read one blog or maybe it's one periodical, say you're stuck on a desert island and that was the only one you could read, whose blog or which periodical would you choose to read?

Craig Newmark:                   

It would be some kind of tradeoff between Huffington Post, New York Times and Dilbert.

Aaron Strout:                             

That's fair.  That's definitely one of the most interesting combinations, but very telling.  Craig, this has been a pleasure.  I really appreciate you taking the time, and thanks for everyone listening in.

Craig Newmark:                   

Okay, thanks.