Choose your mistakes carefully.

There's no genius behind it. It's persistence and listening to people.

Finding a good cause is incredibly hard and time-consuming.

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.

Getting out of the way is really important.

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.

Treat people like you want to be treated; live and let live; and also give the other person a break now and then.