Daring To Be Dull

Craig Newmark points us to an article by the BBC about his company Craigslist. In the article the BBC compares the usual behavior of tech companies and their founders with the rather laid back attitude of Jim Buckmaster, CEO of the listings service:

This week that CEO Jim Buckmaster popped into the BBC for one of a regular series of seminars that business journalists here hold with chief executives of interesting companies. Most of them arrive with batteries of assistants and powerpoints and proceed to spend half an hour belabouring us with visions of future greatness. “We’re looking at leveraging our dominance in the mobile widget space to give us huge earnings traction going forwards…” You know the kind of thing.

Well Jim was, let’s say, rather different. He was so laid-back I thought at one stage he might have nodded off, and information had to be gently prised from him. What’s more, he admitted that Craigslist had few ambitions, either to find new ways of boosting revenues or to make the site look shiny and new.

“We don’t even have a logo,” he explained, ”It’s easy to use and quick to load, and that seems to be what our users want.” He said Craigslist did not have to worry about shareholders or venture capital backers – and this gave it the freedom to concentrate exclusively on what its users wanted rather than trying to maximise revenue. “Other sites always have this constant balancing act where they’re trying not to annoy their users too much while satisfying their investors,” he explained.

Makes us think about Craigslist as one of the original 50/50 Corporations.