A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.

We don't think of ourselves as do-gooders or altruists. It's just that somehow we're trying our best to be run with some sense of moral compass even in a business environment that is growing.

My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

Getting out of the way is really important.

The stuff that works best is driven by passion rather than dollars.

We think of Craigslist as a form of Social Media.We provide a simple service that is mostly free and we leave money in the community, instead of taking it away. Shared values, nothing fancy, treating people like we want to be treated. What works on the net works for people in general. The net has very little to do with technology, what matters is how people use the technology.

I feel that one of the best things a person can do for another is to create a job. So you do OK commercially, and then you try to make a difference of some sort.