What began as a small San Francisco Web site to inform friends about local events has in a few years become nothing short of an international phenomenon. Craig Newmark, founder and chairman of the online classified advertising site craigslist.org, is one of the few dot-com success stories with a happy ending.
Newmark, an eighteen-year veteran of IBM, started the site as a hobby in 1995. Four short years later, the list had surpassed a million page views a month, prompting Newmark to quit his day job and incorporate as a for-profit.
Today, craigslist’s fifty million users click on an estimated thirty million classified postings each month at more than 500 sites in all fifty states ...