System Design Frontier (SDF): What do you think about venture capital, is that good or bad to sustainable bootstrapped startups, say taking the starting of craigslist as an example?

Craig Newmark (CN): I prefer the bootstrapping model, like us and others.

SDF: How did you conduct marketing to gain publicity if there is any during those starting years at craigslist.org?

CN: We've never done any real marketing, it's all been work of mouth.

SDF: According to Tom L. Friedman, it is Globalization 3.0 in 21st century, and according to you, it is Web 2.0 nowadays, how are they correlated with each other if they do?

CN: Sorry, I don't follow. I really don't use the "Web 2.0" term.

SDF: What is your definition of publicity for high-tech business under Web 2.0?

CN: It depends on the company. For us, no marketing, but we like working with the press.

SDF: Are there any changes happened since Ebay's acquisition of craigslist.org, both technically and business-wise?

CN: None, except that sometimes they help us with trust and safety issues.

SDF: In your opinion, what is the key difference on business models between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0?

CN: No real difference.

SDF: It seems that Open Source has played significant roles in craigslist.org, could you tell us a little bit about that?

CN: Pretty much everything powering our servers is open source, including Linux, MySQL, Perl, Apache. It's more reliable and secure than normal commercial software.

SDF: Have any special in-house software tools developed and deployed at craigslist.org to make the posting among other jobs more smoothly, we know amazon is very good at developing in-house software tools to make their 1-Click-Purchase happen?

CN: Well, our whole site is in-house, and we improve it all the time.

SDF: What will Craigslist.org look like, say 3 years from now?

CN: Pretty much the same, small improvements like multiple language support.

SDF: What are the biggest joy and biggest sadness during those years while you are running Craigslist.org?

CN: Overall, the sense that we're helping millions of people, that's really good. However, I've made some really big mistakes, fixed now, painfully.

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