Lammer

Email has always been an ideal outlet for Newmark’s genial nature. Craigslist began in 1995 as a mailing list with announcements of events of interest to technical people, and as more of them began to subscribe, he encouraged readers to post their own news, archived the messages on a Web page, and tried to make sure all the content was legitimate. After Netscape’s IPO in August of that year, craigslist became a portal into the dotcom scene. Within two years, he had thousands of readers, most of whom he didn’t know. This was a big responsibility for somebody who is not an extrovert. “I used to email him every day,” says Christina Murphy, one of the first tech recruiters to use craigslist regularly. “If I made a mistake in a job posting, I would have to call him and ask for a change. It drove him insane.” Murphy, along with an Internet consultant named Nancy Melone, began meeting with Newmark, trying to map out a more professional future for craigslist that didn’t require its founder to take phone calls. Job postings were an obvious source of revenue, and in 1998 they launched a nonprofit called List Foundation. Recruiters would pay $30 for ads, everything else would be free, and any money left after paying the cost of upkeep and administration would be given away. Melone was CEO. Newmark’s willingness to cede so much control worried Murphy, who soon quit the venture. “It was a beautiful, perfect little world,” she says. “And it was being taken over by other forces.”

For nearly a year, the site was available at two URLs, craigslist.org and the less embarrassingly personal listfoundation.org. But Melone and Newmark were pulling in different directions, or rather, Melone was pulling and Newmark was digging in his heels. By the end of the decade, the Internet frenzy was at its peak and the smartest minds of the new industry all agreed that the right strategy was to get big fast in anticipation of a sale or an IPO. Melone wanted to raise prices. Newmark worried about charging for listings at all. Melone wanted to become a dotcom; Newmark was wedded to the idea that craigslist was a community service. Melone was gregarious, a talker. Newmark had vast powers of passive resistance. A split was inevitable, and one day in late September 1999, craigslist users who came in through the listfoundation.org address found themselves automatically bounced to a new, for-profit Web site, called MetroVox. Run by Melone, it offered similar sorts of community listings and had a far more aggressive plan to grow. Melone said that Newmark had authorized the switch; Newmark announced that he’d been blindsided.

This was craigslist’s first serious competitive challenge, and perhaps its last. Newmark had some personal qualities that ought to have been fatal in an entrepreneur. Aside from his communication problems and an aversion to exerting authority, he cared nothing for entrepreneurship. But in the battle with MetroVox he had an asset that more than compensated for these shortcomings: For years he had worked on his site with an uncanny, machine-like constancy, doing all the painstaking and repetitive things that would make most people desperate with frustration and boredom, and he had done them happily. And now his users paid him back in the most obvious possible way: They stopped using the List Foundation address, resumed posting their free ads at craigslist.org, and emailed Newmark when problems occurred. Less than a year later, the bubble burst and MetroVox faded away.