The Wait

I saw this lady owner of a roadside eatery waiting at the entrance looking for customers. Somewhere on Goa Karnataka border.

Bandra Worli Sea Link

Bandra Worli Sea Link - Its an awesome piece of architecture for a country like India. Ira was travelling with me and she quoted of of her friend's mom saying that BWSL is a waste of money since it does not save any time for the commuters. By the time she finished...we were at Worli seaface. I told her we have arrived at worli already and she was dumbstruck...

Craig Newmark - The Enlightened Monk of the Internet

Picture Courtesy: Wired.com

Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org - A Classifieds Site. Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon .com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30.

Wired Magazine writes thus about this maverick:

With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.

Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. The only things that cost money to post on the site are job ads in some cities ($25 to $75), apartment listings by brokers in New York ($10), and—in a special case born of recent legal trouble—advertisements in categories commonly used by prostitutes, because authorities encourage vendors to maintain a record that would aid investigators. There is no banner advertising. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either.

This is what Craig Newmark has to say about his unique business model:

1. Pretty much everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.

2. We really do listen to people. We treat them the way we want to be treated and somehow we built a culture of trust.

3. We progress a little on the slow side. Which means that we may lose some opportunity. But we respond to real needs and try to do real well in terms of helping people out, that seems to work.

4. I remember someone saying market are conversations, and they are right.

5. I get up, do customer service, get coffee, do more customer service, lunch, more customer service. I may go out that evening, may be not, there's dinner in there, then I do customer service, then I might so something else, read or watch television, then finish up customer service by 10 or 11, then sleep.

I was always fascinated by Craig since I was at Harvard where every student on the campus was on Craigslist!! It was a cult thing. BTW, Craigslist is available in Indian cities, but it sucks.

Anyway, I read about Craig again in the latest issue of Wired. I was so overwhelmed by his simple approach to business, something I genuinely believed in. Businesses should generate profits, but why is this race to generate more and more profits? How can you build a business for investors? Business is for customers first and then investors. But investors drive business and business drives customers (if they can't they manipulate) and thereafter customers sideline the business and business loses investors. Its a vicious cycle.

Easier thing to do - Just focus on customers and f... everything else.

Wall Street fails to understand this model. Craig says, he needs no VCs and no Equity. He does not want to make money!!! Thats something unheard of on the Street and in the Valley.

Craig is the Enlightened Monk of Internet. He knows what he is doing, because his business is based on Values, not Vision.

He is far ahead of his times.

Arvind Gupta

Met Arvind Gupta of www.arvindguptatoys.com.

Check the site. Arvind Gupta represents in flesh and bones what a prefect world would be.