Is It Still Craig's List?

Managing a 45-city Internet-classifieds site with 5 million unique visitors and over 1 billion page views a month was no problem for http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/nc02/026.html ">Craig's List leaders Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster. That is, until a rogue shareholder sold a quarter of their company out from underneath them to one of the Internet's largest, most powerful businesses.

After a Fast Company staff member http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2004/08/13/partys_over_craigslist_g... ">blogged about the news in FC Now, the magazine's team blog, founder Newmark left a comment in response. So Fast Company contacted Newmark and Buckmaster to learn more about what it was like to court Web giant eBay, how customer feedback can drive development, why it's important to demote yourself -- and what happens next.

Fast Company: I've read that the 25% stake sold to eBay was originally a gift you gave to a friend. How did you wind up giving away such a large stake in the company?

Craig Newmark: It's http://www.cnewmark.com/archives/000265.html ">in my blog. It sounds complicated, but I figured it would be smart of me to spread the equity around in case I ever got tempted to sell out; I have the same weaknesses that anyone else does. So I gave some to him, figuring that we're all on the same page here -- no one's going to sell it -- it doesn't have a dollar value. But he sold it.

FC: Are there other people with equal chunks of the company?

Newmark: We're not disclosing that right now. Probably not ever. You get the idea.

FC: Fair enough. You've said that eBay and Craig's List are going to communicate and share ideas. How is that going to happen? Formal meetings? Brainstorming sessions? Over coffee?

Newmark: This may be too simple an answer, but we're just going to talk to the guys. We've started chatting. They are so much more experienced and so have much more muscle dealing with scammers from off shore, like the scam gangs operating out of Nigeria or Romania. They have contacts at some big ISPs that aren't responsive when we report scammers to them.

Jim Buckmaster: Certainly, at this point it's informal. We talked to them for about two months before it was finalized. We talked to people from top to bottom, from Pierre [Omidyar] and Meg [Whitman] on down to lots of rank-and-file folks, just to make sure, on both sides, that this was a relationship that made sense. We talked with them fairly exhaustively, so that may explain why we haven't done much talking since; we're probably all tired of talking to each other. (Laughter) We don't know for sure how it will develop specifically. There will be benefits from both sides. They have expanded into many countries; they're operating successfully in a number of different international regulatory environments, in a number of different languages. Those are all steps that we hope to take, and we hope to learn from their mistakes. They have the resources to go after international scammers. If I understood them correctly, more than 100 Internet scammers have been put behind bars just in Romania because of their efforts. We don't have the resources to go after people to that extent. [Our partnership] will give us the ability to exchange notes about the bad guys.

FC: I know you've been asked this a lot now, but, specifically, what do you think eBay hopes to learn from you?

Buckmaster: We haven't had any formal discussions about it. But for one thing, the two sites are a couple of the largest online communities in the world. Both teams are considered expert at what they do. Of course, the two serve different purposes -- but each is a very large community of users who appreciate being able to use a level playing field and get what they need done in a fairly efficient fashion. We do stand out in some areas. Web site performance: Our page-load speed is faster than any other large-scale site by a considerable margin. We're perhaps the best at harnessing open-source technologies for large-scale development. We're masters in efficiency: We're currently serving as many pages as Amazon, but we have 14 employees. We do a lot with a little. And remember, it's a relatively small investment from their standpoint. It's not as though they're counting on us for their future financial performance.

FC: Do you think eBay is sincere about not having commercial interests in Craig's List?