Name: The Story of Craigslist, and How It Got Its Name
Uploaded: 2025-01-06T14:15:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Story of Craigslist, and How It Got Its Name' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-06. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Story of Craigslist, and How It Got Its Name' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-01-06. Transcript available.

well we have you for a limited time today i do want to talk um you are the craig
from craigslist
yeah that is true yes okay and um how did craigslist start like just i know it's
a basic
question but it's you don't even think about it as a regular human we don't
even know that you're a
real we just you don't even know yeah and i uh occasionally tell people that
craig is fake like
betty crocker my deal is that i moved to san francisco uh mid uh well mid-93
okay and i saw
there were a lot of people helping each other out on the net uh sometimes doing
so giving away
expensive consulting time and i took advantage of that people helped me settle
in told me about
neighborhoods and restaurants and uh events that i might get interested in so
you were communicating
on the on the internet just with people looking for information about being
living in a new area
yeah a lot of this was from the well an early virtual community some from usenet
news groups
which were the first big deal discussion boards and there is a spirit that we
were all going to use
the net to help each other out yeah so i thought i should get back started a
simple cc list um telling
people about what i thought were cool events usually uh arts and technology
like joe's digital diner
or the anon salon which was a party fundraiser for a local theater highly entangled
with the very
earliest burning man oh and i i never got involved with that because i realized
that i'm not a burner at
heart yeah but uh this mailing list it started growing via word of mouth uh and
i started asking
for more stuff than just events like if people wanted to sell something if
people had a job or an
apartment so that's how it started so you started just emailing people just
with information about
things to do in the area it started to grow and it was just an actual list of
people you were sending a
message yeah it was literally an email cc list and that broke at 240 addresses
i had to use a listserv
i had to give the thing a name i was i'm very literal as a nerd i wanted to
call it san francisco
events since it was still mostly that yeah i yeah i don't have much of an
imagination well but then i i was
going to call it as if events people around me told me they had given the name
uh craigslist ah they told
me i had accidentally created a brand then they explained to me what a brand is
because i was that
naive they were right called it craigslist just kept growing increasingly for
the first three years
just me and how often was it was the list going out whenever somebody had
something i would send it out
okay so is that once a week twice a month um if i was lucky it could be let's
say something worthwhile
a few times a day oh nice okay the deal is not that uh big but uh let's say
high value and i was being
careful i didn't want to spam anyone right and it just kept growing um be a
word of mouth and we've
never really done any advertising yeah yeah i should be careful i'll wrap
around to it but i'm not
involved with the thing nowadays i'm retired busier than i've been but retired
but yeah the deal is
it's just me for a few years and you're the only staff member yes and what were
some of those early
high value items like what was something that would come across are we talking
like kind of like a
like a painting are we talking a like a little catamaran what are we talking um
mostly i was thinking about
uh jobs okay because one of the best things you could do for someone is to help
them get a job
um sometimes then help them uh well find a place to live uh what craigslist is
about in a lot of ways
is helping put food on helping people put food on the table right usfc yeah
that's a great point if
you can help somebody get a job it's such a yeah that's residual and it was uh
completely free the
first three years but the people who were putting jobs on there wanted me to
charge them for to post
for jobs because they felt some like indebted in some way well they felt that
uh they were paying
a lot more money for job ads in other places with fewer results less quality
results so they said
uh charge us a little bit that'll pay the bills and they were right um
experimented a little bit with
volunteers and charging for jobs in 98 but i got the the idea from people in 97
running with volunteers
didn't work what do you mean running with volunteers you mean to help you yes
okay and at that point
you're just doing it out of your home i i exactly right first three years off
of your home computer
yeah and i was big how big did the email list get sorry craig um you know i don't
really know how big
it got through that time because in 96 i remembered that i'm a programmer i can
write software which turns
emails into web pages and so i started doing that uh which gave me web
publishing for free okay and i when
something started taking too much of my time i wrote some more code which
reduced what might take an hour
a day to a few minutes a day got it and that happened a number of times uh but
98 tried running it with
volunteers the people who cared for the thing who were doing job postings in
particular said volunteer
thing isn't working uh sometimes things would take a while to get posted so i
had to make the thing
into a real company right so at that point you're like if i want to keep this
going it's got a there
needs to be some checks and balances and obviously salaries help help create
that yeah i need to hire
other people to do coding uh customer service uh billing and uh that meant
making it into an actual uh
corporate structure and i made craigslist into an actual company in 99. okay so
that's when it becomes an
an actual company in 1999 yeah and at that point you guys have an office you
guys have uh we turned it
from running it uh in a room in my house into a room in a commercial strip way
out in the neighborhoods
of san francisco wow that's cool and the other hard decision i had to make that
year 99 was that
uh i started to realize with help that as a manager i suck oh yeah it's being
it's hard to be a manager
isn't it uh very hard but you don't realize when you're gonna go when you're
gonna once you start
to have employees and stuff you're like suddenly i'm a boss and if you never
wanted to be a boss
it's a very precarious situation to be and i've been there man what what were
some of the things that
you noticed you were not good at well mostly hiring and firing okay as a nerd i
am not good at reading
people and i needed to uh promote someone who would be good at that and i had
already stopped coding
because i hired a bunch of people who are better than me okay i stepped down to
just do full-time
customer service i'm a great customer service rep okay not a manager of
customer service but i was
a customer service rep and did that for maybe around 15 years okay so you ended
up just being a customer
service rep at your own company yes wow so if somebody had a customer service
issue they would
contact you on the phone or email well with some luck um they would contact
someone else on phone first
okay i took that uh luxury for myself of not having to answer the phone okay
but they would generally
email me because i was just craig at craigslist.org easy to guess so i spent a
lot of time doing that
kind of thing and got a lot of stuff uh done and you found yourself effective
there um yeah well i saw
uh what i mostly saw was a lot of good that is uh people on the net are
overwhelmingly good
uh the uh bad guys bad actors get a lot more press because sometimes uh
mainstream media generates
clicks by emphasizing the bad yeah when i realized that again i'm a terrible
manager i'd already hired jim
who's a good manager jim what's jim buck master jim buck master yeah you'll see
pictures of us uh together
and if it looks like we're at eye level it's because i'm standing on a box okay
he he's a smaller guy
he's a big uh he's a foot taller than me he's a taller guy okay so it makes for
a good car there oh there
you are you actually do your box that's uh the old office space and i was the
one who uh who uh suggested
the the gag there yeah and uh and uh kudos to your guys for being really good
at pulling stuff up
craigslist.org yeah man when you guys were the first one to do.org people were
like what is it
people thought i meant oregon people didn't even know what you know where is
well it was an early use of
it and our approach was to be this minimal monetization thing and there's no
category for
that online so that caught the spirit and uh worked yeah and um and so misconnections
do you remember
like the first misconnection that was ever put up or the first personal that
was ever put up i'm sure
people ask you that a lot don't remember much of that at all um i everything is
a blur and unfortunately
i wasn't smart enough to keep a lot of records and so a lot is uh lost like
from the uh internet archive
in the wayback machine i could see the first site that i put up was uh mid or
late 96. and
that was pretty good and i evolved that kind of minimal style like right now
our site hasn't changed
much in appearance yeah in 30 years why is that well i talked to a lot of
people and they want it
simple fast effective they want what you see is what you get and we've heard
from a lot of designers who
want uh fancy yeah and fancy may not be uh the answer for a lot of things yeah
sometimes you
know you do see something which is impressive uh fancy and yet effective but
that seems to be the
minority wow yeah yeah yeah this is you know what you want what do you want
yeah you want heavy equipment
outside of south jersey what do you want you know you want biotech out you know
in mendocino you know
you want legal issues you know you want ride shares you want rodeo interests
outside of fort worth it's
just it's all right there you know yeah you can put it together quick even a
simple even someone who
isn't technologically advanced could go here and even the the the terms you
have on there it's like
child care right pets rants and raves it's like it's just it's every anything
you could need is kind
of right here yeah and that means the site is always uh fast and because it's
not a lot of big
back it background wow and see we've helped people in the tens of millions or
more put food on the table
but jobs you mean and selling things uh exactly okay and advertise their
services but also
we've the site is so simple we've shown tens or maybe hundreds of millions
millions of americans
that the internet could be useful and reasonably easy to use and that meant a
lot of people
who may have been hesitate hesitant to get on the net they get on the net and
again that's fairness for
everyone that's treating people like you want to be treated and that ain't bad
yeah
fairness that's an important word huh it's important to you uh very much so
because uh
you try sometimes it's hard there are often tough decisions to be made and uh
but jim took over that
for the company and you know maybe he's done a better job than i ever could
and i did make for a great customer service rep
Thank you.