I interviewed Craig Newmark for a project in one of my graduate classes.
Here’s an excerpt (complete transcription below):

A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I’ve done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I’ve adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90’s, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing — the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country’s in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70’s when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.
And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It’s changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It’s changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we’re now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing… another way to look at it is, in the early 90’s we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That’s not bad.
Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?
A: That wasn’t my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what’s going on. To hear about what’s going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don’t save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We’re not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we’re growing.

Here’s the complete interview:
Q: How did Craigslist first get started? It was an event list, right?
Craig: 1994. I was at Charles Schwab. Evangelizing the Net and saying that the brokerage business would work that way someday. I saw a lot of people helping each other out, particularly on the Well and Usenet news groups, and figured “well, I should do some of that.” So, early ’95, I decided that I would start sending people notices about cool events, usually ones that involved arts and technology. And from there, via word of mouth, the news of the list spread. People wanted to be added. People wanted more stuff like jobs or stuff to sell posted there. And then I said “how ’bout apartments?” and it just grew like that. People wanted more, had suggestions. We did it. And that’s the pattern to this day.
Q: What technology did you originally use for Craigslist?
A: Originally, it was borrowed kind of stuff. Simple cc: lists for email. That broke in the middle of ’95. Started using majordomo by virtue of a friend’s donation. Then I realized I could write code to turn the email logs into web pages. Used Perl for that. Ran on friend’s machines. Linux servers usually. At one point we actually got a cheap Sun/Solaris machine, but that lasted less than a year. And from there just went on to Linux systems. Now using all sorts of open source. Apache, MySql, Squidcache, Qmail, and lots of Perl.
Q: That was what you used then? Or what you use now? Don’t you have more sophisticated filtering and things?
A: Nowadays, we use all open source stuff. Everything we do is custom made beyond that. But we only switched over to a real database in late ’99. Prior to that, I actually used a simple old email tool called “Pine” to manage the contents of those log files. They were effectively our database then, which is crude but effective in a very deep sense. Pine as a mail tool is really good. It’s a text kind of tool, but it operates for me better than anything point and click.
Q: What made you decide to go to a real database from the Pine system you were using?
A: We figured that using Pine to manage email logs was going to break down fairly quickly as volume grew. It’s just not a very efficient tool for anything but a very tiny database. And it was still kind of tiny in ’99. Now we have going on about 1.5 million postings every month.
Q: And how many did you have in ’99 before you made the switch? Like at what number did you decide “we can’t do this anymore?”
A: I’m honestly not sure, but it would be I think in the thousands — something like that. That was just one city back then, and now we have 23 cities with an expansion scheduled very soon, and that may add, depending on, well our guess of what we can take, we might add anywhere from 4 to 20 new cities.
Q: In the United States?
A: United States and maybe a few beyond. Maybe Canada. Maybe a little Europe. We’re in London now, which has stabilized at about 800,000 page views a month.
Q: And what database do you use?
A: MySql.
Q: How do you feel in general about implementing new technologies?
A: Some of the new software technologies, particularly Java-based, are exciting. Some of the possibilities intrinsic in social software, reputation management, are pretty exciting, but first we got to do basics, and we got to do basics right. We have to do what people need from us, and we have to keep it really fast. That’s more important.
Q: Than implementing a new technology just cause it’s neat?
A: Right. We’re not interested in technology just because it’s cool.
Q: Can you think of a situation in the past where you implemented a new technology and thought it was going to help, and then it ended up creating more obstacles, and you ended up going back to whatever you were originally using?
A: Well, since we have introduced new function, new technology, carefully and gingerly, we’ve only had one setback. In the middle of 2000, we anonymized all postings. That is that we implemented an email relay system and applied it to everything where it said “anon-number@craigslist.org,” like “anon-6073@craigslist.org.” Again, that helped preserve people’s anonymity in personals, plus, if a spammer gets a hold of that, well, it will expire soon.
So as a mechanism for minimizing spamming, that worked pretty well. But, a lot of people liked seeing other email addresses there, so we backed out of implementing that for everything. And now, that’s an option. I think that’s the closest we’ve ever come to backing out of something….Oh, also, at one point, I did use some Java servlets for some things, like subscription management, but the big problem back then was that the Linux libraries for Java, specifically involving networking, were flaky. But this was in 1997, when servlets were just in alpha mode.
Q: So you ended up…?
A: Everything’s in Perl now. In fact, most of it’s migrating to be ModPerl.
Q: So when you did that Java servlet thing, you just went back to Perl, because of the Linux libraries?
A: Yes.
Q: Can you think of a specific situation, again, where things kind of forked? I’m looking for a situation where there were a number of different options, and you ended up choosing one of the others and why?
A: Very little of that actually happened. The only such choice that comes to me is when I decided on a directory structure where postings would go after I generated them, even for different parts of the bay area, now doing parts of New York City. And I made a decision then, which, well, looks wrong now, though we’re still not sure, but we’re sticking with it just because it’s not worth changing.
Q: Could you elaborate?
A: It just has to do with using separate directories for each sub area, rather than just relying on posting identifiers to differentiate postings in much bigger directories. And this gets into the arcana of Unix and Linux systems, and it’s just a detail which no one else, you know, no one sees, but I’ve agonized over in the past.
Q: What have you been agonizing over?
A: Well, it’s just the use of an extra level of subdirectory in path names for postings in the Bay Area or New York now, and it just goes down a level deeper than I might have chosen otherwise.
Q: So what are the pros and the cons of doing the subdirectory thing?
A: In the subdirectory case, I thought it might be faster since Linux systems, Unix systems are to be better at more directories with smaller numbers of files, as I recall. I could be wrong about that, and the tech people talk about it, but I haven’t thought about the issue for a long time.
Q: So that’s the pro. What would be the con of doing that?
A: Don’t know offhand. I’ve forgotten most of the issues.
Q: How involved are other people in your decisions at Craigslist? And again, we’ve been talking about the technology, but include the social aspects too in your answer.
A: For the most part, day-to-day decisions are made by the people who have to implement them, which is to say the tech people, the billing people, and the customer service people. So we’ve driven decision-making power down to the line workers. Jim and I will still make overall directional decisions, but often only after soliciting feedback from the team and from the community.
Q: How many people do you have working for you now?
A: There are a total of 13 of us right now, and I’m pretty much positive that we’ll have one more tech person rejoining us in a couple weeks.
Q: Now is that less than you used to have?
A: Yes. I think we’ve had 18, maybe 19 at most.
Q: So you had to scale down from before?
A: We did scale down, especially as we entered the recession after the bubble burst.
Q: Do you have any kind of overall philosophy? We touched on it a little bit before when we talked about new technologies and how it’s better to keep things going and maintained well than to implement new stuff kind of for the sake of itself…
A: Do you mean the philosophy of Craig’s list? What would you like?
Q: I guess social philosophy…
A: I just realized that I have a number of books that pertain…Like, there’s a number of books on networking theory, like there’s 6 degrees there, “Linked” by Barobasi..there’s Smart Mobs…a book called Sync…
Q: I’m more interested in your philosophy…
A: Those have influenced me though.
Q: Oh okay.
A: Craigslist, as I think about it more and more. What I’ve done, not consciously, but just implemented what I could of the philosophy that I guess I’ve adopted, not consciously, and that seems to be happening by many people on the Net. The deal is that, in the early 90’s, a lot of people, including myself, somehow figured that eventually the Net would change the way we do everything. That includes business, it includes socializing — the way we connect to people, plus online and in real life, and it might also change the world in terms of the way we govern ourselves, the way we get help when a country’s in trouble. I even felt that a little bit when I saw the ArpaNet in the early 70’s when I was at CASE tech. And this was pretty good.
And nowadays, after the bubble is over, we now see that the Net has started to change everything. It’s changing the way we do business in a number of areas. It’s changing the way we socialize in a number of ways, particularly dating and so on. The ubiquity of digital cameras has also accelerated online dating, and we’re now seeing, or beginning to see, the Internet changing the way we govern ourselves, at least in the U.S. The Net has strongly influenced the way the Dean people are doing their thing. Possibly Clark and Kerry. In addition, it’s started to influence the passage of law. For example, the Financial Privacy Law passed in California was influenced this way. Same is true of in California of the anti-spam law. And I may end up working more with Consumer’s Union on this because they’re starting to put a lot of energy into this. Maybe I’ll have to give AARP a call too, since I’m a card-carrying member. AARP being the American Association of Retired People.
Q: You’re not going to retire anytime soon, are you?
A: You can join as early as 50. And I wanted to be a card-carrying senior citizen.
Philosophy — another way to look at it is, in the early 90’s we had this technology we think is going to change the world. We had this bubble, which distracted a lot of people with a lot of money and, on the down side, the bursting of that bubble lost a lot of people jobs and lost a lot of people their retirement money. On the positive side, this world-changing, democratizing technology got developed a lot faster than otherwise. It got deployed a lot faster than otherwise. A lot of people go trained in that technology throughout the world who are, in my fantasy at least, now going around the world changing it. That’s not bad.
Q: Do you purposefully use technology to change the world?
A: That wasn’t my vision originally. I just wanted to connect better with people. To let them know what’s going on. To hear about what’s going on, and that worked pretty well. Doing this has helped me realize that we don’t save the world with big deal social activism normally. We change the world through many, many little acts of good will, and I just provided a platform where people can in fact implement many thousands or millions acts of good will. We’re not the only ones, but, you know, we do a good job of it, and we’re growing.