The country is in some trouble, because the media, which is supposed to provide a check and balance on government, has decided to stop doing that as a collective entity.

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.

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.

We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that 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.

The country is in some trouble, because the media, which is supposed to provide a check and balance on government, has decided to stop doing that as a collective entity.

We don't have much in the way of a business strategy. Like no business plan. Which I say to torment all my friends who are VCs or MBAs. That's always entertaining. The deal is, it's a mixture of luck and persistence.