Twelve years ago, Craigslist. But that changed after he began sending out self-composed e-mails to a small group of friends to tell them of cool art exhibits and high-tech events going on in his adopted city of San Francisco. Newmark quit his job, did freelance programming and dove into what he saw as the promise of the Internet as a place to share information. From those original, e-mailed events lists arose Craigslist.
Newmark, 55, founded Craigslist β it was incorporated in β as a for-profit company, and works there today as a customer service representative. More than 30 million people globally use the site each month. So how did it happen that you created Craigslist?
The effort started in when I was at Charles Schwab, working then on overall security architecture. But I also saw people using the Internet and figured it was going to be important eventually for anyone in the brokerage business. So I started evangelizing that at Schwab. While I was looking around at the Internet, I saw a lot of people helping each other out and thought that I should do something, too. So in , I began to e-mail a bunch of friends about art and technical events in San Francisco.
Over the months that followed, people kept asking if I could add the occasional job posting and listings for things to sell, too. This is the sort of pattern we still have today β people suggest stuff to us, we do what makes sense and then we ask for more feedback.
I left Schwab around the same time I began Craigslist. Soon I went freelance and had a lot of fun, while working on Craigslist as a hobby. One milestone was hit in the middle of At that point, I was sending my e-mails to about people, but the list at that point had gotten around to friends of friends as well. At addresses, though, the cc: list mechanism broke. Then I had to use a listserve. I was going to call it SF Events, since it was still mostly events, but friends told me that they already called it Craigslist, that I had created a brand unintentionally and that I should keep calling it that because it was personal and quirky.
