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Wake Up with craigslist founder Craig Newmark (palo alto)
Respected, fun Club seeks SBM/W (smart business men and women) to start their Thursday morning, Feb 24, enjoying good food and discussion with craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Click www.churchillclub.org to RSVP.
Craig gave birth to craigslist ten years ago when he started e-mailing friends about local art events. When more and more people asked to be added and it became too big for e-mail, he put it on the Web. He wanted to name the site "SF events," but a friend told him that he should call it what everyone else on the list already did: craigslist.
Since then, craigslist has survived the downturn and continued to grow, even when hundreds of other start-ups came and went. In 1999, it became profitable. Craigslist has 14 employees and brings in about $10 million a year in revenue. Since 1999, the company has gone from a staff of 8 to 14, and traffic has multiplied by 100. If the company is able to repeat that in the coming five years, it will be running more pages than Amazon, Google, and Yahoo!, with a staff of just 28.
On any given day, people post about 110,000 ads on the sites' various boards (ranging from Personals to Housing, Community, For Sale, Services and Jobs) and carry on 40,000 conversations in craigslist discussion forums.
Hear how Craig went from software engineer at IBM to entrepreneur to chief customer service representative. As he has said, “…in a savage corporate takeover, I got rid of myself and I'm in fact no longer in management.” He hired a CEO and he spends his time obsessing on customer service. How has craiglist managed to maintain its vision to serve as a non-commercial community bulletin board with classifieds and discussion forums and sustain their guiding principles:
People giving each other a break.
Restoring the human voice to the Internet, reversing the corporate voice
and over commercialization.
Providing useful, down-to-earth, common-sense function.
How was he able to turn a website into a community? Will eBay’s stake change the company? What are the lessons learned and what does the future hold for this Internet phenom?
This is another event in the Churchill Club’s continuing Breakfast Series that will give you new levels of access to those that shape business, the tech industry and the world. These forums will always be limited to a smaller number of attendees in order to spur interaction between you and your fellow members, as well as between the audience and the speakers.
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