Video Interview: Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster

[mandy]

Wall Street meets California cool

It's the man from Fortune versus the man from San Francisco. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster uses low-key brevity to parry a barrage of hard-nosed business questions from Fortune's technology editor, David Kirkpatrick, and a Manhattan audience at the Software & Information Industry Associatio

Video (9 minutes 4 seconds): http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2_2-6035150.html

Buckmaster said Craigslist's traffic grew 200% in the past 12-months.  The company has 18 employees.

[jessie]

He's one of a handful of decent CEOs.

[landofsmiles]

That was a great interview. A few things he said, not quoting verbatim, "The wellbeing of the end user is our main philosophy. We focus on our users, not our competition. We don't lose sleep over it. We don't try to maximize revenue. We just try to keep it simple."

Now contrast that with ebay's philosophy of screw them and tatoo them.

Another great CEO is Costco's. He limits his salary to $300,000 and thumbs his nose at Wall Street, who would like to see him be a little stingier on employee benefits.

[landofsmiles]

Oh, and he was also saying that he didn't feel any need to be on the cutting edge of technology.

[bargainbloodhound]

ebay's philosophy of screw them and tatoo them.

 

That about sums it up.

 
This is from the FAQ on Craigslist:

A: 19 of us work out of a victorian house in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco

Compare that to eBay's working environment.  I like the noncorporate culture of Craigslist and the fact that it is reflected in everything they do.  I'd jump out the nearest window if I was forced to work in a tightly controlled environment like eBay (or Yahoo, etc).  The cold corporate environment of a company like eBay is always going to put  squeezing the largest profit out of anything they touch first even if it comes at the expense of their users (or employees)...and that won't change no matter how much PR spin they try to put on the word "community"

he didn't feel any need to be on the cutting edge of technology

Until recently they had never spent a dime on software.  Everything was free open source software.  It might not be on the cutting edge, but it tends to be much more stable than the Microsoft/IBM/Sun crap the average corporation gets sucked into buying.