Annaliza E. Nebres

OOC

Case Study

Craig Newmark

(Founder Craig’s List)

Craig Newmark started an email list to publicize events in San Francisco. It grew in popularity and was called Craig’s list then he switched from a mailing list to a website and added categories. He decided to turn craiglist.org from a hobby to a real business. He was dedicated in building community in the Internet. Newmark wants Craig’s list to keep as free as possible, he never compromised the experiences of its users.

Newmark starts Craig’s list at Charles Schwab when he was working with computer security and some of the stuff. He contributed in evangelizing the Internet, how the equity brokerage business would work someday. He started sending out notices about cool evetns. Usually about arts and technology events, because of this more people wants to be added to the lists and and they started calling it “Craig’s list”. They also suggested other kinds of things like jobs or stuff for sale. He decided to give the thing a formal name and use a listserv. Somebody offered him majordomo and named it “SFEvents” but most people calling it Craig’s list wants to keep it name. it signify that it will be personal and quirky.

What Newmark mostly do was according what the people asked them to do. He has a lot of this email sitting in folders. He was thinking of operating on a Solaris system and his using Pine. He can write Perl code, which turns the email logs into web pages. He use Pine as his database tool until late 1999 which switched to MySQL.

He got the first inkling called “moral compass”. People were claiming a moral high ground that actually didn’t practice what they preached. In Craig’s list the community dictated the policy; they weren’t shy of sending feedbacks. They have a time when they went down but in a way that’s reasonable and understandable and still amnage to keep it up pretty well and keep it fast. They spoke the site to be a nonprofit. They get up a way for community to regulate the site and its doing tagging.

Newmark founded Craig’s list in his own. He made specific decisions based on their specific values and followed through. They used to do all sorts of things.

Three things I’ve learn are; first trusts your instincts and your moral compass. Second is quitting is not a solution. You may feel anxiety but it is part of having a startup. Third always be committed in everything that you’re doing.