Craig Newmark Quotes

“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.”

“Choose your mistakes carefully.”

“Crooks are early adopters.”

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

“Do something real, and keep it simple.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I do think the biggest problem newspapers have is loss of trust, and I feel that's a result of failure to speak truth to power.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

“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.”

“Milestones aren't what I think about much.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Realize that you can't make everyone happy.”

“Right now, the biggest shared value that I can think of is that you should treat others the way you want to be treated, and just have some good sense about what matters to you.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”