Craig Newmark Quotes

We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.

Treat people like you want to be treated; live and let live; and also give the other person a break now and then.

Milestones aren't what I think about much.

Death is my exit strategy. I'll be doing significant customer service only as long as I live.

There's no genius behind it. It's persistence and listening to people.

The stuff that works best is driven by passion rather than dollars.

I don't expect to be a ‘leader’ with this thing. I'd rather be a builder. I'd like to build a way for people doing good work to connect, to learn from each other, protect each other, and then I want to get out of their way.

We think of Craigslist as a form of Social Media.We provide a simple service that is mostly free and we leave money in the community, instead of taking it away. Shared values, nothing fancy, treating people like we want to be treated. What works on the net works for people in general. The net has very little to do with technology, what matters is how people use the technology.

Follow through with basic values, and remember to provide good customer service.

I am committed to doing customer service for Craigslist for the rest of my life. The exit strategy is death.

In business, there are times when you disagree, and sometimes it turns out that you're just plain wrong. Humor takes away tension and helps you realize you're wrong.

Getting out of the way is really important.

Craigslist does serve as a platform where people help each other for the basics, and also, shows people that the Internet is good for mutual support. I do feel pretty good about that.

Crooks are early adopters.

I need to make an okay living. The people who work for us need to. But after you make a comfortable living, how much more do you need? It's like I make a joke about nerd values, because I'm very much in the rich nerd tradition. And you know, we say, like, hey, people pay us for this stuff, like programming. You know, what else do we need?

We don't think of ourselves as do-gooders or altruists. It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing.

Sometimes a slow gradual approach does more good than a large gesture.

I admit that when I think of the money one could make from all this, I get a little twinge. But I'm pretty happy with nerd values: Get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world.

We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that trust.

What works on the net works for people in general. The net has very little to do with technology, what matters is how people use the technology.

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort.

Choose your mistakes carefully.

People everywhere have the same needs and values. They need a place to live and a job. Beyond that, they may need to sell stuff or get a mate.

From the very beginning, I was involved in talking to people, listening to people. And it hasn't stopped. The idea was that people send me information; I'd ask them about it, listen, try to do something about it - and then ask for more feedback.

Finding a good cause is incredibly hard and time-consuming.

A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

I had one simple idea about telling friends about arts and technology events. People in the community suggested everything else to us, and that's our theme. We're really run by the people who use the site. We just run the infrastructure, and help out with problems.

We want to offer job training and mentoring and build the site with more robust, reliable and flexible technology.

A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.

I look at what the phone company does and do the opposite.

My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

Okay, I'm not in the news business, and I'm not going to tell anyone how to do their job. However, it'd be good to have news reporting that I could trust again, and there's evidence that fact-checking is an idea whose time has come.

I want you to know, at this very moment, I am simulating normal human behavior.

I'm not in the news business and won't tell people how to do their job. I'd like to restore trust in the news business, though, and feel that restoring fact-checking will really help. News business realities mean that such fact-checking has to be practical, it has to be fast and cheap.

The country is in some trouble, because the media, which is supposed to provide a check and balance on government, has decided to stop doing that as a collective entity.

My understanding from talking to a lot of people in the business has been that it used to be that a newspaper was considered a community service. Now they're being run as profit centers, and they're trying to get pretty high profit margins. As a result, investigative reporting has been seen as a problem.

I want to help accelerate the evolution of the press because right now, newsrooms are cutting investigative journalists, and we need investigative journalists.

I rely on Taegan Goddard's Political Wire for straight, fair political news, he gets right to the point. It's an eagerly anticipated part of my news reading.