The nerve center of one of the Bay Area’s largest communities is chock-full of the cultural detritus of its constituents: red-vine licorice, early-’90s grunge rock and reminders to complete “accounting entry-customer interface.”
The Sunset district flat that serves as the home for Craigslist.org could be construed as a museum for the dot-com glory days. It is buzzing with twentysomethings full of insouciant vibes riffing on the potential of their online community — plus an endless supply of caffeine and junk food on hand to spike their creative juices.
And yet Craigslist, which has been the Bay Area’s one-stop online shop for the past three years with job postings, apartment rentals, personal ads and items for sale (a kind of Costco-Amazon.com hybrid for the “think locally” crowd) hasn’t gone the route of many of its Internet-based brethren.
Not only has Craigslist survived the fallout from the boom, it has grown at a steady rate. In fact, the S.F.-based enterprise has launched sites in Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego and other national and international cities, including Boston, New York and Melbourne, Australia. Craigslist was ranked as the most efficient job-recruiting site in the nation by Forrester Research in 2001, beating out such well-funded sites as HotJobs and Monster.com
And the eponymous owner of the site attributes its success, in part, to being inculcated with Jewish values.
Craig Newmark bears more than a passing resemblance to Jason Alexander of “Seinfeld” fame, but eschews the actor’s nasal bleatings in favor of the syrupy, measured tones of Fred Rogers. Newmark famously started Craigslist as a lark in the nascent days of the Web. What started out as an e-mail list to a dozen friends (mostly about interesting tech events) blossomed into a list to a larger group of acquaintances, notifying them of job listings and “for-sale items.”
About four years ago, when the list had thousands of recipients, Newmark quit his software consulting job and devoted himself full time to managing the site. Craigslist now has 14 full-time employees and reaches an estimated 200 million visitors per month.
Not bad for a nice Jewish boy from Morristown, N.J., who never had any aspirations of being a go-get-’em entrepreneur. And yet Newmark, who was raised in a nominally Conservative household, recently addressed a meeting of the Jewish High-Tech Community in Palo Alto. His message: Traditional Jewish values can breed success.
“I’m pretty much in the Northeast Jewish vein,” he said in a recent interview. And if that comment implies a certain amount of nebbishness, well, Newmark doesn’t deny it. The 49-year-old wears the trait in the same way Woody Allen does: as a cultural identifier, a badge of pride and perhaps as a knowing wink to a media fond of archetypes.
“The older I get, the more I identify with the Jewish values of social justice, compassion and intellectualization,” he said. “Actually the first two are great qualities, but the last one I tend to overdo. I analyze everything to death.”
It could be said that Newmark’s adherence to social justice and compassion provided the impetus to start the still-free service (only employers pay a fee for listings), as well as the reason why he donates some of the profits to charity. And although Newmark doesn’t officially belong to a synagogue, he does claim to be a “congregant” of a “rabbi” with a great set of pipes — Jewish troubadour Leonard Cohen.
But even given his well-noted reluctance to embrace the greedy ethos of the dot-com revolution (Newmark has repeatedly turned down princely sums for the site) he still has aspirations of pioneering a new business model — one that has a utopian ideal at its heart. An online kibbutz, if you will.
“Craigslist is a communal way to sell items, meet people and discuss issues and events,” he says. “In my own way, I’m trying to make the world a better place, and that’s certainly a Jewish value.”