ZAINAN ZHOU: Hi, everyone.
Thank you all for coming
to today's Fireside Chat
with Craig Newmark.
This event is part of a
Talks at Google program,
and today's Fireside Chat
is hosted by a Google
internal community called
Wikipedians at Google.
Thank you all for being here.
My name is Zainan Zhou.
Today's Dory is
open at [INAUDIBLE],,
and I already added some of
the questions from the RSVP.
Please feel free
to use that link
to add your questions and vote.
We're super happy here to have
well-renowned entrepreneur
and philanthropist, Mr. Craig
Newmark, founder of Craigslist
and Craig Newmark Foundation.
Craig is born in
1952 in New Jersey
and moved to San
Francisco around 1990.
Around 1995, he
started a mailing list,
which ultimately turned
into craigslist.org,
one of the world's
most successful
online classified
advertisement websites.
Nowadays, he focuses more on
philanthropy efforts with Craig
Newmark Foundation and hasn't
been involved in management
since 2000.
While he caught himself doing
some lightweight customer
service.
Please welcome Craig.
CRAIG NEWMARK: Folks, thanks.
And I really do wear
kangol hats like this,
but it's too warm in here now.
Yeah.
What I'd like to
do is speak a bit
about founding
Craigslist, why I did it.
I'll talk a little bit
more about the technology
than I normally do,
given the audience.
I'm going to talk about the
philanthropic philosophy I
developed without
consciously thinking
about it along those lines.
And I'm going to talk
about the philanthropy I'm
engaged with right now,
including connections
to Wikipedia, and
also to something
called Google News because
I'm actually highly involved
with that.
In fact, I'll just
begin by saying,
so I don't forget that, Google
News folks are doing really
good, really important
work, particularly
involving the countering
of disinformation.
That includes-- trying
to get the names right--
Richard Gingras, Steve Grove,
Erica Anderson, and Olivia Ma.
I'm probably missing some
names, but those are the ones
that come to mind immediately.
So I may repeat a little
bit more about that.
But something I mentioned ahead
too is I spent 17 years at IBM.
And I saw frequently,
especially in the field,
people were not given credit for
stuff they did, so I overdo it.
I spent a couple of
years at Charles Schwab,
for that matter, going around
the company at lunch things,
telling people that the internet
would be a thing someday.
This was '94 mostly.
And the guy who started the web
at Charles Schwab, a guy named
Darius Milewski,
has been forgotten,
except that I keep bringing his
name up at things like this.
Keep track of time
for me because I
don't want to go crazy with it.
My deal is that I am a
nerd of the old school.
Born in the early '50s, grew
up through the '50s and '60s.
There's a stereotype about a
guy who wears a plastic pocket
protector, thick black
glasses taped together,
and no social skills.
That was me,
completely literally.
In high school,
two times, I really
had my thick black
glasses broken,
and I tried taping them together
until I got replacements.
No social skills.
And even now, what
you see before you is
a simulation of social skills.
And I can do that for about
90 minutes, after which things
start going south.
I become cranky.
My deal was that I got a couple
of degrees in computer sciences
at Case Western, Case Tech
in the mid-'70s, although I
learned coding in high school
in 1969 using punch cards,
Fortran II, and an IBM 1620.
I feel like I should make
it your homework assignment
to look up all three,
but you'll be frightened.
However, I can assure
you that the 1620 was
from that generation
of computers
which had the blinkety lights.
And it literally did
have the blinkety lights.
And I kind of miss that.
Not that I'm going to
be searching surplus
for one of those.
It was about the size
of a player piano.
Anyway, after some point,
I decide to leave BMI.
I get myself hired by Charles
Schwab, who brings me to San
Francisco, which I appreciate.
And I had a lot of help
from people around town
on the net,
newsgroups, the WELL,
helping me with
neighborhoods around town,
helping me with restaurants
and how to get around.
This was pretty good.
So early '95 rolls
around, and I'm
leaving Charles
Schwab at the time,
but I'm thinking I
should give back.
So I start a simple
mailing list.
And basically what it is is
I'm using a very advanced email
tool back in '95 called Pine.
And I figure it's
just a cc list--
10, 12 people to start with.
Events that involve
arts or technology.
And then people tell
me about more stuff,
and I do more stuff.
People start asking me
to do different things,
and I go along with that.
But about the middle of
'95, the cc list stuff
had about 250 addresses, breaks.
And I need to use a listserver.
Somebody volunteers majordomo.
And as an old school
nerd, I'm very literal.
So I'll call it San
Francisco Events.
People around me, though,
are smarter than me.
They say, we already
call it Craigslist.
Keep calling it that.
It signifies it.
It will be personal and quirky.
And then they explain
to me what a brand is.
Seriously.
I didn't know.
Those of you in marketing
should have cause to mock me.
But anyway, I
learned what it is.
I was 42 at the time.
And that made a lot of sense
to me, so it's Craigslist.
I just kept plugging away for
a few years all by myself.
One interesting thing in '97
was that job posters asked me
to charge them for their ads.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Why?
CRAIG NEWMARK: They thought
they were getting better results
in the list, better results than
paying expensive headhunters
or whatever to help
them get people.
So I figured a philosophy might
be to charge people for ads--
people who already
paid for ads--
but to charge them much less
money for more effective ads.
And that's a practice
we continue to this day.
The site is almost all free,
but we do charge for ads,
specifically at times
to minimize abuse.
Like in New York
apartment brokers--
in Manhattan, the New
York apartment brokers
can really damage people.
At the very last
minute, they'll tell you
there's a big commission on an
apartment, and that's not OK.
And speaking to them, we made
a little dent in the problem,
but I'm getting way
ahead of myself.
And in '97 also, at that
point, we were hitting,
or I was hitting, about a
million page views per month,
which at the end of '97,
for a one person operation,
pretty good.
And also Microsoft Sidewalk,
an obsolete city site,
wanted to run banner ads,
but I dislike banner ads.
Many of them, I think,
are just kind of stupid.
So I just decided that I'm
living comfortably enough.
I don't need the extra income.
That grew into the lesson that
I was calling nerd values.
If you make enough money
to live comfortably
and then to help your
family, maybe some friends
live comfortably, then it's more
satisfying to change the world.
And that's our
philosophy to date.
But people are also
suggesting that I run
the site on a volunteer basis.
That's what happened in '98.
Even back then things were easy.
I recently saw a credit
card bill from back then,
and I was running
Craigslist on something
called Best Internet Services,
which is all gone now.
But I was running the--
ZAINAN ZHOU: That
was the name, right?
CRAIG NEWMARK: Sorry?
ZAINAN ZHOU: Best
Internet Services.
That was the brand?
CRAIG NEWMARK: That's the name.
They got bought by someone who
was bought by someone else.
But I was paying $35 a month
for hosting services back then.
And sometime in
that frame, before I
used the services of
volunteers, I was thinking,
well, I'm using Pine.
I, at one point, realized Pine
can output an email into a Perl
script.
Perl was hot then.
And I figured, well, I can
write some simple code, which
extracts the email
headers because they're
pretty predictable, and I
would have instant HTML pages,
therefore instant
publishing, and that's
how our site was born.
I think that was late
'96, but I don't remember.
This was all a hobby, and
I wasn't taking notes.
So when '98 rolls around, I try
writing things with volunteers.
And to say a lot in a few words,
some of the job posters who
wanted to pay me, who
started off like a year
before, they approached me and
said things were not working.
And they said if I wanted
Craigslist to survive,
I had to go full time, make
it into a real company.
And they were right.
'99, I had to make
tough decisions,
like, how much to monetize.
And again, I was thinking, you
know, that nerd values thing.
And I was thinking even
from Sunday school,
Mr. And Mrs. Levin taught me
to think, how much is enough?
And in my case, not
too much is enough.
I do indulge myself
in some ways.
I buy all the books I
want and things like that,
but I don't go
crazy with things.
And I just gave up my
old Prius, 15 years old,
to a brother-in-law who has
three kids who are driving now.
I have a feeling I may wind
up regretting my decision.
And I have my eye on
the Chevy Volt, which
is a good electric
car, and it has
a lot of electronics
on it, which
I could fool around with
and possibly injure myself.
So there I am.
These guys say I should
start my own company.
And by then, even I had
lots of parties and stuff.
I talked to bankers
and VCs in this area,
and they're telling
me, hey, I should
monetize the usual
Silicon Valley way,
and they will be
putting billions
of dollars on the table.
The answer again is,
how much do you need?
Now that I've done a
lot of philanthropy,
I can see having some
billions to give away.
That would be pretty cool.
But I also think about
the philanthropic model
of the robber barons
who would acquire
the equivalent of billions.
They would acquire it by
abusing their employees
and their customers,
and then they
would give back a
little bit of it,
you know, decades
after the fact.
So instead I'm thinking,
what Craigslist
is about is helping people
put food on the table.
It's helping people find a
table on which to put the food.
And then Craigslist is about
finding a roof under which
to put the table with the food.
And so there's this
philanthropic motto
I've accidentally
come up with, which
is let someone try to put food
on the table, keep the money
they would otherwise
spend in advertising.
And that's a much more
cost efficient model
for philanthropy.
And so said in fewest
words, the business model
is doing well by doing good.
And that worked out pretty well.
I tried running the company
myself for about a year,
and then some of the
same people approached me
and helped me understand
that as a manager I suck.
I'm emotionally
unsuited to the hardest
of management activities,
like, hiring and firing people.
I'm just not tough.
Hired a Jim Buckmaster
to do the job.
That's worked.
And I figured around then
I stopped programming.
Because at some
point around then,
we had hired a whole cadre
of programmers, all of whom
smarter than me.
But I saw a need for
myself to go full time
in customer service because
another Sunday school
lesson was treat people
like you want to be treated.
And in business, that means
have serious customer service,
and you do the best you can.
It's challenging when
your site is mostly free,
and that's probably
an unsolvable problem
in some regards.
But that's what we were trying--
and turned it over to
Jim, did customer service
for a long time.
The thing is in
customer service online,
you may have heard that you see
some things that you can never
unsee.
You know, I have seen a
certain amount of ugliness.
I've seen far more good, but
the ugliness can get to you.
And that's a big problem
right now in user
generated content and
in commenting systems.
There is a great need for
keyword filtering kind
of systems that is actually
this word filtering systems that
can figure out bad stuff
in ways that doesn't rely
on actually seeing
specific keywords
or doing Bayesian filtering.
What's needed is software
which I don't think
exists, because I don't
think AI heuristics will
solve that problem.
If anyone knows of anything
like that, I'd like to know.
But I have a feeling
the only thing that
could do the full
customer service job
would be actual strong
AI, and I, for one,
welcome our machine overlords.
Frankly, I've begun to feel
like it's time for machine
overlords.
And when I say that, I'm not
sure if I'm joking anymore.
So that was 2000, and since
then, Craigslist just grows.
We're now in a whole
bunch more cities,
a whole bunch more countries.
The direction I put it in
generally remains unchanged.
Folks here may have noticed
that we have changed the user
experience but stay
consistent with the design
principles, which say, keep
it simple and keep it fast.
Listen to what
are the real needs
and wants of people,
not the fancy stuff.
So you'll see that in our
tables of contents, which
used to be things you scanned.
There is a fairly sophisticated
database powering there.
And you'll be able
to see thumbnails
of the pictures which
are in the things.
You'll be able to see
the whole pictures.
You'll be able to see maps
and all the variance in that.
You see, the last programming
thing that I did, '99 or 2000,
I don't remember when--
well, back then, remember,
I was using Pine.
The data set, the
database, for Craigslist
back then was Pine
email folders.
And Pine is great.
Pine, forgive me,
in many respects,
is much easier to
use than Gmail.
This is actually-- forgive
me for bringing up the name.
I had an extensive discussion
on this with Marissa Meyer
about 10 years ago,
which is why there
are some shortcuts in Gmail.
But the deal is
that I was able to,
with a few commands,
identify and remove
all the old ads in a
category with Pine.
And when Pine email
holders started
proving to be unsatisfactory,
I switched to MySQL,
and that's when
I stopped coding.
Now, and for the
last several years,
I do some, what I call,
lightweight or token customer
service to stay in
touch with what's
real, because you want
to find out what's
going on with everything.
What do people care about?
What matters to people?
And so I get to do that.
Sometimes I handle customer
service email directly.
And also, very
frequently, people
will find me in social
media and come up
with requests, which
I'm embarrassed to say
I can't really help with.
So what I do with
those is I generally
just share them with main
line customer service.
And I have to
phrase it carefully,
because the Yahoo versus
Barnes case makes it very clear
that you can't imply you're
going to solve a problem.
And if it slips
between the cracks,
or you just forget, or
whatever, you have a problem.
So that's Craigslist there.
Doing well by doing good.
And again, I made that decision
to monetize minimally in '99,
2000, not altruistically,
but it's just
what feels right
speaking as a nerd,
as a person who is genuinely
dysfunctional in these regards.
That's what happens sometimes.
But in the last 10-plus
years, over those years,
people from nonprofit
organizations
were coming to me talking
about how to build a community,
how to run sites, which might
be the Craigslist for something.
And frankly, too,
at times they were
hoping for cash
contributions and so on.
And I started getting organized
regarding that in 2011
with something called
Craigconnects and this branding
that kind of sucks, and it
just didn't work very well.
I'm more organized now.
And I have this thing,
craignewmarkphilanthropies.org,
which consists of Craig
Newmark Foundation,
which is a 501(c)(3), and I
have a couple of donor advised
funds.
There's also the
Craigslist Charitable Fund.
The idea is that I
figure I can see what's
going on in the world today,
and I can identify some areas
where help is needed, and
where I can help other people.
I can find smart people
who are doing things
that make a difference and
support them with media,
with cash, with convening power.
The deal is that I
screwed up really
badly with Craigslist
in the sense
that I never told people
back in 2000 and not now
that I'm not in
Craigslist management,
and I've had no real role to
play in any decision making
since 2000.
Stupid of me.
And I learned how stupid
that was around 2010.
So since then, I've now gotten
communications and PR religion.
I'm a zealot.
That matters for technical
people because every one of us
have our own image, our own
brand, our own narrative,
and no one is going
to really watch out
for your own narrative.
That's something as tech people
we're all responsible for.
But I figured that out in
2010, got professional help,
and right now I need a great
deal of professional help,
and I have it.
I got an email from
some of the folks
right before coming up here--
literally.
So that's a big, big lesson.
But anyway, with the help of
professional communicators,
I've identified four areas
where I'm helping people.
There is veterans
and their families.
You know, I figure if
someone's willing to maybe go
to another country and risk
taking a bullet protecting me,
I should do something.
And it never occurred
to me until I
was told that their families
give up and sacrifice
a lot for them.
So for example, I
started off today
working with the Bob
Woodruff Foundation.
They find, they qualify, and
vet and fund organizations
which support wounded
veterans wounded
veterans, and their families,
and their caregivers.
So this is a really good
set up we've got going.
And literally, that
was 9:00 this morning
that I met with them.
Another area in the interest
of practicing what you preach
and treating people like
you want to be treated,
I have a women in tech effort,
which I'm still developing.
I've been involved for
years with the Women Startup
Challenge, which is a deal where
startups run by women pitch
to a panel of VCs, winning
valuable cash prizes
and winning valuable
time with VCs.
They'll usually hang around,
and help you network,
and give you advice.
So that's a big deal.
In this year, too--
well, if you want to protect
the country, voting rights.
The voting rights of lots
of people in this country
are under attack.
We knew they were under
attack by bad politicians
for some years because sometimes
the politicians will admit it--
sometimes under oath.
A week or so ago in a document
produced by Robert Mueller,
in part 47, he says that one
thing the Russians were doing
was interfering with
people actually voting.
They were going after people
who might vote Democratic,
and that may have tilted
things in some states.
Notice I'm not making a
political statement there.
I'm talking about
protecting the country.
So the deal is
that I'm doing what
I can to protect voting rights.
That's still developing
because I'm only now
talking to the people doing it.
Most of all, though, I
have a program involved
with trustworthy journalism.
And I'm supporting a
number of groups that
are trying to do good work.
I'm working with the
Google News people
to support the Trust Project
out of Santa Clara University.
Speaking as a news consumer,
I just want news I can trust.
The Trust Project is
one way of articulating
what a news outlet has to do
to provide trustworthy news.
Things like don't lie to people.
Things like when you do
make a mistake, fix it.
Things like listen to
different kinds of people
so you get different
perspectives.
There's other things
involved, too.
Poynter Institute runs the
international fact checking
network.
Because if a news outlet commits
to trustworthy journalism,
they should--
you need watch dogs make
sure they're doing it.
But as of a year ago, one guy
who actually has been here
and who talks to the
Google News people a lot
and also Facebook, guy named
Jeff Jarvis, a year ago,
told me for fun to read the NATO
Handbook on Russian Information
Warfare.
In that, Russian military,
and military intelligence
in particular, tell
us, tell the world
what they're going to do to
the US during the election.
And last week, I think, Canadian
intelligence among others says,
hey, here's what the Russians
did in 2016 and continue to do.
Now, growing up
in the '50s, I saw
a lot of crackpot
activity regarding
communists and
Russians, and so I'm
very gun shy in this regards.
But the intelligence
community and the people
investigating fake
news, the people
who are looking
at networks of it
say there's a lot of domestic
bad actors amplifying what
the Russians are doing
for really bad results,
including a lot of harassment.
This is real stuff.
And I figure, if I want to
help defend the country,
I need to find people
doing good work,
I need to get them
communications support,
and I need to fund them.
And honestly, I'm now
writing large checks
to support these groups
because they are defending
the country just like active
service members, and veterans,
and their families help
defend the country.
Similarly, I think Wikipedia
plays a big role in this
because my slogan
about Wikipedia
is that Wikipedia is
where facts go to live.
So I'm involved in helping
fund their counter harassment
efforts, I'm talking
to them about what's
the nature of reliable
sources, and I'm also
working with them on the
bios of living persons
because it's just really
hard to get those bios fixed.
I had a college professor fix
mine up for the most part,
but I've been into some
events recently where
when I talk about Wikipedia,
frankly, I get a lot of crap
from notable people
who have bios
who have no way of fixing them.
So those are the kinds of things
I'm working with Wikipedia.
I am one of the
funders of WikiTribune,
but that's not a
Wikipedia thing.
Although, oddly, last week
in Miami at a conference,
I saw Jimmy plus Orit, who are
the co-founders of WikiTribune.
So the deal here is on
the Craigslist side,
a business model of
doing well by doing good
with a lot of luck
can do pretty well.
And I feel if you're
lucky enough to do well,
you should help the
next people do well.
And you should practice
what you preach,
which includes treating people
like you want to be treated.
I can go on quite a long time,
but I'm going to stop there.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Thank
you very much.
I think you mentioned
that in 2011
that you started
Craigconnects, and in 2015 you
decided to launch the
Craig Newmark Foundation.
Even based on the
name, I think there
are quite different approaches
behind that message.
CRAIG NEWMARK: You're making
a correct inference regarding
the names.
It just didn't
work out that way.
I remember 2011 I wanted
to have a brand that
would be catchy and effective.
The best we could think of--
Craigconnects-- just
failed because no one
knows what Craig is.
Craig Newmark Foundation or
Craig Newmark Philanthropies,
people know what that is.
And interestingly, I hear
rumors that people in New York
may know more about who
Craig Newmark is than
in the Bay Area.
The advantage there
is that New York
is the country's
hub of news media,
and influence, and connection.
This isn't it.
And what I want to do are
things that contribute.
As I push my efforts,
I want to contribute
towards a new normal
of trustworthy news,
and that means
things that I do have
to be noticed to be effective.
ZAINAN ZHOU: I think we
have about 20 minutes left,
and then we can have
some questions that
was from the Dory.
And also, you're more than
welcome to use that mic
for live questions as well.
I can ask a question that
was from Googler's RSVP.
One of that is--
I have been using CL for at
least 10 years and cannot pass
up the moment to thank you for
making a huge impact to every
day Americans like myself.
The question is what inspired
you to be with Craiglist
in the first place?
CRAIG NEWMARK: It
literally is just the sense
that I should give back.
Because on the WELL and
usenet newsgroups, even back
in the early '90s with
all the craziness,
there were still a lot of people
who would help each other out,
sometimes contributing
expensive consulting time.
There were a couple of
dramatic cases on the WELL
where a doctor
helped save people.
So that's the idea
is that I'm getting
such good stuff from this
community, I should give back.
And it felt right.
ZAINAN ZHOU: But was it
very difficult to get--
because at the time there was
not much of that services,
right?
Even 250 of the
subscribers at the time who
were pretty much using
maybe phone lines and modems
to dial, right?
If you think about that,
that's quite difficult.
What's the biggest challenge
in the earliest days?
CRAIG NEWMARK: I think
I started, by the way,
with a 9,600--
96 kilobaud modem, or
9.6 kilobaud modem.
And I remember when
56 was a big deal.
But can you repeat that again?
ZAINAN ZHOU: What
was your biggest
challenge in the earliest days?
CRAIG NEWMARK: The biggest
challenge in terms of growing--
well, the good part was I
wasn't thinking about growing.
Things grew word of mouth.
If someone at a company
was getting the mailings,
they would share it with other
people in the same company,
and then that person would
send me an email saying,
put me on the email list.
That worked pretty well.
Something that helped
accelerate this
was that this was '95 when
the dot com boom was just
hitting San Francisco, and
that accelerated things.
A phenomenon back there,
like, lots of launch parties,
some open, some closed.
Patty Beron did
something called SF Girl.
Her specialty was
finding launch parties
and telling people how
to get into them, even
if they were closed.
My only distinct
memory from that time
was that the new at that
time San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, in the
entry they had lots of food
and there were big
mounds of fresh shrimp.
And that was my favorite
memory of that era.
These people were spending
way too much money
on this kind of thing.
You know, if you watch
HBO's "Silicon Valley,"
you'll see a lot of that
history being recapitulated.
ZAINAN ZHOU: We'll
take one live question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you
for joining us today.
There's so many
refugees globally.
Do you have things--
like Craigslist is great
for-- you move to the city,
and I need a free couch,
and for those people.
But I'm wondering,
is there other things
that you're looking at
or advice for helping?
CRAIG NEWMARK: I am frustrated
in that I'm not smart enough
to think of really
good things to do.
What I have done, and
partly through a charity
called Invenio in San Francisco,
is to help get refugee centers
and so on and related efforts
wired up for the internet,
because the aid workers say that
they need internet connectivity
for various purposes.
For example, we
did that in Haiti.
That is, I helped
by funding in Haiti.
And just yesterday
I was reminded
that I helped get wired up the
Dadaab refugee camp, which may
be the largest in the world.
And I think it's in
Northern Africa someplace.
I had forgotten all
about it until I
saw a reference because of a
keyword search in Google News
yesterday--
and again, literally yesterday.
There's been all
other ones, too.
When the Obama administration
was trying a serious outreach
to the Islamic world, I helped
wire up the vocational schools
in the West Bank.
Now we have something going
on an island in Lake Victoria
where there we're helping
provide internet connectivity,
but there it's because
people need it,
but it's also a
lure into a facility
to get people tested for HIV.
Because culturally
speaking, it's
really hard to get
people to get tested,
but they all want
to be on the net.
So those are small things.
Nowadays I'm thinking
I'm specializing--
because in our country,
maybe we have an all hands
on deck situation where
things have gotten bad,
and we need to do something
good, like protecting the vote,
like stopping bad
actors, Russians
or otherwise, from
contaminating the news.
Because you really
can't run a democracy
if the normal
national conversation
has a lot of lying going on.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Thank you.
And we have another
question from Dory.
I think this is related to the
involvement of the management.
But the question is, I
can think of many ways
that Craiglist can improve.
I'm wondering,
what's the roadmap?
And why does Craiglist
seems reluctant to take it
to the next level?
CRAIG NEWMARK: Well, for
any of that, since I'm not
involved in management,
email something to Jim
at Craigslist.org.
Don't send any
intellectual property.
And hopefully, you've
gotten a lecture
about protecting
that, if not here,
from the folks on
HBO's "Silicon Valley."
So please do that.
Bear in mind that what
people seem to need
is not fancy stuff
but effective stuff.
Fast and simple is always big.
Regarding the next
level, I don't
know what the next level is.
But if you're helping people
put food on the table,
that's pretty good
next level to me.
ZAINAN ZHOU: I actually think
of a follow-up question on that.
In terms of funding
from the Craiglist,
you have been very
conservative in turning down--
and turned out a lot of
investment ask, right?
And have you ever--
wondering that with more
resource, like money,
that Craiglist would be
able to have more resources
in fighting scams and spams?
And this also really
applies to not just
Craiglist, but also
maybe Wikipedia,
and maybe the overall
news community?
CRAIG NEWMARK:
Maybe what we need
is a crash project, a Manhattan
project in terms of software,
which can figure out
bad intent on the part
of a posting of any sort.
A posting could be
an ad or a comment.
That would be really,
really smart software.
I don't think it
exists, and I don't
think it's going to
exist anytime soon.
Maybe I should offer a
really big prize for that.
And maybe that would be--
maybe that would be useful
since I don't think it exists.
Yeah, but we do need
that kind of thing.
There, again, those
are those people
who think software that smart
could achieve self-awareness.
And you know, you hope it's the
nice kind of self-awareness,
like the AIs of Iain
Banks' culture novels
and not the murderous
pistol-wielding robots
of "Westworld."
Although that is a
really good show.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Thank you.
We have another live question.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you
for being here and sharing
your story.
I really appreciate it.
You seem like a
really humble person,
but I will ask this anyways.
When you look back, what
is the biggest mistake
you think you did, and
what did you learn from it?
CRAIG NEWMARK: Our big--
well, the big
mistake as a company
was not seizing control and
determining our own narrative.
When you're not
telling your own story,
other people can tell it.
And most of them will be good.
Some of them will be running
scams of one sort or another.
That's why in 2010 I
started doing it for myself.
And I've stumbled along
the way, but now I
have a really good
firm helping me out.
The thing is that you do need
good, smart people doing that.
Marc Benioff at Salesforce
does a great job of it.
There are other dot coms who
have done a terrible job of it,
even when people like me
are trying to help them
and to try to do a
little wake up call.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Free to ask
another live question.
AUDIENCE: Again, thank you
for creating Craigslist.
I've used it throughout my life.
I was wondering if you
had any advice in general
around creating
internet-wide communities.
How do you handle that scale
of people, or what advice
do you give to
companies or startups
or nonprofits trying to create
internet scale [INAUDIBLE]??
CRAIG NEWMARK: I don't
have broad overall advice.
Just watch out.
That user-generated content
will have a moderation problem,
and there's a number of
unsolved problems with it.
Yeah, and right now that's
in major flux right now.
Somewhere in Alphabet
there is Jigsaw.
I think that's Jared Cohen--
I keep forgetting
his last name--
working directly
with Eric Schmidt.
They think they have a
handle on the problem.
I don't know, but
that's something
which is badly needed.
There are folks who are doing
big work with machine learning
here, and that
may lead the path.
But again, no one knows
how machine learning
is going to lead us.
And I am kind of excited
about it, but remember,
I've been reading science
fiction for over 50 years.
ZAINAN ZHOU: How about I put
the question on the other way.
So you have been a nerd.
And the Craigslist is actually
a very successful community,
right, if we want to learn from
how to create a wide internet
community.
What are things that were
not coding or technical,
but the things that
you've done, what
are the practices and
strategy in the early days
that you think is part of
the success of this creating
this community?
CRAIG NEWMARK:
The success factor
is doing one's best to
provide a customer service.
That's serious.
Again, a challenge when
your site is mostly free.
That was the big
thing right there
because the initial
spirit that this site was
about giving people a break--
and people could see that--
by accident that proved
to be a good start,
a good initial culture,
or as people like to say,
it's in our DNA.
And that's managed to succeed.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Is
there any challenge
to work with volunteers?
CRAIG NEWMARK: With--
ZAINAN ZHOU: With volunteers
in the early ages.
That before 1980, you mentioned
a lot of them are volunteers.
CRAIG NEWMARK: In
that first year--
the volunteer thing failed
because you can't tell
a volunteer to--
like, you just can't tell
them that their job depends
on getting something
done at a certain time.
Because if they're volunteers,
you can't withdraw their pay.
So companies-- I guess the
company in human history
is quite an invention
to make things work that
otherwise wouldn't work.
So you normally don't think of
it as an invention, but it is.
ZAINAN ZHOU: It is, and it is
an invention of the way how
people can collaborate.
CRAIG NEWMARK: Yeah.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Yeah.
Let's take another
live question.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for
coming here, again.
I'm very interested
in your story,
and that was really
good to hear from you.
I guess my question is, you
know, you mentioned that people
come to you to say,
do you have advice
for creating the
Craigslist of law?
I do find the fundamental
principal of Craigslist
as a product very
interesting, which
is connecting people
who need things
with connecting
people who want things
in a single place
of exchange, right?
In a very fundamental
level, like maybe AirBNB
is even trying to do that, which
is I have some leftover things,
and some people could pay
me for some of these things.
I'm curious to know, from
all the ones that you heard,
can I create a
Craiglist of whatever?
What are some of the
most interesting things?
What are some of the
most successful things
or even weirder things?
CRAIG NEWMARK: I don't pay
much attention to the people
who make businesses
out and that because I
guess I just don't care.
I mean, that's a distraction.
The best kind of
things are where
people manage to make
a little business out
of finding junk stuff and then
rebuilding it and making it
into something real.
And until today, I couldn't
think of a good example except,
again, I just gave a--
I was on a panel at Stanford
Business School where
a kid who must have been
20, but looked 14 to me,
but he made a
business out of going
to the junkyards in
his neighborhood,
finding old bikes, rebuilding
them, and selling them.
And that was a way that he
saved up enough for whatever he
needed.
Maybe a little bit for a
college or something like that.
That feels really good.
And there's been
other things, too.
Because during the
recession, around 2008, 2009,
I could see a lot of people
who were really relying
on our site for advertising.
They were relying
on it for barter,
because sometimes that's the
only way you're going to get
what you need in a recession.
And that lasted a couple
of years, I think.
So we have all
these things happen
that does feel pretty good.
But meanwhile, in these
philanthropic areas I have,
we have real challenges.
Again, on
CraigNewmarkPhilanthropies.org,
that's how I'm--
that's how I'm getting this
stuff done the best I can.
I should mention that I'm not
restricting myself completely
to those four areas.
I'm working with some
groups on food security,
like Meals on Wheels kinds
of things-- delivering
hot food to people or whatever--
like in New York in particular.
I support God's Love We Deliver,
which when you say it fast
is "God's lovely liver."
And I also support pigeon rescue
because I know how important
that is to everyone.
I've also learned there that
pigeon pants is a thing,
and that you want the
pigeon to be wearing
the pants before they
fly onto your shoulder
to coo lovingly at you.
If they coo first and
then the pants are put on,
you may have a problem.
And I did.
Although I do like
pigeons a lot.
ZAINAN ZHOU: We have some
question from the Dory again.
I think the live
streaming people are now
sending the questions.
One question is, Craiglist
has notoriously not
modernized its design in UX.
What's the reasoning for this?
CRAIG NEWMARK: I can't
speak for the whole company.
But if you look
at the site, we've
been incrementally making
improvements in it for years.
Both improvements that you
can see, like the database,
like the thumbnail
sketches and all that,
and the people who use the site
say this is what they want.
So we've made a lot of
improvements that way.
There's a lot of
improvements that you
can't see, like improved
caching and efforts
to keep the site fast.
Speed is a design principle, and
it's a really important design
principle.
And Google does a lot of
things along those lines.
Something I have to look
into is a better use
of Google domain service.
Because I have my real doubts
regarding both my ISPs,
in fact, all three of my ISPs,
because something tells me
their DNS lookups
are kind of sluggish.
I should also count the hotel
I usually stay at in New York
because their ISP kind
of fails to deliver.
But I'm hoping not to
be in there much longer.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Thank you.
I have a question that is
regarding the integration
of a block chain.
The question says, I
personally really appreciate
Wikipedia and Craiglist
as the free layers
of knowledge and marketing
information in the economy.
Have you considered
block chain integration
in which you could create
pure, decentralized Craiglist
and tokenomics around it?
But what's your view
in general on that,
and how can people
can collaborate?
CRAIG NEWMARK: Well, a block
chain is applied to Craigslist.
I just don't know what
Jim is working on.
What I'm thinking is that block
chain-based identity, verified
identity might be
a way that we can
get a lot more
accountability on the net.
And when you get a scam sent
to you or a piece of spam,
you'd like to hold the
center accountable to that.
That's good.
But on the net,
we're always going
to need places where you
can be completely anonymous,
places for dissidents,
whistleblowers,
people who may have been in
a really bad domestic abuse
situation.
We're always going
to need places
where verified identity is not
good, where anonymity is good.
This may also apply,
and this is a big thing,
the European Union now
has this GDPR standard.
It's a set of standards
which allow consumers
to control the data
passed between publishers
and advertisers.
And my gut feeling is that
block chain-based control
of an individual's
data will be a way
to make everyone happy in terms
of the data about a consumer
that an advertiser and
publisher can share.
I don't know about
you, but I want
control of that
kind of data, and I
do want to be served ads which
actually mean something to me.
You know, sometimes it's mixed
because my wife and I are--
my wife and I share an Amazon
account, especially when she's
buying things for the
nephews and nieces,
and we've got 21 of them.
So odd things show up
in my Amazon profile.
That's OK.
But I want the ability
to control that.
Block chain may be
the way to do that.
ZAINAN ZHOU: And do
you think it also
may help in terms of,
let's say, the true news
and fighting the fake
news, for example?
CRAIG NEWMARK: I
don't know honestly
what role it may play in that.
That's something that people
smarter than me are working on.
My gut tells me that one
of the biggest things that
need to happen are
the fact checkers,
like at the international fact
checking network, and the tech
and check people at Duke.
If you-- fact checking in
real time is really hard.
Because if someone lies to
the public and the newspapers
and so on report
it, you know, they
may only realize that
it's a lie an hour after.
So we're talking up
summary fact checking,
meaning that a person
or a news outlet
will have a track record in
terms of how honest they are
or not.
And I think that's
going to need a lot of--
that's going to
need a lot of work.
Because frankly, it's
not hard to figure out
what news outlets try
to get things right
and which news outlets
deliberately get things wrong.
The idea is how do you
do it so that no one is
an arbiter of truth.
There's no one, no
single group or anything,
will arbitrate truth.
Instead you have a large
network of networks,
and that's what's
happening right now, maybe
not fast enough.
And I just realized
another condition
I may put on if I may make--
if I'm going to make
a very large grant
to a particular news
institution, because you know,
I'm talking about journalism,
but I'm a news consumer.
And I've learned a
lot, but unless you've
been writing to get to deadline
like five times a week,
you don't know journalism,
because that's really
a tough kind of
creative pressure.
You know, I've
been in situations
where I've had to
write code to deadline.
But writing stories
to deadline is tougher
because you don't know
what the story is ahead
of time, whereas
if you're coding,
you normally know what kind
of stuff you've got to write.
Presumably someone's done some
decent requirements definition
of the variety, which
is not entirely stupid.
I put that qualification
on just reminding people
that I worked in IBM
development for six years.
Not that I have anything
specific in mind.
ZAINAN ZHOU: OK,
one last question.
We saw the startup
trend of pursuing
vertical opportunities
of what Craiglist
is doing for the past decade.
As a horizontal
company, I'm wondering
what Craiglist
think of this trend,
and how Craiglist would respond
to this trend of the future.
CRAIG NEWMARK: I don't think
about it much because I'm
focused on philanthropy.
Jim may be thinking
about it, but you'd
have to ask him, which is
not a satisfactory answer.
But again, the deal is
that, and it's maybe
a good thing that like, for
roughly 10 years, I focused--
well, for 10 years I focused on
coding then customer service,
then for a lot of that I
focused on customer service
and then philanthropy.
Not that I'm really, really
smart in any of that,
but I'm combining the two.
You know, I've been
lucky enough to do well.
And I'm putting my money
where my mouth is in all this.
The deal is that there's
this billionaire's pledge
to give away half of what you've
made during your lifetime.
I'm not being specific, but
I've already exceeded that.
I'm looking to do more,
to do it in smart ways
because a democracy can't
survive built on lies.
And you know, we
need to fix that,
and we have some runway
to fix that until things
go really bad.
So I'm involved in
that kind of thing.
And by involved, I mean I'm
involved in it literally
every day.
And you know, that ain't so bad.
Again, there's a lot of people
around who are smarter than me
and who do more than me.
My role is to
bring them together
and to get some cash to them.
Not bad.
ZAINAN ZHOU: Thank you.
I like thank Craig
Newmark for being here
and have the
conversation with us.
And I would like to thank
the crew and all the audience
here and on the live streaming.
Thank you for being here.
And please follow [INAUDIBLE]
for future events.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
