The internet entrepreneur profiled for this week is “Craig Alaxander Newmark”, the person who turned a hobby into an institution.

First, for the benefit of those who did not get the chance to know about craiglist, it is a classifieds site carrying ads on many topics under the sun.It also has a large forum for people to discuss. It is largely non commercial, that is you don’t see irritating popups and screaming banners there. The revenue is generated through fees for the ads posted and that too only on certain categories like jobs, home brokering and only in certain cities.

Flashback

The story begins in 1995 when Craig maintained a list of email address to announce people who were interested to know the events happening around San Francisco. This list gradually grew in size and people were not only interested in knowing about events but selling, renting, services , jobs etc etc until it was no more a small list to manage.

While working at Charles Schwab he started craigslist (the name suggested by his friends, else it would have been called SF Events ) in 1995 to distribute events list more effectively. But today it distributes a lot more not only to SF Bay area but to people in 5 continents across 50 countries who contribute to more than 25 million hits per month. One of the secret to its success is that the company is still run with less than 25 employees.  Big is out. Small is good.

Connection With Ebay

About 25% of craigslist is owned by ebay after its shares was sold by a former employee in 1994.  While both ebay and craigslist are geared towards for the people and  by the people , there is a commercial difference in their business model.  While ebay is commercial , craiglist still retains its essence of giving back to the community.

Thus the craigslist.org which was born out of the genuine interest in reaching out to people remains so till date. That is why it has a devout user base running millions.

 Tidbits

Craig was born in 1952 and is now a multi millionaire. He is also very actively involved in charity work. He is responsible for the customer service at craigslist and personally responds to the mails. How many big shots still do that ?

 

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