Jim Buckmaster on Craigslist

Jimbuckmaster

(c) Robert Hyndman

Mathew Ingram reminds me this morning of one of my personal highlights during Mesh this year: meeting Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist CEO. Of course besides the fact that he "qualifies as the world’s tallest free-standing chief executive" – his talk was funny. It was unexpected. The man has a sense of humour. Check out the Mesh interview here.

In the Forbes article that Mathew mentions this morning, Jim answers questions from readers and Matthew Boyle, Fortune writer. A couple of striking responses including this one:

If you didn’t work at Craigslist, what else would you be doing careerwise?

I would be building a platform for user-generated governance (UGG) as a replacement for our flailing "dot-gov" sector. It’s utterly divorced from serving the public. Or maybe I’d take a year off and go backpacking.

I don’t see the one year off backpacking – but that’s mainly because I am a certified workaholic – but the UGG: yes! This is something that I have been thinking about quite a bit but that’s for another post.

A couple of additional nuggets:

  • Web ventures are best run by techies. Keep things simple
  • Focus on user feedback.
  • If you are in a job you like, obstacles start to look small.
  • We track page views to measure the usage of the site. We also look at the number of thank-you notes from users

Here is also Craig Newman’s interview in I want Media a few months ago.

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