Mark Evans talks to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster.

Massive traffic with 24 employees

They spend virtually nothing on marketing

They don’t feel they need to worry about marketing and are content with simply focusing on making the site as simple and useful as possible.

Have had the luxury of a vibrant company since 1999 and feel they have enough money for all their needs. They want to remain focused on what the users want rather than just chasing money.

By remaining totally independent they don’t need to deal with investor pressures to make more money.

They seem to want to run the business in a way that maximizes the benefits for their employees and users while remaining calm and cool about the world around them.

No plans to compete with others like eBay since their focus is on connecting people rather than the transactions. A big part of what eBay does is connect people just like CL.

CL’s main revenue is job listings and apartment listings. That’s it.

The future holds more city support, improved search, multi-lingual, etc. – LOTS OF LITTLE THINGS.

The vast majority of people are well intentioned, and technology needs to build systems to help insulate and protect the well intentioned from the not so well intentioned.

CL is built on LAMP and uses the standard open source tools. They use lots of compression and also try to save costs by focusing on page views per kilowatt hour.

Right now 175,000 page views per kilowatt hour off of about 200 computers.

The CL interface is simple but they love how the users get creative with what they post. As long as it is simple, usable, and accessible they are pretty happy. They really try to stay away from cutting edge technology so they can continue to support the lowest common denominator. They want everyone to be able to use the site with as few barriers as possible.

They have never lost a technology person in 12 years and it’s b/c they don’t have meetings, don’t have business people, and they just focus on the love of the site. Super flexible environment.

These guys seem like a bunch of modern hippies, but I think I could be happy working for them. They seem to focus on the right things.

One of the reasons they started to charge for job postings is to deal with spamming and automated posting scheme. The users actually asked for it in order to establish some order and get rid of the crap. Users told them they would be happy to pay, especially since the cost is way lower than all the other alternatives out there. Before making the change to charging they spent alot of time in a public dialogue in order to make sure it was the right decision.

Charging for posting is a last resort for them they see it as the lazy man solution, but it tends to work very effectively.

Whenever they add a new city it tends to take a pretty long time to get their postings filled up and running well. Toronto is growing at a rapid rate and is on par with the vast majority of US cities. They expect it to crack the top 20 cities soon.

If you have any choice, try and avoid as much outside money as possible. It may sound like a good idea at first, but long term you will find yourself constrained.

As an organization and a business they don’t really fear much since they don’t have much pressure from the outside world. They are just too busy keeping up with their own stuff. The usual things like net neutrality, etc. are on their radar but it’s on everyone’s radar.

They aren’t worried about Google and are in fact big fans. If Google can do better and out-do them they would expect people to migrate. People will find the best solutions out there and use them.